Among those who came to the fort in the late 1760’s was a Scotsman, Daniel Morison, surgeon’s mate in the Royal Americans’ Second Battalion. Of his life before and after his tour of duty at Fort Michilimackinac we know nothing. Under ordinary circumstances we would agree with one of Morison’s commanding officers who told him bluntly, “You are not worth my Notice.” But Morison is worth our attention because between 1769 and 1772 he kept a journal in which he set down in language that is often unintentionally hilarious and at other times brutally frank the best account that we have of life at this outpost of European civilization.
This important historical document, now published for the first time in its entirety, was purchased in 1914 by the great collector of materials relating to the history of Michigan and the Old Northwest, Clarence M. Burton, who bought it from a book seller in London, England, for $55. He brought the journal back to the state in which it was written where it now rests in the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library.
Dr. Morison’s journal provides us with a picture of the English population of the fort, a people beset by violence, lawlessness, tyrannical officers, petty bickering, and assorted other problems. A reading of the journal should dispel any romantic notions of what conditions were like at an eighteenth-century frontier fort.
The inhabitants of Michilimackinac consisted of several groups. There were the soldiers, numbering around a hundred men. A few of them, we learn from Morison, had brought out their wives. The commanding officer’s house was the most impressive of the thirty-odd wooden buildings located within the stockade. The other officers lived in various cabins in the fort, as did the rank and file of the troops until 1769 when a large barracks was constructed in the center of the fort. Dr. Morison’s complaints about the poor quality of the housing are supported by statements of others who commented on the ramshackle construction which necessitated constant repairs and made the danger of fire an ever-present fear.
As a military fort Michilimackinac was scarcely adequate even to withstand the attacks of Indians. The post was maintained, however, because it was a convenient center of the fur trade. The small garrison, with its six-pound and nine-pound cannon mounted on the bastions, was enough to impress the Indians who lived in the vicinity and those who gathered here each summer with the reality of British armed might. This symbol of military power protected the English fur traders who made up the second, and most important, segment of the fort’s population.
By 1767 Michilimackinac had become for the British as it had been for the French the headquarters for the fur trade of a fourth of the continent. Canoes were sent out from here loaded with trade goods to be exchanged for furs at distant Indian villages located in the uncharted wilderness north and west of Lake Superior, westward across the Mississippi, and southward to the Illinois country. For two or three months in the summer hundreds of voyageurs and traders came back from the west, bringing in the furs they had gathered during the previous year or two. Like the lumberjacks of a later era, these men were bent on enjoying to the fullest degree their brief contact with the comforts of civilization before they returned to the west to barter for more furs.
A few traders who had acquired sufficient means to enable them to hire others to do the actual trading remained here the year round and occupied cabins in the fort. These Michilimackinac traders, men like Benjamin Frobisher, Isaac Todd, George McBeath, and others not mentioned by Morison, together with their agents or partners in Montreal who obtained the trade goods and sold the furs, dominated the fur trade for decades.
From Morison’s narrative we see that the officers and the traders permanently in residence at the fort formed an elite group. It is obvious that the French habitants and half-breeds who comprised a third part of the fort’s population, not to mention the Indians of the area, were not admitted to this exclusive social club. That the strain of being cooped up in the small fort, cut off from all contact with the outside world for over half the year, proved too much for some of the members of this clique, especially the bachelors, is also obvious.
Equally apparent is the fact that Dr. Morison, poor man, was unsuited to withstand the rigors of life at this post. He was apparently an educated man who could quote accurately from Virgil’s Aeneid, and a man of refinement and sensitivity. To some of the cruder members of the English set he must have seemed an easy target and a source of amusement when life became too dull and the bowls of toddy ran dry. Feeling himself much persecuted, as he certainly was, and outraged by the injustices of which he and others were the victims, Dr. Morison fumed, but, with a few exceptions, as when he refused to permit the whipping of a soldier to continue, he lacked the courage necessary to stand up to his oppressors. So, like Lieutenant Maryk in The Caine Mutiny, who kept a secret log on the activities of his sick captain, Dr. Morison recorded in his journal the evidence which he no doubt hoped would some day enable him to bring Ensign Robert Johnson, Captain George Turnbull, and his other tormentors to justice.
Actually, Dr. Morison probably was not a doctor at all. He was a surgeon’s mate, which means that he may once have been an apprentice to a surgeon and that he may have taken a course or two at a medical school but that it is unlikely he ever graduated since had he done so he would not have been simply a mate. The professional ability of the British army surgeon’s mate was of a notoriously low order, and, if we may believe one of the Royal Americans’ regimental surgeons, Daniel Morison was no exception in this respect. Surgeons were scarce, however, and a small frontier garrison, even when, as at Michilimackinac, it had been plagued by much sickness, had to be satisfied with the services of a mate. Unlike the surgeon, who was commissioned by the king, the surgeon’s mate was only a warrant officer appointed by the colonel of the regiment. The mate, therefore, was inferior in rank even to the ensign, the lowest of the commissioned officers. This was undoubtedly the source of many of Morison’s problems. He claimed the title of doctor and demanded equal status with the officers, who, for their part, treated him as they would a common soldier.