Comments added at the end of the manuscript in a different handwriting indicate that someone in England who possessed Morison’s journal in the nineteenth century intended to publish it in a magazine. No evidence has been found that this was done. In preparing the journal for publication we have ignored the numerous changes that this earlier editor made in the document and have retained Morison’s own phraseology at all times, including the misspelled words and grammatical construction so typical of his age. The narrative has been broken into five parts, and paragraphing and punctuation has been supplied at some places in the interest of easier reading. Material within brackets has been inserted by the present editor.
GEORGE S. MAY
Lansing, Michigan
March 6, 1960
“Doctor, damn your blood, get up & give us a bowl of Toddy!”
I
An Entertainment and a Violent Assault
Dr. Morison begins his journal innocently enough with an account of a party which he and others gave in the fall of 1769. Among the other hosts was Isaac Todd, who later helped found the great Canadian fur-trading firm, the North West Company, and whose long-time partner, James McGill, endowed McGill University in Montreal. The party began to get out of hand with the arrival of a couple of rowdy traders—John Chinn, who is best remembered as a partner in an unsuccessful copper-mining venture in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and Forrest Oaks, who was a prominent fur trader at Michilimackinac and later at Montreal for a number of years after 1769.
Morison, who seems to have been something of a name-dropper, mentions as he goes along other men who are familiar to students of the fur trade and British military history. But all of them are dwarfed by Ensign Robert Johnson, who crashed Morison’s party and soon turned the evening into a nightmare. Johnson (which is apparently how he spelled his name, although Morison insists on calling him Johnstone) is the villain of Morison’s journal, a scoundrel and bully whom we come almost to admire for the infinite variety of ways in which he gave vent to his evil nature.