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The Doctor's Secret Journal

Chapter 13: Transcriber’s Notes
By Daniel Morison
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About This Book

A surgeon’s mate keeps a candid journal of life at a remote frontier fort, recording daily routines, cramped and poorly built housing, and the seasonal bustle of the fur trade. The narrative lays out sharp social divisions between officers and resident traders on one hand and French habitants, mixed‑heritage residents, and local Indigenous visitors on the other, and it describes frequent violence, lawlessness, and petty rivalries among the garrison. Personal grievances, a few moral interventions, and episodes such as a domestic scandal and resulting trial appear alongside observations about military weakness and the fort’s strategic and commercial roles, delivered in an often blunt, ironically comic voice.

An innocent evening’s entertainment ends in a wild brawl and an attempted murder ...

A judge arrives late to a horse race because he has been busy smuggling rum ...

The court-martial of a sergeant charged with being disrespectful to an officer who was cavorting with the sergeant’s own wife ...

These are a few of the strange but always fascinating events related by Dr. Daniel Morison in the journal he kept from 1769 to 1772 while he was surgeon’s mate at Fort Michilimackinac.

Editing and interpreting this authentic and uncensored 18th-century document, never before published in its entirety, is Dr. George S. May, former research archivist of the Michigan Historical Commission. Illustrating the text is the well-known artist, Dirk Gringhuis.

Transcriber’s Notes

  • Silently corrected a few typos, but left the good doctor’s unique spellings unchanged.
  • Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook is public-domain in the country of publication.
  • In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by _underscores_.