La Ronge Journal, 1823

[Transcriber Note:
Produced by Owen O'Donovan.
(Includes additional materials: List of some other publications of his work; notes on the editing; example of music scroll; details of Nelson's fur trade career; table of contents; page images of handwritten manuscript; references.)]

Peers, Laura & Schenck, Theresa (ed.). My First Years in the Fur Trade: The Journals of 1802-1804. St. Paul. Minnesota Historical Society Press. 2002.

The La Ronge journal of 1823 has also been published in hard copy in an extensively researched work by Jennifer S. Brown and Robert Brightman in 1988. This work contains additional commentaries on the Nelson text by Stan Cuthand and Emma laRoque.

Brown, Jennifer S. H., & Brightman, Robert (ed.). "The Orders of the Dreamed": George Nelson on Cree and Northern Ojibwa Religion and Myth, 1823. Winnipeg. The University of Manitoba Press. 1988

Nelson's manuscript is a handwritten first draft for a work on North American aboriginal belief systems, completed in June, 1823. Nelson had intended to edit and publish it at a later date. The first publication did not occur until 1988 in "The Orders of the Dreamed": George Nelson on Cree and Northern Ojibwa Religion and Myth, 1823 where it is given a comprehensive, analytical and contextual treatment by Jennifer Brown and Robert Brightman with contributions from other authors.

The goals for this edition of Nelson's La Ronge Journal of 1823 are to make his work accessible to a wider audience and ensure its preservation and availability in digital format. It is presented here in three parts.

Part 1 provides a lightly edited version of the manuscript. Nelson's text is an excellent example of common English usage in early nineteenth century North America. Idiosyncratic misspellings are generally corrected; archaisms and localizations have been maintained. Where the spelling of names is irregular or abbreviated, a consistent spelling is chosen. Punctuation has been somewhat modernized.

Editorial interjections, including section and subsection headings not in the original, are enclosed in brackets. Nelson occasionally used brackets in the text for parenthetical remarks; these have been replaced with braces.

Part 2 is a verbatim and line by line transcription of the original handwritten document. The transcription serves as the starting point for Part 1. It is included here because of the importance of the journal as an historical document and the desire to preserve and make the manuscript available close to the original form while moving it to a digital version. No attempt has been made to edit or correct the text.

Part 3 (omitted from the text-only and portable reader "noimage" versions) is a set of digital images of the manuscript made from photocopies provided by the Toronto Reference Library, the holder of the Nelson papers. The size of the images is reduced to make them suitable for on-line use; resolution is kept adequate for direct comparison with the transcription.

An added table of contents provides links (in the hypertext version) to sections or pages in each of the three parts. Page numbering preserves that of the manuscript for reference purposes.

Certain sections of the this e-text may display poorly on some e-book readers: (1) References to World Wide Web resources may be longer than can be contained on normally formatted lines. To simplify correct copying of the references, the lines have not been split. (2) In Part 2, the

The Nelson manuscript was made available courtesy of the Toronto Public Library. I would like to thank the staff of the Baldwin Room Manuscripts Collection at Toronto Reference Library for their assistance in making the material available for digitization. I would also like to express thanks to my wife, Susan O'Donovan, for the hours spent proofing text and clarifying many fine details of the language.

George Nelson's Postings and Employing Companies

1802/1803    Yellow River, Wisconsin, XY Company (XYC)
1803/1804    Lac du Flambeau, Chippewa River, Wisconsin, XYC
1804/1805    Lake Winnipeg / Red River area (no journal), Manitoba, XYC / North West Company (NWC)
1805/1806    Lac du Bonnet, Manitoba, NWC
1806/1811    Dauphin River, Manitoba, NWC
1811/1812    Tęte au Brochet (Jack Head), Manitoba, NWC
1813/1816    Long Lake, Ontario area, NWC
1818/1819    Tęte au Brochet, Manitoba, NWC
1819/1821    Moose Lake, Manitoba, NWC / Hudson's Bay Company (HBC)
1821/1822    Cumberland House, Saskatchewan, HBC
1822/1823    Lake la Ronge, Saskatchewan, HBC

Nelson's experiences and accounts come from his life and work with Ojibwa / Saulteau cultures around Lake Superior and Lake Winnipeg and contact in his later career with the Cree of Lake Winnipeg, the Saskatchewan Delta, Cumberland House and Lake la Ronge. He makes reference to the Beaver Indians (Dane-zaa) who, until the nineteenth century, lived as far east as the Slave and Clearwater Rivers bringing them and other Athabaskan cultures into contact with fur trading at Ile ŕ la Crosse, the administrative centre for Nelson's post at Lake la Ronge.

His journal of 1802/1803 was instrumental in leading to the rediscovery of the Folle Avoine posts of the XY Company and North West Company in 1969 by Harris and Frances Palmer with assistance of local residents. Subsequent archaeological work was undertaken and the forts were reconstructed and have been operated as the Forts Folle Avoine Historical Park by the Burnett County Historical Society since 1989. The Society provides tours, displays and programs on the fur trade and aboriginal culture of the area.

Nelson recalled accounts of Ojibwa practices in the Lake Superior area in his 1823 La Ronge journal.

Lake la Ronge was the site of some twenty trading posts dating from 1779. Nelson's Hudson's Bay Company post was a reestablishment in 1821 of an earlier North West Company post. According to The Atlas of Saskatchewan, it was the only fort on the Lake over the winter of 1822/1823. The location is likely a known archaeological site in the area shown on the map identified in the Atlas as Lac la Ronge II.

The road network reached La Ronge, founded in the early 1900's, in 1947, and Stanley Mission, which dates from 1851, in 1978.

Part 1

• Introductory Remarks 1
• Conjuring: The Interpreter's Account
• Initiations and Conjuring4
  • In Quest of Dreams
  • Dialogue with a Spirit 5
  • Principal Spirits
    • Wee-suck-ā-jāāk / Gey-Shay-mani-to6
    • Key-jick-oh-kay (Old Nick)
    • Water Lynx
    • Sun
      • A Dream Meeting with Sun7

Part 2

• Typescript of Manuscript

Part 3

• Manuscript Page Images

References