La Ronge Journal, 1823

(Includes additional materials: List of some other publications of his work; editing notes; an example of a music scroll; details of Nelson's fur trade career; table of contents; page images of handwritten manuscript; references.)]

ALSO BY GEORGE NELSON

Peers, Laura & Schenck, Theresa (eds.). 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 extensive additional analysis of the mythology, the shaking lodge ceremony, medicines and religious practices of the Northern Algonquin peoples. Additional commentaries from aboriginal perspectives on the Nelson text are given by Stan Cuthand and Emma laRoque.

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

EDITING NOTES

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 Nelson's work accessible to a wider audience and ensure its preservation and availability in digital format. It is presented 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 some portable reader 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 versions) to sections or pages in each of the three parts. Page numbering preserves that of the manuscript for reference purposes.