_Lansing, Michigan_ _March 6, 1960_ [Illustration: “Doctor, damn your blood, get up & give us a bowl of Toddy!”] I An Entertainment and a Violent Assault [Illustration: Musket and saber] _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._ _He had been deeply involved in the Robert Rogers affair which had rocked the little community at Michilimackinac two years before. Johnson was in Detroit in the fall of 1767 where he had gone for the treatment of an injury when a messenger from British military headquarters for North America arrived with orders to place Major Rogers, commandant at Michilimackinac, under arrest on suspicion of treason. Johnson brought these orders back to the Straits, and it was Lieutenant John Christie, an officer who also figures prominently in Morison’s journal, who arrested Rogers. Johnson later asked to be given charge of the detail that took Rogers to Montreal for trial, boasting that he would foil any attempt that might be made to set Rogers free. However, when Rogers was acquitted, those who had hoped to see him convicted charged that the prosecution’s case had been fatally weakened by Johnson’s testimony which had enabled the defense to show that Rogers had been mistreated while he was a prisoner. Such mistreatment would be in keeping with the picture of Johnson’s character which emerges from a reading of Dr. Morison’s journal._ Narrative of an Action of Burglary and felony perpetrated on the Dwelling House & person of Daniel Morison, Surgeon’s mate of the 2d. Battn. 60th Regt. at Michilamackinac the Seventh day of November (about 5 Oclock in the morning) in the Year one thousand seven hundred & sixty nine, Vizt: