Chapter 1: What Is Memory? And How Did George Do It? You''ve probably never heard of George Nelson, but his memory was astonishing, and his contribution to our collective memory deserves wider appreciation. I certainly hadn''t heard of him until I came across his tracks in the 1990s, when I was working on an historical novel about one of his younger brothers, Robert. Along with a third brother, Wolfred, Robert was one of the leaders of the rebellions of 1837-1838, the nearest thing to a revolution that Canada has ever had. Skulking around in the archives looking for traces of the family, I came across a cache of documents held by the Toronto Reference Library: the handwritten journals that George wrote at various times about his years in the fur trade and afterward.George was born in 1786 in what is now Sorel-Tracy, Quebec, which was then called William Henry, Lower Canada. His father was an Englishman who ran a school where he educated the sons of the English officers stationed at the garrison, as well as the scions of other anglophones in the region. Among his students were, of course, his own sons, three of whom became doctors. George was not headed for a medical career, however, even though he was no dunce.

He wrote a good hand, knew a bit of Latin, was well acquainted with some of the greats of the literary canon, and had more than a passing acquaintance with Greek and Roman mythology and philosophy. Yet he apparently chafed under the parental yoke, and in February 1802, when he was fifteen, he jumped at an offer to become a clerk in a fur trading company after a chance meeting with a representative of the XY Company in Montreal.As he wrote more than thirty years later, the prospect of adventure and fortune was very appealing:"In May each year we would see numbers of young men, each one with his bag, containing a few of the most necessary articles of clothing, on his back, with a paddle and a "setting pole" in his hand, bidding "Farewell" (alas! how many forever) embarking in their bark Canoes with tears in their eyes and singing as if going to a banquet! These were easily distinguished by their gay & lofty mien and jaunty air, as men who had faced dangers & conquered difficulties they only were capable of. The free and thoughtless way in which they squandered money was not the least of wonders to those who unacquainted with influence of example & the habit of thoughtlessness so natural to a roving life. The example was infectious, the Stories thrilling, and I was in that period of life remarkable for thoughtless- ness & anxious to be engaged in a busy life -- I was seized with the delirium."In short order, he was indentured for five years as an apprentice clerk, with a salary of fifteen pounds a year and the "promise of a Share in the Company at the expiration of the indentures, or one hundred pounds a year."In 2025, fifteen pounds would be worth about $3,310, and the sum probably seemed a fortune to the boy from William Henry who was just days shy of his sixteenth birthday. George''s experiences on those late spring days when he started his career in the fur trade are recorded in at least two places, and this is where his story doubles back to the bigger story about memory that we are considering here.

First, all clerks in the fur trade were expected to keep a daily journal, and it is known that he did so for nearly twenty years. He also wrote several letters to family members, detailing his observations about the Indigenous people among whom he was living and frequently drawing parallels between their belief systems and those of Christians and the Greek and Roman worlds.He thought that most of these documents had been destroyed when he came back to Lower Canada, but the friend he had asked to do the task hadn''t done it. For a long time, it wasn''t clear how these documents ended up in the Toronto Public Library. It appeared that they simply sat on the shelves for decades before being "discovered" by scholars in the mid-twentieth century, more than a hundred years after they were written. But more about that later. What is important about George''s story is that his experience in the fur trade didn''t become a case of out of sight, out of mind after he left it.He retired or was pushed out In the late 1820s and returned to William Henry with his wife, Mary Ann, a member of the Ojibwa Loon clan, and their children.

He worked at one thing or another, and then, in 1836, he had a chance meeting with one of his friends from so long ago, and the memories came tumbling out of him: "I last saw him at Bas de la rivière Winnipick, in the spring of 1806. What a length of time! & yet to my memory fresh, pleasing & new as but one month back! What a variety of circumstances have occurred since ."And so he began to write down what he remembered, perhaps for his own pleasure, but also possibly with the idea that others would find his interesting. It should be emphasized that he did not know that his earliest journals still existed; at this point he doesn''t appear to have consulted the other text that he had written, fifteen years before. No, what he relied on was his memory, both for what happened and for what he felt about it.Historians Laura Peers and Theresa Schenck, who prepared some of Nelson''s texts for publication, underline just how acute his memory was by placing excerpts from this later work beside sections of the earlier journals that so surprisingly survived. In many cases, he fleshes out incidents, and sometimes there is a slight shift in emphasis, particularly in regard to his relations with his family back on the St. Lawrence.

One of the most poignant differences is in the way he recounts his "marriage" at the age of seventeen to the daughter of his guide, one of the Indigenous men he was trading with in the Folle Avoine area of what is now Wisconsin. In the earlier account, he carefully says he was very against the idea of taking the girl as a wife "after the custom of the country" -- that is, entering into a common-law relationship without a civil or religious ceremony as recognized by "civilized" authorities. Such alliances were forbidden by the XY Company (unlike the Hudson''s Bay Company) and, he says, would also be against the strict morals of his parents. He was only convinced to go along with the idea -- the phrase he uses is "prevailed upon" to take her -- after his guide threatened to leave George far from the place where he was to winter.But years later, he wrote much more positively about the situation:"A whelp, not yet 18 to marry! Whatever might have been my own bent, which, to tell the truth, was far from averse to it, yet the respect for my father''s injunction, the awe I was impressed of for his authority & the dread of [his superior''s] censure were so powerful as to effectually curb & humble my own dear Passions. Fear prevailed for a long time. The old father became restless, impatient, frequently menaced me to leave me & at last did go off. I sent out my Interpreter to procure me another guide.

In vain -- my provisions being very scanty, my men so long retarded, fear of not reaching my destination and, above all the secret pleasure/satisfaction I felt in being compelled (what an agreeable word when it accords with our desires) to marry for my safety made me post off for the old man. The poor old creature came back. I think I still see the satisfaction, the pleasure the poor man felt. He gave me his daughter! He thought no doubt that it would be the means of rendering him happy & comfortable in his old days. What a cruel disappointment. It is strange how our passions, our desires, do blind our reason and pervert our understanding."The idyll was not to last, however, because George really did get into hot water when his superiors learned of the attachment. In later years, he suspected that it weighed heavily against him when he came up for advancement.

Certainly, there was a rupture with the girl at some point, which gave him some heartache. A few years later, however, he married Mary Ann, also "after the custom of the country," and the union was formalized some ten years later at the Anglican church in William Henry. Unlike many other men in the fur trade, he brought his "country wife" home with him.His story, whether told as an old man, a middle-aged one, or a young clerk through his diary entries, is fascinating, made all the more so by the fact that he appears to have remembered so much so well. The question that most of us -- who sometimes don''t remember where we left our keys -- will feel compelled to ask when we hear it is, How did he do it? Would writing journals and keeping the missives we write to others make a difference in what we remember and, just as importantly, in ensuring that what we remember is correct? In the following part, we''ll address this somewhat mysterious process.But the question of George''s amazing memory prompts another one: What is the link between individual and collective memory? In this case, it''s obvious. What he remembered is now an important record of a civilization that was being fundamentally changed by the incursion of outsiders. As such, it and other memories written down or passed on orally provide two important things: a testimony of a heritage in which to take pride and hints of ways to rebuild a rich and nurturing culture.

In addition, as we''ll see, there are analogies between the way memory is stored and accessed in our brains and the grand network of physical and digital artifacts and documents stored in our libraries and archives and on the web. This long- lasting memory is essential to any plan for safeguarding civilization should our worlds be turned upside down by climate change or another catastrophe.* * *Straight off the top, though, we should consider an obvious question: Where do our individual memories reside? The brain?That certainly is the accepted answer now, but that wasn''t the case in the past. N.