Overview

In the year 1354 King Magnus of Norway commissioned Paul Knutson to organize an expedition to search for the inhabitants of the Western Greenland Colony who were reported missing in 1342. Viking's Last Voyage is a story about how that search might have unfolded. The search lasted about eight years, but the story relates only to the latter part of that time. The search ultimately took the expedition into Hudson Bay, up the Nelson River, down lake Winnipeg, then up the Red River of the North, eastward on the Buffalo River, and to Big Cormorant Lake in west-central Minnesota. As the search proceeded into the interior of America there was considerable interaction with Native Americans. Initially the Ojibwes were hostile and accounted for the loss of 16 of the 20 who had traveled inland. A record of that loss was recorded in Norse runes on a stone that was unearthed near Kennsington, Minnesota in 1898. Following that loss, the survivors aided by a fortuitous romance between one of the survivors and an Indian maiden they reach the Dakotas and Mandans who were friendly. Among the Mandans they found the members of the Lost Greenland Colony. Unfortunately the news never reached the remaining 10 Scandinavian who had remained at Hudson Bay before they set sail for Norway. Three of the surviving Norsemen married into the tribes, but Paul Knutson traveled westward with two Norse/Mandan guides in search of a fabled river that laid far to the west and emptied into a salt sea. He was never heard from again. Over the centuries the whole Colony disappeared as a result of intermarriage with the Mandans and Dakotas.

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Iral Conrad nelson (1900-1994) was born and raised on a small farm near Gordonsville, Minnesota. There he attended the common schools which consisted of Grammar School and two years of High School. His paternal grandparents immigrated from Norway in 1852, and he was always interested in the Norwegian Language and culture. He was a Life Member of the Sons of Norway, Sonja Lodge of Eugene, Oregon, and an ardent member of the Eugene Norsemen's Chorus. He became reasonably fluent in Norwegian and Lodge associates told him that he could get along well speaking with natives in Norway. His maternal grandfather immigrated with his parents from Wales to Pennsylvania in about 1820. His maternal grandmother was born in western Pennsylvania and was likely a mix of Scotch-Irish and German, but with a touch of Native American from the 1700's. (His grandmother once told his older brother, ""You got more Indian in you than you think you have."") The latter likely influenced his treatment of Native Americans in the story. His idea for Viking's Last Voyage apparently began with reading of The Riddle of the Kennsington Stone published in Reader's Digest, November 1948. Iral Clair Nelson (1927-) is the son of Iral Conrad Nelson. The decision to reconstruct the manuscript in digital form was based on fulfilling his father's desires to have the story made available to the public, the encouragement by a neighbor, Alan AAmot, and from him having retired and thus having time to devote to it. In the process of preparing the manuscript considerable research was done. The research was made possible because of the 17th and 18th century journals and other information available on the Internet; none of which was available to his father. Although not added to the story, the more the related aspects were investigated the more plausible the story became. On the personal side, he was born and raised in Oregon and Idaho. He received a Bachelors Degree in Mathematics in 1951 and a Masters Degree in Physics in 1955 from the University of Oregon. He then married and went to work in radiation and environmental protection at the Hanford Project in Richland, Washington which he continued for nearly 50 years. He became Board Certified in Health Physics in 1962 and now hold emeritus status. He served in the US Navy during the Korean War and briefly in World War II.

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