Iral Clair Nelson / Iral Conrad Nelson
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. 3
