This project significantly edits the writing of Harry Gordon. 18th-century habits of erratic capitalization and abbreviation have all been adjusted to modern grammar, for ease of reading. 

     Naming conventions have been adjusted to the most common spellings for the names of Native Tribes, Places, and Events. 

     The greatest editorial choice for this project, was the decision to divide the Journal entries up by date of occurrence instead of maintaining the historical body and paragraph format written by Harry Gordon. You will see a date heading each entry of the journal, where in the original the date was a narrative sentence heading the paragraph.

     Correspondence presented will be edited to modern grammar as time allows. Letters will be transcribed as is (until edited) based on the most recent reproductions available.

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Transcription published by my project:

- Capital and lower-case letters will be standardized to proper English throughout.

- Spelling will be corrected to proper English.

- Abbreviations will be silently expanded in all cases.

- Small amounts of missing text will not be supplied and a bracketed ellipsis will represent the gap.

- Terminal punctuation will be rendered as a period, dash, comma, slash, etc. as it appears.

- Two or more punctuation marks will not be included and one mark will be chosen based on context. Paragraph indents will be standardized.

- “Slips of the pen” will be ignored.

- Readings that remain in question after review by the editor will be included in the text and noted as questionable in the footnotes.

- Canceled text will be included if legible but rendered as struck-through. Interlineations will be silently included in the text.

- Editorial insertions will be rarely used within the transcriptions.

- Accents over letters will be rendered as they appear.

- Obscure monetary symbols will be rendered as they appear within the limits of available software symbols.

- Small drawings on the manuscript will be reproduced and dropped into the text-only if deemed significant.

- The published version of letters at variance with the written text will be sought out and referenced in the footnotes in every case.

- Foreign language passages within letters will be translated in footnotes if the “average” reader could not figure them out.  

- Elements such as dateline and internal address will be moved to the standard location no matter where they appear on the page.

- At the close of the descriptive note, the period will be placed outside final quotation marks.

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