Migration, Arrival, and Settlement

In the 1991 Canada census, 14,555 individuals declared themselves to be of wholly Icelandic ancestry and 48,785 of partially Icelandic ancestry, for a total of 63,340. The provinces with the largest Icelandic populations (single and multiple response) were Ontario (32,365), Manitoba (23,340), and British Columbia (16,130).

Icelandic emigration to North America began with a few individuals who left the homeland in the 1850s. It was initially directed to the United States, at first to Utah and later to Wisconsin. For a brief time, Brazil also attracted Icelandic settlement. Mass movement to Canada and, to a lesser extent, the United States began in 1873 and continued unevenly until 1906. The major years of departure were 1876, 1882, and 1893, and peaks occurred in 1886–90 and 1901–05. In total, between 1871 and 1915, about 16,800 people left Iceland. After the turn of the century, however, industrialization of the country’s fishing fleet lessened the outflow; between 1901 and 1910, 2,659 Icelanders entered Canada, but in the following decade the number dropped to 987. By 1921 the community in this country totalled 11,000, of whom 78 percent lived in rural areas.

No single explanation can account for the mass emigration from Iceland to North America that began in the 1870s. Some specialists emphasize ecological and political reasons for the Icelanders’ departure, and downplay or ignore the social factors that made volcanic eruptions, pack ice, and the failure of grass crops devastating for so many. Danish colonial rule played a lesser role in motivating people to leave than is usually believed. As was true elsewhere in Europe, rising expectations and persuasive immigration agents were powerful influences. Resentment arose between those who left Iceland and those who remained behind, however, and emigrants were accused of unpatriotic behaviour. They were thought to be “poor Icelanders” who were willing to abandon their native land in its time of need. The struggle for independence from Denmark had been growing since 1848. But in 1874 when the mass outflow was just beginning, the Danish king granted the country its own constitution. Dissatisfaction with that document did not become apparent until the next decade but may then have persuaded more people to leave. Animosity between Icelanders and West Icelanders (Vestur Íslendingar) – the name given to those living in North America – gradually faded with time.

Certain patterns of Icelandic migration are consistent with other European countries, in that most individuals left economically depressed farming regions that were distant from the thriving fishing communities. Only after 1905 did the number of migrants from urban areas become significant. Overall, age and sex distribution suggests family migration. Many of those who left were young adults (aged twenty to thirty-four), with men slightly outnumbering women. Children aged fourteen or younger constituted about one-third of all emigrants. The occupational profile varied somewhat over time, and documentation is less reliable; whereas in the early years more substantial farmers predominated, after 1885 it was the rural poor who were most likely to emigrate.

Most individuals were from northeast Iceland. Some chain migration appears to have taken place, but the only detailed analysis has been on movement to Hecla Island in Manitoba. It has been argued that the peculiar history of Icelandic settlement disrupted the usual pattern of chain migration. The evidence suggests a modest degree of correlation between sýsla (municipality) of origin and place of settlement in Canada. However, using the sýsla as the unit of analysis raises difficulties since it does not account for population movements within Iceland. There, workers released from yearly labour contracts would criss-cross the island in search of employment (although they were required to return to their hreppur, or parish, of birth should they require charity) and thus would establish social ties outside their original sýsla that could then serve as links in chain migration.

Settlement in Canada began when Sigtryggur Jónasson arrived in September 1872. He found work in Ontario and quickly learned English, which prepared him for the arrival a year later of more immigrants. An exceptional figure for the Icelandic settlers who followed, he was not only the first to stay in Canada, but he would become the editor of the first Icelandic-language newspaper in Canada, Framfari, the first Icelandic member of a provincial legislature in 1896, and the first governor of the regional council of New Iceland, the territory granted to the settlers in Manitoba.

In August 1873 a small group of immigrants left Akureyri on board the Queen. At Glasgow, together with other settlers, they transferred to a ship of the Allen Line. Altogether 165 Icelanders arrived in Quebec City on 25 August; of these fifty went on to Wisconsin and the remainder travelled by train to Toronto and then north to Rosseau in Ontario’s Muskoka area. They had hoped to receive land on which to settle and find local employment, but they were disappointed at the near lack of both. They established themselves on a tract of land ten kilometres east of Rosseau, which they named Hekkla. Some left to find work to tide them over the winter, while two men, Baldvin Helgason and Davíd Davídsson, began to raise cattle locally. The following spring, Sigtryggur Jónasson visited the settlement. The Ontario government asked him to act as its agent and greet 365 Icelanders who would be arriving at Quebec City in September 1874. This group first settled in Kinmount in Ontario. Employment opportunities there proved too few, and the men were forced to leave their families to work on the railways. During the first winter, all the children under the age of two years died because of lack of food and adequate shelter.

The settlers in Rosseau and Kinmount were unhappy with the circumstances in which they found themselves. Some departed for Milwaukee, while others from Kinmount, influenced by an agent of the Nova Scotia government, Jóhannes Árngrímsson, moved to that province. They established the Markland settlement overlooking the Musquodoboit valley some eighty kilometres east of Halifax. Soil conditions proved poor, however, and by 1882 all the Icelanders had abandoned the area. In the spring of 1875, accompanied by the English pastor John Taylor, four men from Ontario and two from Wisconsin had travelled west to scout for territory large enough for a block settlement that would enable the Icelandic community to stay together. The Canadian government endorsed their request for a land grant upon completion of residential requirements. On 20 July, after assessing sites in the Red River valley, they chose one on the west side of Lake Winnipeg, an area approximately nineteen kilometres wide and seventy-seven kilometres long extending north from what was then the Manitoba boundary at Selkirk to include Hecla Island. This territory became Nýja Ísland, or the Republic of New Iceland.

The first party of Icelanders to reach Manitoba numbered 285 and consisted of 80 men, 136 women, and 69 children. In Toronto, the Kinmount group joined other Ontario-based Icelanders contacted by Sigtryggur Jónasson, and on 25 September they travelled by train to Sarnia, by steamer to Duluth (where thirteen more Icelanders from Wisconsin joined them), by train to near Grand Forks, North Dakota, and finally by sternwheeler to Winnipeg. They arrived at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers on 11 October. The Icelanders’ arrival in Winnipeg attracted some curiosity among the city’s nearly 5,000 residents. Some had expected them to resemble Inuit, but in general their Nordic appearance met with approval. They spent five days in the immigration hall, where they learned that preparations had not been made for their arrival. The families decided to continue on to New Iceland, while thirty-five single men and women remained in Winnipeg to find work as domestics. The former boarded makeshift flotillas towed by a steamer to travel north on the Red River. Rough water near Willow Point south of present-day Gimli forced the captain to cut the tow lines. Although they were destined for Icelandic River (Riverton), it was the windswept shore at Gimli that became the site of the first settlement on 21 October 1875. The first child born in New Iceland, Jón Ólafur Jóhannsson, son of Sigridur Ólafsdóttir and Jóhann Vilhjálmur Jónsson, arrived the following day.

Lacking the skills and equipment needed for farming and fishing in this territory, the settlers made some errors the first winter; fishing nets were frozen in the ice, and potatoes unsuccessfully planted in over-wet soil. Nutrition was a problem during the harsh weather, and some deaths from scurvy occurred, although the exact number is not known. When spring arrived, about half the population left for Winnipeg. Later that year approximately 1,200 Icelanders arrived in Canada from Akureyri in northern Iceland and Seydisfjördur in the northeast. They had been motivated to emigrate by a volcanic eruption in the area in 1875. Most continued on to New Iceland, settling farther north at Icelandic River or on Hecla Island. Of these immigrants, about thirty to forty died en route or shortly after they arrived in Gimli. Lack of funds was a problem, but this time the Canadian government advanced the colonists a loan for the purchase of supplies.

Not all immigrants wanted to stay in Manitoba’s New Iceland, particularly after its difficult beginnings. Many went south to North Dakota, while in 1880 some followed John Taylor’s assistant, Everett Parsonage, to Pilot Mound in southwest Manitoba. Two men established the community of Argyle to the west. For New Iceland’s disaffected, it provided a more fertile region. Between 1889 and 1894 settlement spread from villages such as Glenboro and Baldur to the South Cypress Hills. New colonies also appeared at Arborg, Big Point, Brandon, Dog Creek, Geysir, Melita, Morden, Piney, Selkirk, Shellmouth, Shoal Lake, Swan Lake, Swan River, and Winnipegosis in Manitoba after 1885. By the turn of the century some 10,000 Icelanders were living in the province. The first Icelanders in what is now Saskatchewan settled in the Thingvalla district in 1885. Others moved to Tantallon, Yorkton, and Calder. Markerville, near Red Deer in present-day Alberta, was homesteaded as well, and others continued west to Blaine and Point Roberts in Washington state or to White Rock in British Columbia.

Settlement in New Iceland followed a similar pattern to that in the homeland: people lived close to the shore, where they could both farm and fish. They established gardens, brought oxen and cows, and began to ply the lake. Local Cree and Sau Heaur taught them to fish through the ice and use plants such as Acorus calamus, known as sweet flag or Indian root, for treating various ailments. The federal government allocated $8,000 to survey and build roads through the settlement. Men received sixty to seventy cents a day for road work, and women the same amount to tend the camps in which the men lived.

Icelanders arrived in Manitoba at the beginning of mass movement into the province, which had previously been part of Hudson’s Bay Company territory. Following the passing of the Manitoba Act in 1870, the old pattern of the Red River settlement gave way to homesteading by arrivals from Ontario and Quebec. The population of Winnipeg grew from about 100 in that year to some 5,000 five years later. By 1881 the newly expanded province had a population of 65,954. At its creation in 1870, Manitoba had had 11,963 inhabitants, of whom 1,565 were white. The major issue in the opening of land to European occupation was the negotiation of treaties with the indigenous population. Between 1872 and 1874 blocks of land were granted to groups of Germans, Mennonites, Swiss, Scots, and French Canadians. When the Icelanders received theirs in 1875, the territory had not yet been fully ceded to the federal government by the native Saulteaux.

The Republic of New Iceland was the only self-governing settlement with its own legal and judicial system to have been created by non-natives within Canada. Inspired by nationalist sentiment and the founding of the Althing in 930, the settlers strove to maintain their society by constitutional means. In April 1876 New Iceland became part of the district of Keewatin in what was then the North-West Territories, but the district lacked an administrative system. Already on 4 January the settlers had set up a provisional governing body of five councillors, which was recognized by the federal government. The initial duties of the council were primarily concerned with allocating supplies and recording homestead applications.

The following January the settlers held meetings and appointed a committee to draft a provisional constitution. The final version divided the territory into four districts, or byggdir, running north to south: Mikleyjarbygd, Fljótsbygd, Árnesbygd, and Vídirnesbygd. The residents of each district met and formed a five-person council with one individual appointed reeve, or byggdarstjóri. These four councils then met to establish an overarching Thing, or governing council, made up of the four reeves and an elected thingstjóri, or governor. The council’s duties included building and maintaining roads, caring for the poor, supervising health, and settling disputes. Final approval of the new laws and regulations came in January 1878. Three years later the republic was included in an expanded Manitoba, but the constitutional government remained in place until 1887.

Despite the original enthusiasm for New Iceland, problems and discontent grew. A smallpox epidemic hit the settlement late in 1876, and before it ended the next spring, 102 people, many of them young, had died. A quarantine (which prevented legal trade outside the settlement) was imposed at Netley Creek in November and remained in place until July 1877. During the quarantine – lifted too late for spring seeding – an armed barricade enforced the group’s isolation. Smallpox also killed most of the neighbouring Saulteaux. Other tragedies undermined the settlement’s success. High water levels over four years beginning in 1876 exacerbated already bad conditions by destroying hay crops and causing the starvation of cattle. The most devastating flood hit in November 1880. As well, the fishing industry failed for the first two years of its existence. Adverse weather left roads and fields impassable and unworkable. A dispute, ostensibly over religion, divided New Iceland’s inhabitants in 1877–78. As a result, part of the group left for North Dakota, where they established themselves near a Norwegian settlement. Disagreement over the repayment of a government loan further divided the settlers in 1882, preventing some from registering their homesteads.

Reinforce these hardships were glowing reports of progress in the North Dakota and Argyle settlements. Talk of leaving New Iceland became widespread, and in 1881 an exodus to other locales began. The population dropped to about 250 people from 1,029 in 1879. Resolution of the loan dispute, an economic decline in Winnipeg, and improved weather attracted newcomers. By 1883 migration to the settlement had begun again, and at the turn of the century the population of New Iceland had reached 2,500. The new residents were mostly the poorer recent immigrants, however, since for them fishing provided a familiar form of self-sufficiency. Frequently, new arrivals continued on to Winnipeg or other Icelandic settlements after only a brief stay.

Unlike many other immigrant groups in that city, Icelanders avoided the privations of the north end and settled in the central area. By 1905 many had moved to the newly constructed middle-class residential district in the west end. The corner of Victor and Sargent avenues became known as the heart of the Icelandic community. By 1916 some 2,485 of the 2,969 Winnipeg-based Icelanders lived in that part of the city. In contrast, only 138 lived in the north end and 346 had moved into the predominantly British southern district. Icelanders were quick to become naturalized citizens: by 1916, 81 percent (or 4,322 people) of immigrants had been granted citizenship. Five years later, this proportion had risen to 88 percent.

After the single extended wave of departures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emigration from Iceland continued at a much lower rate, and since the 1950s it has been directed more towards the United States and northern Europe, particularly other Nordic countries and Britain. Census data from 1991 shows that, of 550 immigrants to Canada, 120 settled in Manitoba, 130 in Ontario, and 110 in British Columbia. It is not known if these individuals made permanent moves to this country, came as students, or (more likely) combined the two purposes.