The Far Travellers
- W. D. Valgardson
- 5 days ago
- 9 min read
by W.D. Valgarson
W.D (Bill) Valgardson (I4274040) is an acclaimed, award-winning writer and professor, who wrote about his family and their arrival in New Iceland 1876. Bill recently attended the INLNA 2025 Convention in Gimli, MB, along with many delegates from Canada, the US and Iceland. His reflection is while he is visiting Gimli: his years growing up there, the influence his family made on him, and the challenges they faced, some of which our families experienced. We thank Bill for this indepth reflection posted on Facebook and have copied it here for our readership. Images were taken by IR Volunteers at the convention.
Torfi Telanius, the Richard and Margaret Beck lecturer this past term at the University of Victoria, said in one of his lectures “Over the past 60 years Iceland has been transformed from a poor, essentially a peasant country to an extremely affluent modern society. It is a process that has not been without national and individual pain.”
He might have been talking about the Icelandic settlers who came here, to this place, a hundred and fifty years ago.
Iceland was a place of isolated farms, no cities, no roads, rivers had to be forded, and a system of indentured labor. Indentured labor! That meant you worked on a yearly contract on a farm. The farm owner decided how much work you did, what you ate, where you slept. The law said you had to be attached to a farm. The Industrial Revolution had not reached Iceland.
People risked everything, everything, for opportunity on this ground. A hundred and fifty years ago our opportunity seekers came here, to New Iceland.
It was such a short time ago that I knew two of my great-grandparents who were among the original settlers of New Iceland. My great-grandmother, Friðrikka Gotskálksdóttir, came with the large group in 1876. She was three. Her newly born brother died in the smallpox epidemic. I assume that Rikka and her parents survived because they were inoculated against smallpox in Iceland. Everyone was supposed to have been.
When Rikka was old enough to leave home, she went to Fort Garry for opportunity. I think she got a job in the kitchen. She married an English soldier, William Bristow. They moved back to Gimli. She had thirteen children.
Two of her sons went with three other young people on a sailboat to pick blueberries. They were caught in a storm. They all drowned. One of her sons had tied himself to the mast in the hope of surviving. Five young people lost from a small fishing village. This did not happen in some far away, exotic place. Their bodies were brought to the Gimli dock.
People have asked me, what was it like to grow up in an Icelandic town like Gimli, in an area called New Iceland?
As a child, I used to go to Rikka’s. My mother and she played cards and visited. I lay on the kitchen floor and ate pönnukökur. Sometimes, I sat in the living room watched over by portraits of stern men with long beards. I looked at pictures in her photograph album with a stereoscope. However, I never stayed long in that room. Rikka had a large statue of the Fjallkona in her living room. I was terrified of her. Everywhere I went, the Fjallkona’s eyes followed me.
I heard stories of how William Bristow, the first non-Icelander to become a fisherman, learned to fish from his brother-in-law, Paul Olson. There is another detail of early life in Gimli. Paul Olson was actually a Gotskálksson but people changed their names to adapt to English culture. Fishermen were still using huskies and sleds to go to their nets.
There was a livery stable where the Gimli theatre now stands. The Greenberg’s had a grist mill, and the farmers came with horse and wagon to get their grain ground. There was a log cabin where they could stay overnight.
This is not ancient history. Rikka lived until I was eighteen. And now, I am standing here speaking to you at a celebration of the 1875 arrival of the Icelandic immigrants. Rikka’s parents, Gottskálk Sigfusson and Hómfríður Jónatansdóttir, then Rikka, her daughter, who became my grandmother, her son who became my father, and me, my daughter and son, their children, and my great grandson.
Think about a three-year-old girl having made this great journey, standing on the Gimli beach. She had boarded a sailing ship from Iceland to Lithe, a train to Glasgow, a ship to Quebec, and a train to Winnipeg. And then traveled from Winnipeg to New Iceland. Think of all she endured, what she survived, of all those she gave life to.
On the other side of the family was my great-grandfather, Ketill Valgardson. He lived until I was six. He used to give me peppermints when we visited. I was scared to look down into his basement because he kept his coffin there, set on two carpenter’s benches beside the cold room where he kept his potatoes. He had come as a teenager with his father, Valgarður Jónsson, who was already ill. I believe they were hrepsomagur, welfare cases, their way paid to get rid of them. Valgarður died two years later. I’ve been told he was buried at Sandy Bar and that that area is now washed away.
Ketill and Soffía Sveinbjarnardóttir (I506348) had three children who lived to adulthood. Valentinus Valgardson (I506351), the gold medalist in mathematics. His daughter, Stina, who became an artist, craftsperson, and brilliant photographer. And my grandfather, Svein, who became a master carpenter. They are all part of my life, part of who I am. I knew them all.
Many of us were baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran Church. Our ministers often came from Iceland. We were living with war time rationing, yet at Christmas we all got a small bag with some candy and an orange. We walked to the Christmas service over snow drifts. After Halli and Gusta Bjarnason built their house next to Scribner’s, we always stopped there after the service for sukla (hot chocolate) and baked treats. Gusta took the Icelandic rule that you should have seventeen kinds of treats seriously.
Adapt or die is the essential rule. And adapt to this new world, we did. We did not eat rotted shark, but we ate slauter and skyr and rullupylsa and Mysuostur. On our Christmas table, at times, along with the turkey, was venison, pickerel cheeks, stuffed sunfish and even roast of bear and beaver tail. We were becoming Canadian.
However, as important as Christmas was, it was the Icelandic Celebration that we waited for with its chance to win a quarter in a race. A quarter would buy us a hot dog and a soft drink. With the excitement of relatives returning who had continued on Westward, some to Winnipeg, but others all the way to Vancouver Island. There were the speeches at the park, the music, the dance, but most of all the gathering together of friends and family.
I think of our people as the far travelers. Like the Vikings, they traveled great distances over oceans. That journey West, with many stops and starts, would continue over the years until Icelandic immigrants reached the furthest West possible, first Vancouver, then Victoria, British Columbia. There were Icelandic settlements at Hunter and Smith Island, Icelandic coastal communities close to Prince Rupert. Many of these travelers came to New Iceland before they headed further West.
The Canadian/American border was easier to cross than it is now, and Icelanders moved to Point Roberts, Blaine, Bellingham and Marietta. The wonderful book, Icelanders on the Pacific Coast, by Margret J. Benedictson and translated by a group of volunteers tells these peoples' histories.
I see these people as heroic. I see these people’s stories as part of our Icelandic immigration history that must be preserved. Some of the early settlers left New Iceland and walked to North Dakota looking for the opportunity of better land. Today, under the inspiration and guidance of [Sunna] Pam Furstenau, Icelandic Roots is helping preserve our history.
As well, there are publications that have helped to save our Icelandic North American history. You probably need to search for them in second-hand bookstores because many are locally published and are now out of print. There are Nelson Gerrard’s famous books Icelandic River Saga and The Icelandic Heritage but also lesser known books like Memories of Osland.
There is, of course, Glen Sigurdson’s history of fishing on Lake Winnipeg, Vikings on a Prairie Ocean. The story is truly a Canadian saga detailing all that had to be learned to first provide subsistence fishing, keeping people from starving, to creating the freshwater fishing industry that still exists to this day.
There is a heart-wrenching account in Wakeful Nights, Vidur Hreinsson’s biography of Stephan Stephansson. One day Stephan saw his friend Indriði travelling to Reykjavik to attend the local Latin school.
Only the well-to-do landowners could afford to send their sons to Reykjavik to attend school and then to Denmark for further education. Vidar says that Stephan was overwhelmed with grief because he couldn’t go. Education was for a small elite. The dream and the hope of the settlers was that education would be for everyone.
Stefan came to Canada, settled in Alberta, and, in spite of the physical distance from Iceland, became one of Iceland’s most respected poets. If students had been accepted on merit, not money, he would have been going to that school.
It was Miss Stefansson, our beloved French and English teacher, who dedicated her life to teaching us and left her estate to build our library. The settlers who came to north America would have been proud of that library. When you have a moment, walk one block to the Gimli library that Miss Stefansson funded. It wasn’t just the billionaire, Andrew Carnegie who believed in education and libraries.
This attitude toward writing and writers, to literature, came with the settlers to New Iceland. I’ve said many times that the community provided exceptional support for becoming a writer. When my first book, Bloodflowers, came out, I set up a table in the Gimli Park on Islendingadagurinn with a modest sign saying buy a book from the best writer in the world. One of my first customers was a woman who came to the table and piled up books. I thought she was nervously destroying my display. Would you like to buy a book, I said, and she said, “I’ll take six.” What community better than that could any writer want?
The list is too long to recount but no one thinks it odd that David Arnason, Kathleen Arnason, that Kristine Benson, and numerous other writers are from New Iceland, that Gimli has Tergesen’s bookstore. David told me that when he was growing up, he thought the characters from the sagas that his family talked about with such familiarity were neighboring farmers.
The first settlers who landed on a sand bar as winter threatened, who were sheltered by ratty, second-hand Hudson Bay tents, whose first task was to build as many log cabins as there were stoves, survived under the direst conditions. The result was crowded, inadequate shelter. Some of the food the Icelanders were sold in Winnipeg was of poor quality. Once the lake froze over, to keep from starving, with the help of the local natives, they learned how to fish under the ice. And John Ramsey and other natives helped feed them. Yet, in spite of these conditions, before that first Christmas, Caroline Taylor, the niece of John Taylor, opened a school in English. Thirty people enrolled.
The next year when the smallpox started, the school was temporarily disbanded. One hundred and two people died from the smallpox. The community was devastated. Once the smallpox was over, Jane Taylor restarted the school, this time with sixty-three students.
The Icelandic settlers, no matter where they settled, adapted. They learned English, they learned new skills. There was no grain grown in Iceland. Many of the Icelandic immigrants, including my great grandfather and great uncle, became grain farmers.
At the beginning of the Icelandic immigration, there were fears that our heritage would be lost. We would forget the Golden Age of the Vikings, the Sagas, our history, but that has not happened. We are here today, in the heart of New Iceland, celebrating our history and our heritage.
In Gimli, my grandfather, Swanberg and others, built the monument to the settlers. Gimli Park was created. Icelandic Celebration started in Winnipeg and moved to Gimli. There was also an Icelandic Celebration at Hnausa. The school that was so sought after in Gimli went through many permutations. Even after the brick school was built between Second and Third Avenue, we went to school in the church, in the Town Hall, in the skating rink. But then the new high school was built. In Winnipeg, the Icelandic department and the Jon Bjarnason Academy were created and funded. And doctors and professors and successful business people of Icelandic descent emerged because what had been missing in Iceland was not lack of intelligence or imagination but opportunity.
An important part of that heritage is education.
Education matters. Younger generations need schools and libraries and books to teach them the knowledge and skills to defend the accomplishments of those people who risked everything for a better life for not only themselves but generations to come.
