Founded by People Fleeing Natural Disasters : New Iceland: A Little-Known Republic Recalled

Here on Lake Winnipeg, just north of Minnesota and North Dakota, a band of people fleeing natural disasters a little more than 100 years ago founded one of history’s least-known republics.

It was called New Iceland.

About 20,500 descendants of those pioneers survive today as Canadians, living in Manitoba and proudly forming the largest Icelandic community outside the North Atlantic island itself.

The community dates to 1873-75, when volcanic eruptions on Iceland destroyed homes, a plague killed the sheep, summers were icy and the cod were dwindling.

Boarding a boat for Canada appeared the best solution, and the result was the self-governing colony of New Iceland that existed from 1875 to 1887.

One of the descendants is Helgi Tomasson, 72, a ruddy-face fisherman who has lived all his life on Lake Winnipeg’s Hecla Island.

Climate ‘Invigorating’

“The climate is the same as Iceland or Russia--invigorating,” he said. “It tends to make vigorous people.”

Tomasson ice-fished for 20 years with only a dog team to pull the heavy crates of pickerel and whitefish back to shore. Then he bought a 1952 Bombardier, a tractor-like ice vehicle, which he has managed to keep running despite winter temperatures that plunge to 22 below zero.

It is the same spirit of self-sufficiency that enabled his grandfather and 1,500 other settlers to face smallpox and scarlet fever epidemics, grasshopper plagues, flooding, and a religious rift in their first tumultuous years in New Iceland.

The immigrants signaled their determination by naming their original settlement Gimli, a reference from Norse mythology to the Great Hall of Gimli where gods, giants and the best of men meet following the end of the world.

Only about 1,000 of Gimli’s 2,500 residents today are of Icelandic heritage, but they give the town its flavor through the 99-year-old Islendingadagurinn Festival, their traditional cuisine such as smoked lamb flanks and vine terte prune cake, and a museum that contains a log house from the old settlement.

Vikings Everywhere

Gimli has a Viking pharmacy, Viking motor lodge and Viking travel agency. The harbor is guarded by a 15-foot statue of a Viking wielding an ax.

Summer tourists keep the original 1910 cash register busy at H. P. Tergesen & Sons general store with its racks of Icelandic sweaters and books.

“Our daughter is leaving to go to university in Iceland to study Icelandic culture and literature,” said Lorna Tergesen, whose great-grandparents were in the first party to reach New Iceland on Oct. 21, 1875.

Tomasson speaks such fluent Icelandic that he felt right at home on a visit to Iceland with his wife Helga in 1978.

“They asked what part of Iceland we were from and just about keeled over when I said I was third-generation Canadian,” said Tomasson, whose grandfather arrived here in 1876.

Cultural Preservation

Iceland’s ambassador to Canada, Ingvi Ingvarsson, said his small nation takes pride in the cultural preservation of its former North American colony.

“They speak really good Icelandic, although it’s a little bit archaic,” he said in a telephone interview, noting that contemporary idioms are missing from the 19th-Century tongue Icelandic-Canadians still pass on to their children.

Icelandic is no longer taught in local elementary schools, but the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg has a Department of Icelandic Language and Literature, and Canadian Icelanders continue to publish a newspaper and support cultural groups such as the Icelandic Canadian Front.

This cohesiveness contrasts with the integration of later Scandinavian and German immigrants, and Prof. David Arnason of the University of Manitoba attributes the difference to the Icelandic fascination with myth.

Stories of Hardship

“When we tell our epic stories, they are stories located in the new land, stories like the horrors of the smallpox epidemic when the bodies of children were stacked on the roofs of houses so that wolves would not get them,” he wrote in a recent article.

Lord Dufferin, the British gOvernor general of Canada in the 1870s, offered volcano-fleeing Icelanders the virgin land about 42 miles long and 11 miles wide beside Lake Winnipeg and about 100 miles north of the U.S. border.

Cree Indians probably saved the lives of early settlers by teaching the sea-fishing immigrants how to fish through thick ice with nets.

Before joining Canada’s province of Manitoba in 1887, New Iceland had its own constitution, which declared Icelandic the official language, preserved Icelandic civil law and established an elaborate social welfare system. Only Icelanders were allowed to settle in the region.

No Doctors or Police

The immigrants often did without doctors or policemen but always built schools and began publishing a newspaper in a log cabin within two years of arrival.

“They were great believers in education,” said Tomasson. “They all brought a little chest with them containing their most precious books--the Bible, the Icelandic sagas, prose and verse, and educational books.”

A split between strict Lutherans and a more liberal faction that eventually became Unitarian resulted in the early exodus of hundreds of settlers to North Dakota and western Canada, but the towns along Lake Winnipeg have remained the center of Icelandic culture.

Only Hecla Island has seen a sharp decline in population, from 500 people half a century ago to four families now, after the closing of island schools and the designation of Hecla as a provincial park.

“We used to put on our own socials with accordion bands and our own plays in Icelandic,” recalled Tomasson, looking at the boarded up community hall and two-room schoolhouse he attended as a boy. “We all spoke Icelandic in those days.”