Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1942, Page 49

ICELANDIC EMIGRATION TO AMERICA
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which at one time numbered about 200, was therefore short-lived.
Most of its members only remained long enough to acquire full
proprietary rights in the land they had occupied. They then sold
their property and moved westwards, settling in districts where
an Icelandic population had arrived in the meantime. The last
Icelandic settlers left Nova Scotia in 1881.
Meanwhile, the remainder of the Icelanders who had settled
down in Ontario had not found conditions there to their liking.
Their object was above all to get a whole district to themselves
where they could found a purely Icelandic colony without mix-
ing with other nationalities. This desire was manifested very
clearly when an agent of the Dominion Government met a large
party of Icelanders who arrived at Quebec in 1874, and proposed
to them to settle in Canada instead of the U. S. A., as they had
originally intended to do. The Icelanders accepted this proposal
on condition that the Dominion Government should guarantee
them equality of status with native-born Canadians, that they
should be given a separate tract of land to colonize, and that
they and their descendants should be allowed to preserve their
language and nationality. The Government acceded to these
conditions, but it soon appeared that they could not be fulfilled
in Ontario, and that the settlers would have to move further
West, where settlement was more scattered. A Canadian named
John Taylor became their spokesman with the Dominion Govern-
ment, and he was given a sympathetic hearing by the then
Governor-General, Lord Dufferin, who had visited Iceland in
1856 and written a book about his travels there. On a subsequent
visit to the Icelandic colony, Lord Dufferin said that he had
given personal assurances to the Dominion Government on be-
half of the Icelanders, when the decision to permit them to found
a separate colony was taken. On the initiative of John Taylor,
an expedition was now sent out to the West in the spring of
1875 under the conduct of Taylor himself and an Icelander
named Sigtryggur Jónasson. Reaching the town of Winnipeg,
they proceeded to the North along the Red River to Lake Winni-
peg. On the Western shore of the lake they believed that they
had found a suitable locality for the proposed Icelandic colony.
The district was wooded and uninhabited; it was not too distant
from the nearest railway; it seemed well adapted for grain cul-
tivation, and there were plenty of fish in the lake. When the
expedition got back to Ontario more than 300 Icelanders at