Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1942, Blaðsíða 51

ICELANDIC EMIGRATION TO AMERICA
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persons of various nationalities have settled in Gimli County,
as the district is now called. The Icelanders still remain in sole
possession, however, of a strip of land along the Western shore
of Lake Winnipeg.
About the same time as New Iceland was colonized, the first
Icelandic emigrants arrived in Minnesota. They quickly formed
a flourishing colony, but it never constituted a separate whole,
and never became very numerous. Its centre is now the city of
Minneota, where the only Icelandic paper in the U. S. A. was
published for some time.
The first settlers who left New Iceland in order to find
more suitable country went up the course of the Red River to
North Dakota. In the North-Eastern part of this State a con-
siderable Icelandic colony was soon founded, and its numbers
were swelled by new arrivals from Wisconsin and directly from
Iceland. Here too, the settlers at first had many hardships to
contend with, and they found it difficult to procure the requi-
site initial capital. Most of them made good, however, and the
colony is now the largest Icelandic settlement in the U. S. A.
and one of those which have best succeeded in keeping alive
Icelandic traditions on American soil.
In several other parts of the U. S. A. there are smaller groups
of Icelandic settlers. In addition to the Icelandic colony in Utah,
which never attained large dimensions, and the settlement in
Washington Island, there still exist in Nebraska the small rem-
nants of a settlement which was started there in 1873. On the
Pacific coast there are a few smaller groups in the State of
Washington Island, there still exist in Nebraska the small rem-
Blaine and Seattle. Icelanders are also found scattered in the
larger cities, such as New York, Chicago, Duluth, etc., but these
small groups have, of course, had little chance of keeping to-
gether, and are quickly absorbed in the local population. Ac-
cording to the census of 1930 there were 7400 persons in the
U. S. A. either born in Iceland or of Icelandic descent, most of
them in North Dakota and Minnesota.
After the foundation of the colony of New Iceland, the
majority of the Icelandic emigrants continued to go to Canada,
and Winnipeg with its adjacent Icelandic settlements became
the nucleus of their colonization, and the first destination of
practically all who left Iceland for the Dominion. Many of them