Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1942, Page 53

ICELANDIC EMIGRATION TO AMERICA
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ditions were difficult: the district was thinly populated and there
were few opportunities of getting employment. As the nearest
railway was at Calgary, communications were bad. A few years
later, however, a railway was built from Calgary to Edmonton.
Communication was thus established between the colony and
the outside world, and prosperity consequently increased.
Apart from the above-mentioned groups of Icelandic settlers
in the Dominion, there are, of course, persons of Icelandic des-
cent in practically every part of the country. According to the
census of 1931 there were 19,400 persons in Canada either born
in Iceland or of Icelandic descent. The bulk of them live in
Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The greatest concentration in one
place is in Winnipeg.
The problems and difficulties with which the Icelandic
settlers in North America were faced were, of course, largely
the same as those which emigrants from other countries came
up against. In one respect, however, the Icelanders were placed
in a more difficult position than other European immigrants:
they were totally inexperienced as regards practically every
form of work which they had to tackle in the new country.
Most of them were farmers or agricultural labourers, but the
agriculture which they knew from their homeland had nothing
in common with that which they now had to take up. The prin-
cipal form of American agriculture, grain-growing, they only
knew by name, and even the most primitive methods and imple-
ments were quite new to them. Those who went to the towns
were not in a much better position: at that time there were no
towns in the proper sense of the word in Iceland, and the Ameri-
can urban occupations were unlike anything which the immi-
grants knew from their home country. To this was added the
language difficulty: the vast majority of them did not know a
word of English, but in many cases they got over this by settling
in districts which had already a Scandinavian population. This
was especially the case with the early emigrants to the U. S. A.
The emigrants of a later period, who went to already established
Icelandic settlements, were better off in this respect. One result
of all this was that the emigrants often found it especially hard
to overcome the obstacle constituted by the want of initial capital.
Practically all of them had spent their last cent on the journey
and had to start from scratch in their new career. It is not to
be wondered at that they all had a bitter struggle with mortgages