The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2009, Page 30

172
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #3
portation business, moving fish on water
and ice. Soon you were building winter
roads and then real roads. But in the
muskeg of the north, roads were in many
ways only an excuse to build a ditch. And
that is where the draglines came onto the
scene, essentially engines on big platforms
with a big boom sticking out, rigged with
cables to throw out a one and a half cubic
yard scoop into the muck to build a road an
inch at a time. So it was that men from
Riverton put their imprint across Canada’s
north, one bucket at a time. Then came the
expansion into tractors. Monarch
Construction came first, and before its time
was over it had built roads across the
province and was the first and largest con-
tractor in the building of the Winnipeg
Floodway. Alongside was Steini Erickson,
a veteran who survived Dunkirk as a
mechanic on a landing barge, and returned
counter /vise
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to build from a base of one tree bulldozer,
an army of machines. Erickson
Construction would become the pre-emi-
nent contractor on the rebuilding of the
Winnipeg Floodway 40 years later. And
countless companies came to life alongside,
like the Orbanksi’s; Walter, Murray and
Lome whose operations worked across the
continent, Riverton Construction with
Larus Thorarinson and his sons, prominent
contractors in Calgary for thirty years,
Falcon Construction owned by Oddur
Olafson and his son Leslie, Evergreen
Construction owned by Bill Triska, the
Zagoweseki Brothers, The Finnson
Brothers, Nordic Construction owned by
my Uncle Grimsi Brnyjolfson. In recent
years the inheritor of this legacy has been
Ken Palson Enterprises. There are many
others, all of whom, (named and those I
have not named, I ask forgiveness) I regard
as unsung and unrecognized heroes work-
ing under incredibly difficult situations
transforming swamps into farms and open-
ing up new lands and territories.
Fishing extended its tentacles in many
other ways into the life of the community.
Chris Thorsteinson and his father before
him had been making boats for over fifty
years, first with wood and then with steel.
Riverton Boatworks developed the tech-
nology of compartmentalizating the con-
struction of boats which enabled them to
build them in Riverton and move them
across Canada by truck to Newfoundland
or to the Canadian Arctic. Alex
Zagozewski took his genius with iron and
steel, (learned under the able hands of his
father who brought his blacksmith trade
from the old country to Riverton), into
boat building. Kenny, Chris’s son perfect-
ed the art of moving and assembling the
pieces at sites far distant from home base
on Lake Winnipeg, all under the watchful
leadership of Chris. One of their most
famous and unique assignments was mov-
ing the replica of the Hudson Bay
Company’s boat from the 1600s, the
Nonsuch, on tour 3000 miles across North
America before resting her down in her
final home at the Museum of Man and
Nature in Winnipeg.
Riverton was always the centre of the