Trans-Atlantic immigration to America in the nineteenth century was truly a daunting decision, a severe test of body, spirit, and resolve. I’m reading about it in the Pioneer Mother narratives set down by the Gardar Homemakers Club, women of Icelandic descent, the files preserved by NDSU’s Institute for Regional Studies. Some are typed; most are handwritten; they capture a defining cultural experience encoded in individual stories. The journey is the thing, the essential element in each narrative. Mrs. Jonathan Lindal, nee Ingebjörg Soffia Benediktsdottir, departed Iceland with her husband bound for Dakota Territory in 1887. I read,
They traveled first on horseback over Iceland to the coast where they boarded the ship which took them to Quebec, Canada, via Glasgow, Scotland. From Quebec they traveled by train to Winnipeg, Man. And from Winnipeg they went by train as far as St. Thomas, N. Dak. Where they were met by Björn Blöndel driving a team of horses and wagon. On their way to Mountain, N. Dak., they stopped overnight in some abandoned shack. Next day they reached Mountain.
Horseback (I’m picturing them bouncing cross-country on those little Icelandic horses, surely not much baggage), steamships, trains, horses and wagons, sleeping in an abandoned shack. If there had been a printed itinerary at the outset, would they ever have started?
Or, consider the immigration journey of Helga Kristjansson Sumlidason, who by the time she told her story, was living in Seattle. She,
Came to Gardar, North Dakota, from Isafjord, Iceland, on the small ship Laura, which left Akureyri September 5, 1884. It landed at Leith, Scotland, two weeks later after a stormy voyage. Helga was traveling with her husband and three children by his former marriage. The party traveled by train to Glasgow, and after three days waiting went by a ship of the Anchor Line to New York. The Atlantic crossing was very stormy and the ship was so delayed that a search ship had been sent out to determine its whereabouts. The trip from New York to Buffalo was by train; from Buffalo by ship across Lakes Erie, Huron, and Superior to Duluth. From there by train to Pembina, N. Dak. From Pembina to Mountain the journey was continued by horses and wagon.
There the new arrivals moved in to stay with a family living in a log house near Gardar, before establishing their own place in the town. Reading on,
During the spring of 1885 they purchased an acre of land in Gardar. . . . A small timber house was built on it, which became the family home for four years. Two children were born there. Supplementing his small capital by cultivating the small plot of ground, raising chickens, and milking one cow, the family lived tolerably well.
That phrase, “tolerably well,” says a lot. They got by, and it was tolerable. Helga’s husband was a watchmaker, without much business in Gardar. I suspect Helga was subsisting the family by working their little acre. They scrimped and saved and finally were able to buy forty acres over at the town of Milton, where they lived out their lives, having survived immigration and hardship, but never prospering impressively. And yet I read of their struggle through the writing of their granddaughter, who is composing an impressive literary narrative alongside the other members of her ladies club, which was an extension homemakers group. As I always explain to my students, you can’t understand immigration to the prairies according to individual ambitions. It was a matter of hope for the children.
