After spending a couple of days reading the Pioneer Mother narratives written by members of the Gardar Homemakers Club, all descendants of Icelandic immigrants, their stories preserved in the collections of the Institute for Regional Studies, NDSU, I am left with questions. I know that hopes for posterity, the children, were central to the motivations of the original immigrants. What was the watermark of such experience, however—the exertions and the privations of perilous immigration and rough living—on the original immigrant generation, especially the womenfolk?
The tendency in reminiscent writing about such experience is to catalog the hardships, praise the stolid courage of the immigrants, and offer a triumphal denouement, a “thanks to our forebears, look where we are now!” sort of conclusion. Such tendencies surely are tempered in the case at hand, as the Gardar homemakers, writing in the 1930s, recalled their pioneer mothers in the context of the Great Depression. On the other hand Icelanders hold fast to a certain self-defined identity as a special people, more literate and accomplished than their neighbors, people who possess a poetic sense and recite sagas from memory.
I recall the story of Sigruder Johanna Samuelsdottir Bjarnason, the bearer of many children in her turf home and an impressive haymaker in the field, who after immigrating in 1883, suffered from loneliness on her homestead in Dakota Territory. Sigruder’s grandaughter writes,
When her daughter Kristin was about to give birth to her third child, grandmother, who was always near to lend a helping hand, took the boy, Sigurder, who was only a year old. Even though she never legally adopted him, he remained with her after this, although his parents wanted him back. At this time, Sept. 27, 1901, her husband, Bjarni, died and the little boy was a consolation to her. She brought him up as her own son with the help of her son, Gudbrandur, who took his father’s place.
The granddaughter writes this simply, dispassionately, but I feel as though she is containing some longstanding qualms. Many other narratives feature widows who came to America, and I find their understated stories compelling. They seem to me more survivants than victors.
Now comes the granddaughter of Hallfridur Halgrimsdottir Gislason, telling the story of one of these widows, whose fisherman husband drowned, but who found another one in Dakota, and they ran a hotel in Gardar. Certainly she did not find wealth in the new world, but her story concludes,
Mrs. Gislason, like so many pioneer mothers of Icelandic descent. . . lived a quiet industrious life. In common with most of the other women, she started out with little means. But also in common with them, she came of a race that had fought for its existence in . . . Iceland, against the cruel harshness of the winter climate, against the barrenness of the coil of their volcanic island, but had nevertheless been able to wrest a living from the land and sea and in doing so become hardy, self-reliant, and capable of facing and conquering emergencies. Here, in the Land of Promise, this beloved country that made good all its promises, they met with no very great hardships. On the contrary, the settlers in the Gardar community enjoyed prosperity and progress, from the very first.
As a research historian, I know better than to take this summation at face value. But after a half-century in the business, I do not feel the necessity to tidy it up, to reconcile one account with another. Atop layers of experience lie layers of memory, a vinarterta to be savored.
