Saga Connections 3.2 “Kinmount to Gimli” a Live Webinar with Prof. Ryan Eyford

Saga Connections: Kinmount to Gimli with Prof. Ryan Eyford

When we began Saga Connections in the early days of the pandemic, the sorrowful story of the Kinmount Icelanders came to mind as one not only of tragedy but of hope. It was in the cold winter of 1874 when the SS St. Patrick group from Iceland ended their long journey in the logging shanties along the Burnt River, taking up employment with the Victoria Railway to get them through the winter before they moved to more permanent homes in the Spring. But, disease and squalor, lack of employment and hunger took the lives of many. Don Gislason in our Saga Connections on Kinmount told us of the sixteen children and one teenage girl who died in the first week of arriving. More died over the winter and were buried in unmarked graves along the riverbank. Saga Connections Kinmount Revisited told the story of the making of the Kinmount memorial that artist and sculptor Gudrun Sigursteinsdóttir Girgis called ‘In the Presence of a Soul’.

Driven by grief, the Icelanders were disillusioned with Ontario but not defeated. Even over the winter and into the Spring and summer, young men and women scattered to other locales in Ontario, to Nova Scotia and south to Minnesota. Sigtryggur Jónasson had compiled a report in May 1875 tracing the whereabouts of Icelandic families and singles.[1]  Jónasson, as we had learned, was the agent who brought the families to Kinmount with hope and determination, writing in the 1874 Nor∂anfari, “I am confident that those of my countrymen who desire to settle in Ontario will not regret it later.” [2] Unfortunately, they did come to regret it.

However, the saga did not end there. With a resilience perhaps characteristic of Icelanders who were inured to hardship, they, under Jónasson’s leadership, gathered to move again to a new “promised land” feeling so hopeful they would call it Gimli in reference to the ‘heavenly abode’ promised in Sybil’s Prophecy found in the Elder Edda.[3]

As we continue our saga following the Kinmount Icelanders’ journey west, Ryan Eyford, a professor at the University of Manitoba who studied the Icelandic migration to Canada, will examine the stories of the Icelandic settlers who migrated from Ontario to Manitoba and the North-west Territories in the fall of 1875. Eyford will address the questions of why and how the migration occurred and what happened to Icelanders in the wild lands north, of what was then the small province of Manitoba, in the early history of Canadian federation. Dr. Eyford’s talk promises to dispels some myths, set the record straight in regard to indigenous lands and to be highly informative.   Please join us for:

Saga Connections, Kinmount to Gimli with Professor Ryan Eyford on Wednesday November 16, 2022 at 7:30 EST. Register at HERE

Dr. Ryan Eyford is an associate professor in the department of history at the University of Winnipeg where he teaches Indigenous and Canadian history.  Dr. Eyford is the author of White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West (UBC Press, 2016).

[1] P. 114 Ryan Eyford Masters Thesis “Icelandic Migration to Canada, 1872-1875.

[2] p.102 Ryan Eyford ibid.

[3] p. 13 Gimli Saga: The History of Gimli, Manitoba, 1975.