The Gimli Saga

We begin our journey into the saga of New Iceland at the Giant Viking Statue, a tribute by the people of Gimli to their proud heritage. The Viking was unveiled by the visiting president of Iceland in 1967 as part of Canada's Centennial celebrations. The statue may be the most conspicuous reminder of this town's Nordic origins, but as you walk through Gimli, you'll see the signs everywhere: Blue, red, and white Icelandic flags in shop windows; homes with placards announcing the home's name (naming your house being an Icelandic custom); and of course the unmistakably Icelandic names.
We will come across many of these names during this tour, but let's start with the name of Gimli itself. Most visitors can be forgiven for associating 'Gimli' with the dwarf lord in Lord of the Rings. But J.R.R. Tolkien got the inspiration for his character from the same place as this town's Icelandic pioneers (the pioneers also picked it first, for the record).
In Old Norse mythology, Gimli is a great hall with a golden roof, the most beautiful place in Asgard, the realm of the Gods. When the great apocalypse of fire and ice at the end of the world comes, Ragnarok, then Gimli will be protected, and will serve as a paradise-like shelter for the survivors. Depending on which scholar you ask, Gimli means literally 'fire-protected' or 'gem-roofed.' You can think of it like Viking heaven.
As we will see, when the pioneers picked that name for this town in 1875, they may have meant it a bit more literally than you might think.

As we walk down the path into Harbour Park, look south across the bay, and see the shoreline gently curving out into the lake to form a cape. That is Willow Point. That is where, on October 21, 1875, the first 220 or so Icelandic settlers came ashore to found New Iceland. Unfortunately, nobody who was there that day had a camera, but this 1950 painting by Arni Sigurdson imagines what it must have looked like.
You can see that they've landed in flatboats, which were effectively lumber barges, and a york boat, which was effectively a rowboat. These were not designed to withstand the stormy late October waters of Lake Winnipeg.
For the Icelanders, the epic and perilous journey just to get to this spot was an odyssey all itself, and it marked the beginning of New Iceland's saga.

Every August long weekend the descendants of the Icelandic pioneers (as well as many others) gather at Gimli's Pavilion Park to celebrate Islendingadagurinn, the Icelandic Festival of Manitoba. Each year a woman is selected to be Fjallkona, or Maid of the Mountain. The festival's organizers explain:
"The Fjallkona is Iceland, and the Icelanders are her children... The selected woman sits on her elevated throne, clad in the beautiful and dignified formal Icelandic costume of a white gown, green robe with ermine, golden belt, high-crowned headdress and white veil."¹
Here we see a Fjallkona of years past laying a wreath at the cairn to honour the first Icelandic settlers. The stone atop the cairn was taken from the beach where they landed.
The pioneers had endured immense privation and hardship just to get to New Iceland, but in reality their ordeal had only just begun. They had arrived almost exactly at the start of an unusually early and harsh winter. Ahead they had to look forward to cold, poverty, hunger, and disease. Yet, as we will see, these were challenges that the hardy and industrious Icelanders were prepared to meet.

Here we see fishermen unloading a great bounty from a whitefish boat after a successful fishing expedition in the 1930s. They are on the pier in front of what was then the Armstrong-Gimli Fisheries plant, today the Gimli Visitor Centre.
Fishing has always been a crucial part of Iceland's culture and economy. The chance to fish on the massive lake was one of the main reasons the Icelanders chose this spot for their colony in 1875. But they soon discovered that fishing on Lake Winnipeg was very different from the North Atlantic. The long winters where the lake froze over, and new techniques and equipment needed to catch freshwater fish, meant the settlers had to learn many hard lessons to build up their own fishery.

Walking down to the end of the pier, we can see in this photo that the pier was much shorter when this 1912 photo of the Winnitoba was taken. This paddlewheeler had a rather short career: It was built in 1909, and then burned at its moorings in Winnipeg just three years later, shortly after this visit to Gimli.
Surprisingly few photos from the early years of New Iceland have survived, but we can say that the early settlers would have marvelled at a grand ship like the Winnitoba visiting Gimli. They would have also marvelled at Gimli's pier: it wouldn't be until 1900, some 25 years later, that a pier was finally built that could survive a Manitoba winter.
Continuing our narrative, after the first winter of 1875-6, and the arrival of about 1,200 new Icelanders in the summer of 1876, the first pioneers must have thought they had gotten through the worst of it.
They were wrong.
The new settlers had brought with them a smallpox contagion that burned through New Iceland. A third of the settlers got sick, and over 100 died, 3/4 of them children. It then spread to the nearby First Nations communities, where it wiped out whole villages.
The panicked Manitoba government quarantined the colony, limiting supplies so drastically that it contributed to further waves of disease including scarlet fever, scurvy, and summer diarrhea, and strangled New Iceland's fledgling economy. When the quarantine was lifted in July 1877, many miserable Icelanders had had enough and simply left.

Three men pose for a wintertime photo at the lighthouse that once stood at the end of the Gimli Pier. In 1972 the B.C. Packers fish plant that once stood here was shut down, and the harbour expanded and modernized as part of Gimli's transition to a tourism-focused economy. The visitor centre here was once the plant's ice house. The lighthouse was no longer needed and was dismantled, but the top was remounted here.
Through the disastrous first years of New Iceland, it can probably be said that its survival was in large part thanks to the aid of the First Nations people, who have lived here since time immemorial. This life-saving help was best represented by John Ramsay, a Saulteaux who lived in the village at Sandy Bar, 40 km north of Gimli.
Even though his land was given away under his feet to the Icelanders, he became their true friend and ally. As the Icelanders struggled to survive in this new environment, Ramsay threw them a lifeline. He taught them how to build wind-proof cabins and construct leak-proof boats, as well as local techniques for hunting and fishing. He and his wife invited starving Icelanders into their home to share their food. He is credited with saving dozens, if not hundreds, of lives.¹
The Icelanders have never forgotten. W.D. Valgardson writes "We all knew the stories of John Ramsay and the tragic tale of his wife's death... It was part of the mythology of growing up in Gimli"²

Here we see the general store built by the Icelandic settler Hans Pjetur Tergesen in 1898. Today the fourth generation of Tergesen's are running this store, making it the oldest general store in Manitoba and one of the best surviving examples of a community store. As we can see in this historic photo, the store used to be two storeys tall, the second storey being a home for the Tergesen family until its removal in the 1920s. Asides from the drug store, this building also housed a dentist, an ice cream parlour, and a barber shop, as well as a space that was variously used for community events, a library, a classroom, and the Gimli Women's Institute.
The survival of the Tergesen store to the present shows how the Icelanders were able to adapt to their new environment and build a flourishing economy centered on Gimli.
It was no easy task. The early years threw up every conceivable obstacle to establishing a thriving economy, from flooding and poor farmland, to isolation and a lack of trade markets, there were many factors in Gimli's slow early growth.

This eye-catching monument is a T-33 Silver Star training aircraft. In this historic photo we see it being unveiled by the officers and men of the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1971, a gift to the people of Gimli for their decades long partnership with Canada's air force.
Let's take a quick detour into another fascinating chapter in this town's history: Canadian Forces Base Gimli. Located just a few kilometres west of town, the airbase was built in World War II as part of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan, a scheme to train Allied aircrew before sending them into combat overseas. The military continued using the base until 1971, when this photo was taken. Part of it was given over to local car enthusiasts, who used the decommissioned runways as a motor speedway. Another part continues to operate to this day as a civilian airport.
The event that would make this airbase internationally famous came long after its closure: in 1983 the Gimli Glider landed there.
To learn the story of the Gimli Glider we encourage you to check out our virtual tours of the Gimli Glider Exhibit and the runway where the 'Glider' landed. Or better yet pay the museum a visit, or take our Gimli Glider walking tour!

Here we see three children running to follow two women into the post office, which once stood prominently on the corner where the Lakeside Hotel and Gimli Glider Exhibit can be found today. The Union Jack flies overhead, a reminder that Canada was officially represented by the British flag all the way up to the adoption of the Maple Leaf in 1965. This brick post office was built in 1939 and was the most visible sign of the Canadian government's presence in Gimli.
The Icelanders were able to settle here in the 1870s thanks to government loans, but beyond that they were mostly given free reign to govern themselves as they saw fit. Since they came from a nation that boasts the oldest democratic parliament in the world, the Althing, they drew upon their own experience to draft a democratic constitution.
The remarkable system they created has sometimes been called the 12 Year Republic (while catchy, this is a name that is hated by some historians since New Iceland wasn't technically a republic and never had pretensions to independence from Canada).¹

Here we see Gimli's Unitarian Church, a heritage-listed building that was built in 1904. It was built for the Gimli congregation that seceded from the Lutheran Church and joined the Unitarians. This church became the Mother Church of the Unitarian Movement in Western Canada. It's notable for its modest construction and layout, but with lovingly crafted Gothic Revival detailing and an elegant spire.¹
The religious schism that led to this church was one of several heated religious controversies that consumed the energies of the early colonists. They formed a kind of background plot through the early years of famine, isolation, and plague. In 1878 this religious discord bubbled over, and the crisis of faith very nearly brought about the total collapse of New Iceland.

This was the site of the school, built in 1915 and since converted into Gimli's Municipal Office. It was designed by a local resident, Halldor Sigurdson, and was meant to give the children of New Iceland the finest education that could be had.
Providing the finest education has always been a central focus of New Iceland's settlers.
When they came to Canada they brought with them Iceland's ancient legacy of poetry and sagas, one of the world's most remarkable traditions of literature. The penniless early settlers still somehow managed to bring huge trunks of their beloved books.
When Canada's governor general toured the colony in 1877, he said with amazement that he had "not come into a single cottage or hut in the colony where there was not a library of twenty to thirty volumes, however bare the walls and scanty the furnishings."³
The love of knowledge helped the Icelanders preserve their language and distinct cultural identity in Canada, despite enormous pressure to assimilate. It also ultimately allowed them to prosper in their new home.

We conclude the saga of New Iceland at Loni Beach. We see in this photo what has drawn so many people to this town ever since its founding: the white sands and fresh waters of Lake Winnipeg. Gimli quickly became a popular beach escape for Winnipeg day-trippers, and the economy gradually transitioned from fishing and farming to tourism, especially after the arrival of the railway in 1906.