Go West Young Man

egillsicelanders

Egill’s Icelandic tour group, guests of the Icelanders of Victoria.

I have the greatest admiration for the settlers who came from Iceland during the 1870s into the early 1900s. These people risked everything. Many paid with their lives. They came because they wanted better lives, more opportunity and, above all, land. The Icelanders were not the only ones leaving behind an old life to risk a new one. People were coming from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, England, Scotland. Later, in the 1890s, the East Europeans would begin to flood into Western Canada.

When Horace Greeley, the 1871 editor of the New York Times, was asked by a young man working at the paper what he should do, he said that anyone who had to earn a living should go where workers are needed and wanted, where they will be hired because they

Who Am I?

Mournes_wiki
My grandfather came to Winnipeg from Ireland before WWI. He already had three sisters in Winnipeg, all three married to Scotsmen. His Winnipeg world was very Anglo-Saxon. He and my grandmother lived on a street with an English family on one side, a Scots family on the other, and an Irish family across the way.

From the time I was very young, I was shipped on the bus from Gimli to Winnipeg. My mother would take me to the bus, explain to the bus driver that my grandmother would meet the bus at the station in Winnipeg and off I

The Things We Care About

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Strange, the things we care about. Some people care about the fate of the timber wolf or the prairie gopher or the red legged wombat. Others care about historic events, are fixated on Napoleon and the battle of Waterloo. Others are passionate about Mediterranean frescoes. There