New Iceland: The Colony on Lake Winnipeg That Wrote Its Own Constitution

In October 1875 a few hundred people from Iceland were put ashore on the west shore of Lake Winnipeg with about three weeks of autumn left. The boundary of Manitoba was forty kilometres south of them. North of it there was no province, no sheriff, no magistrate and no council. Eleven weeks later they held an election. Fifteen months later, under a smallpox quarantine, they bought a printing press. Two years after that they ratified eighteen articles of their own written law, with four districts, an annual election on a fixed date, a treasury, a poor law, a school system and a court. This is how they lived through it: the thirty shanties of the first winter, the scurvy, the fish they could not catch, the Anishinaabe and Cree neighbours at Sandy Bar who fed them and taught them, the epidemic and the line at Netley Creek, the newspaper carried to the far districts on skates, the quarrel that emptied the houses, the nets set under four feet of ice, and what is still standing on that shore today. 📌 What you'll learn • The landing and the first two winters: why they left Iceland after the Askja eruption of March 1875, the thirty shanties of twelve feet by sixteen with two and three families in each, what was actually in the store, why scurvy went through the settlement, why fishing people could not catch fish in one of the great freshwater fisheries on earth, and who fed them while they learned • Governing ground that belonged to no province: the reserve set aside in 1875, the election of January 1876, the eighteen articles ratified at Sandy Bar in January 1878, the four districts and their elected councils, the colony council of six, the arbitrator, the peacemaker and the committee of five whose finding was final, and the long argument over whether any of it was ever a republic • The smallpox epidemic of 1876 and 1877: how it arrived, the doctors who went in, the quarantine barrier at Netley Creek and the garrison that held it, the makeshift hospital that saved sixty-three of its sixty-four cases, the published figures for the Icelandic dead, why there is no figure at all for the Anishinaabe and Cree dead, and whose houses were burned and whose were not • How the colony finally paid its way: the press bought in Minneapolis for three hundred and thirteen dollars and eighty-one cents, the newspaper with six hundred subscribers and half of them back in Iceland, the winter fishery through the ice and the running pole that went under it, the ice houses, the steamboats and the railway, and the Ukrainian and Polish families who homesteaded there once the reserve was opened in 1897 Educational and historical content. 📚 Key sources - Ryan Eyford, White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West, UBC Press, 2016, and his article Quarantined Within a New Colonial Order: The 1876-1877 Lake Winnipeg Smallpox Epidemic, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 2006 - Historic Resources Branch, Province of Manitoba: the pamphlet The Settlement of New Iceland, and Municipal Heritage Site Number 28, Betsey Ramsay's Grave - Manitoba Historical Society: Manitoba Pageant, The Smallpox Epidemic of 1876-1877 in the Icelandic Settlements, and MHS Transactions, Early Icelandic Settlement in Canada - Framfari, the newspaper of New Iceland, printed at Lundi, now Riverton, September 1877 to April 1880, surviving issues in the Icelandic Collection, University of Manitoba - Fisher River Cree Nation, Our History, and the Treaty Five 1875 treaty research report, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada - and other sources. #HowWeLivedHere #Gimli #NewIceland #Manitoba #LakeWinnipeg #IcelandicCanadian #CanadianHistory #Documentary ℹ️ About this video Educational and historical content. The script, research and edit are the author's own, based on the sources listed in the description. The visual reconstructions and the narrator's voice are created with the help of AI, for illustrative purposes — these are not real recordings or authentic archival footage. Stories are simplified for a general audience and may contain small approximations. Purpose: to inform and to remember. 🕰️ Historical context The events described took place under legal and social conditions very different from today's. They are presented for historical understanding, without intent to justify or condemn any person, community or group.