Where to begin

This post will be long and will probably include a  . . . to be continued . . .

For my 40th birthday, my husband and our parents organized a heritage tour of our Icelandic relatives.

We packed up the car this weekend and headed to the Great Plains in search of my relatives who traveled from Iceland in the 1870's and ended up in the most unlikely of places - North Dakota.

My great great grandmother traveled across this land in a covered wagon.  The week long wagon trip took us two hours by car.

My relatives came marching, rowing and riding into the Dakota Territory just after the Battle of Little Big Horn - a victory for the Lakota and Cheyenne Indians, with 262 of the US 7th Calvary Regiment killed in battle, including Custer himself.  The Sioux suffered the loss of 136 warriors.

Tensions were high on the Great Plains between 'the whites and the indians' and settlers moved across wild, lawless countryside at great risk to themselves and their families.

My relatives were mostly sheep farmers from the northwest and northeast parts of Iceland.  They were not familiar with farming and were admittedly naive when it came to choosing the best parcels of land.  Tall, lush grass growing on 160 acres looked good to the untrained eye until after moving into their sod shanties and realizing that the soil was mostly sand and growing crops would prove difficult.

They sustained themselves with diversified farming: chickens, pigs, milk cows, haying and sheep.  My Amma (my great grandmother) taught my mother to knit.  My mother remembers her always with her knitting, never looking down at her work, but visiting and going about her duties while all the time, knitting.

Knitting needles at the Icelandic Pioneer Museum, Cavalier, ND

My grandfather remembers never learning to knit, but remembers carding wool and spinning in his grandmother's home.

"A lesson in spinning and carding. Note the Icelandic spinning wheel" - Icelandic Pioneer Museum

Icelandic spinning wheel - Icelandic Pioneer Museum

Of course, when looking into the past, we tend to gravitate towards the experiences of our ancestors that most reflect our own.  So for my children, the school house with its dunce cap and neatly aligned desks was a fascination.  Where did they go to the bathroom?  What did they do if it was snowing?  Who kept the stove going?  What games did they play?

Lunker said, "Raise your hand."  Belle heard, "Raise your hair."

As a mother, I wonder how my great grandmother survived the death of 3 infants and a 4 year old daughter.  How did she manage after her young husband was killed when he fell off the hay wagon and was crushed to death.  How did she pass the winter months with the bodies of her children in the hen house, awaiting spring and enough warmth to thaw the earth so a proper grave could be dug.

Touching this not-so-distant past has always been emotional for me.  I realize there is one historian in every family and I am most certainly that person.

Here I stand, at the center of the earth - with the sky and the wind and the grass around me.   I can hear and feel and smell the past as if it were a past that I somehow experienced.  Is this genetics?  A past-life?  Nostalgia?  Or simply romantic notions of times gone by?

Close to "High Bank" farmstead - now gone to the ducks and geese of a wildlife refuge.