Progress

I’ve been reading a strange little book about Icelandic settlers in the Northwest: specifically, in Point Roberts, Blaine, Bellingham, and Marietta. It’s a a 2004 reprint of a 1925 book, in which Margret Benedictson took to creating a kind of census of the original Icelandic settlers in these parts. I read only the Point Roberts’ section which chronicles the arrival of 58 individuals and their various family members.

The names are mostly familiar ones if you’ve read much about the history of this place, or even if you just live here, since they are memorialized in street names: Benediktsson (which is Americanized to Benson in Benson Road), Jonsson (which becomes Johnson Road), Arnason (which becomes Anderson Road), and even Whalan (which becomes Whalen Drive and although Whalan is not an Icelandic name, it is the married name of Ingibjorg Samuelsdottir). The Thorsteinssons, the Magnussons, the many Myrdals (one of whom, Arni, was the first to have electricity in his house: he was, the author says, a very talented man with machinery). The first to arrive here was Kristjan Benediktsson and he and his wife came with such of their 16 children as were still alive.

The author had a special fondness for and/or knowledge of Point Roberts as she writes a lengthy, detailed, and glowing description of Point Roberts as it was when the first Icelandic people arrived. I had always thought that they came via Vancouver Island, but in fact the first four (in her version, anyway) arrived in 1893 from Bellingham, and another four came from Vancouver Island the next year. They initially came and took up large tracts of land—60, 80, even 160 acres. At that rate, there wouldn’t be room for many people to settle on our tiny peninsula, which Ms. Benedictson refers to consistently as ‘a spit.’

Soon there were lots of cattle on the island, not to mention lots of salmon up out of the ocean. She describes thousands of salmon being caught in a single trap, and as many as 25,000 salmon left on the beach to rot because they couldn’t get them canned fast enough. Thousands and thousands of salmon in a single day caught here, imagine. "Nowadays,” she says (and recall that she is writing in 1925), "the salmon is depleted; that is how man’s greed treats nature’s best gifts while times are good. In hard times they complain even though they were the cause of the destruction.”

Also, she describes Point Roberts as a tiny area with thousands and thousands of trees. She refers to the land as so heavily forested that it was virtually impenetrable until they cleared trees for farming and for roads. People at the southeast end would have to go by way of the beach to get to the main settlement on the western part of the spit. There were special ‘ladders’ to get up from the beach, including one called the ’99 step ladder’ at the edge of the Thorsteinsson home off the south side of APA Road.

It’s very difficult to imagine what Ms. Benedictson would say if she saw denuded Point Roberts in 2009 (she died in 1956 in Bellingham). Salmon scarce and trees getting scarcer. It’s what we call progress, I guess.

N.B. The book is currently in the P.R. library, or it will be later this week when I get it back: Icelanders on the Pacific Coast. Another fascinating book about the settling of this part of the world by Europeans is Annie Dillard's The Living, which is a novel about the founding of Bellingham, although it mentions Point Roberts only casually.