[2] Between 1870 and 1915, some 20,000 Icelanders left their homeland—roughly a quarter of the population of Iceland—due to harsh environmental and economic conditions in the country, including the eruption of Mount Askja.

Initially, Brazil was favoured as a likely destination, with over 40 Icelanders emigrating to that country, and many more prepared to go before transportation difficulties blocked the movement.

[5] Around this time, in the 1870s, the federal Government of Canada began a series of reserve schemes to establish populations of European ethnic minorities—Mennonites, Doukhobors, and Icelanders—both in Manitoba and what was then the North-West Territories.

[6] A group of 115 Icelandic settlers joined Jonasson in Canada the following year, taking up land in the Rosseau district of Ontario.

Many of the Kinmount group were attracted to Nova Scotia, while those who remained were persuaded by a Scottish missionary, John Taylor, to seek land in Manitoba or the North West Territories.

The young province had suffered a grasshopper plague that summer, but the Icelandic delegation was impressed with land they inspected immediately north of Manitoba's boundaries.

[2] (The migrants' original destination was the White Mud River; however, bad weather made it impossible to go all the way, so they chose a town in the bay north of Willow Point: Gimli.

In an 1877 piece, a writer for the Manitoba Free Press described New Iceland’s population as an "effete and unprogressive race, who were not equal to the struggle of life on this continent and must inevitable [sic] succumb to the fate of the ‘least fit’.

Immigrants learned to handle the ax, how to prepare the soil, fish through ice, and hunt game, as well as how to drain the land, grow crops, and build better houses.

[2] A series of natural disasters, including floods and a smallpox epidemic 1876-77, decimated the population, until a general exodus in 1878 to Winnipeg and North Dakota began.