As I explored the valley and met a few of its inhabitants, I began to understand how well that farmhouse represented Bella Coola and its pioneers. The simple, strong construction, so purposeful and dignified, was a symbol of self-sufficiency. This region wasn’t connected to the rest of the province by road until 1953—and that was more to allow outsiders in, one senses, than to let the locals out. Today, vehicles and their occupants can leave Bella Coola by ferry, visit Vancouver 425 kilometres to the southeast, and return across the Chilcotin plateau from Williams Lake via scenic Highway 20. The increased access is appreciated, no doubt, but visitors to Bella Coola may get the feeling that, if the highway suddenly vanished, the residents of the valley would still be perfectly comfortable.
The colonization of the Bella Coola valley really started with Adrian and Fillip Jacobsen, two Norwegian brothers who gathered enormous collections of First Nations artifacts in the 1880s, mainly for Berlin’s Royal Museum of Ethnology. They left gripping accounts of their individual journeys to remote British Columbia inlets and villages, usually made with just a First Nations guide. Besides buying artifacts, the Jacobsens were commissioned to hire a group of West Coast First Nations people willing to take part in one of the circus-style ethnic expositions organized by Hamburg impresario Carl Hagenbeck.
The village of Bella Coola, at the mouth of the Bella Coola River, is dwarfed by the valley’s high mountain walls in this postcard of the region, probably taken in the 1940s. Author’s Collection
Kwakwaka’wakw groups from northern Vancouver Island, understandably suspicious of this offer, had twice tentatively agreed to go to Europe, then backed out. Finally, in 1885, the Jacobsens persuaded nine men from Bella Coola, where Fillip had gone collecting several times, to sign up. This troupe sang and danced its way through Germany’s main cities, performing “games and recreations” and “showing the habits, manners and customs of the Indians.” They influenced Franz Boas, who studied them while working temporarily at the Berlin museum and decided to pursue the career in Northwest Coast anthropology that would make him world famous. The Nuxalk entertainers were, by all reports, treated well; accompanied by Fillip, they returned to Victoria a year later in good health. One participant subsequently built a longhouse in Bella Coola topped with cedar-shingled spires and carved gargoyles, supposedly modelled after Cologne Cathedral.
An old postcard of the Nuxalk village of Q’umquots or Komkotes, located at the mouth of the Bella Coola River. The shingle-roofed longhouse, second from the left, was modelled by its owner after Cologne Cathedral. Author’s Collection
Fillip took a particular liking to Bella Coola. In 1887, he talked the BC government into surveying the valley and starting construction of a trail. The next year, he pre-empted a quarter-section beside the Nuxalk reserve. Convinced that there was enough good land in the valley to support an agricultural colony—and hoping to act as an agent for prospective settlers—he wrote letters describing Bella Coola’s potential to Norwegian-American newspapers in Seattle, Tacoma and Iowa. Norwegian immigrants, he promised, would find this northern coastal valley very similar to their own beloved homeland.
At the time Jacobsen was writing, more than 300,000 of his compatriots had immigrated to North America. Most settled in the north-central United States, especially Wisconsin and Minnesota. They left Norway because of poverty and lack of opportunity; a rapidly expanding population at home was putting intolerable pressure on arable land, which had always been in short supply. The New World, supposedly blessed with endless quantities of rich soil, had a near-hypnotic appeal, for the dream of poor Norwegians was to free themselves from wage slavery by cultivating a modest piece of private property.
By the late 1930s, when the great trans-Atlantic migrations had essentially ended, Norway had lost a higher percentage of its population than any other European country except Ireland. In 1830, Norway had just over one million inhabitants; during the course of the next century, more than 750,000 emigrated. Those who left were mainly landless peasants: farm and forestry workers, servants, fishermen, labourers. In America, they typically worked for wages for several years, saving money to buy land and set themselves up as farmers. And they succeeded. Determined, uncomplaining, energetic and tough—most Norwegians made superb pioneers.
Jacobsen received several enquiries about Bella Coola from the Midwest, and Reverend Saugstad, who lived in the Red River valley, near Crookston, Minnesota, probably saw or heard about his letters. The Red River farmers were hardy folk, practised at scratching out a living on the margins of civilization. Many of them were from the far north of Norway—places such as Tromsø, the Lofoten Islands and the Bardu valley—all located well above the Arctic Circle. But some had become disenchanted with life in America. The treeless landscape depressed them, as did the locusts, floods, prairie fires and alternately scorching and freezing climate. The land was fertile, but the Norwegians were used to a combination of farming, fishing and logging, not the tyrannical monoculture of wheat. An economic collapse in 1893, which sent grain prices plummeting, was the final insult.
Rumours were circulating—that new lands had opened for settlement in Washington and British Columbia, that a life more to the liking of Norwegian farmers might be possible, in more familiar surroundings. A few were tempted to raise money to leave by selling their land. They were scorned by their fellows, who saw them as dupes of settlement agents and railway companies. But change was in the wind. One group from the Red River area made plans to decamp, and in May of 1894 they headed off, not for the coast but for central Alberta, where they founded Bardo (which still exists), named fondly after their home valley.
Saugstad had an additional reason for making a fresh start. The Lutheran church in America was in disarray, embroiled in doctrinal disputes and split into at least half a dozen factions. Saugstad, for example, was a Haugean: a follower of Hans Nielsen Hauge, whose “born again” puritanism and excoriating attacks on the state church earned him great fame and a lengthy prison sentence in Norway. Saugstad had already come into conflict with other Lutheran groups in Crookston and elsewhere. The pious immigrants, for whom religion was inextricably woven into everyday life, were caught up in the discord. Saugstad longed to lead his supporters to a place where they could practise their own particular beliefs undisturbed.
Idealistic communities of disaffected Lutherans were not unknown in North America. The most famous were the Amana villages in Iowa, founded in 1855 by German Pietists. Amana had a communal economy, producing high-quality woollen goods, cloth, lumber and agricultural products. The villagers were mystics, inspired through divine revelation to migrate from Germany. The villages exist today. Although the Amana economy is now structured in the form of a corporation, rather than as a commune, the villagers still refuse to give oaths of allegiance or perform military service.
Another well-known colony was Bishop Hill in Illinois, founded by Eric Janson in 1846 in an attempt to recapture the simplicity and sincerity of early Lutheranism. This was a Swedish community, where all farmland was held communally and everyone worked for the common good. Although Bishop Hill flourished for many years, it eventually disintegrated in a welter of debt, lawsuits and internal strife. A short-lived Norwegian communistic settlement was established at Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the 1850s. Saugstad may well have been aware of some of these efforts.
A group of Red River Norwegians appointed Saugstad and Anders Stortröen to head west and look for new land. They left in June 1894, investigated the Yakima and Willamette valleys in Washington and Oregon, and then made the long steamer trip north to Bella Coola. Walking fifteen kilometres upriver, they examined soil and