When he arrived home from the coast, Saugstad held several meetings in the Crookston area. The minister was a stocky, powerful figure with a long beard and a fiery, eloquent manner of speaking. He soon had a number of dissatisfied farmers eager to follow him into the unknown. Encouraged, he started a correspondence with Colonel James Baker, BC’s provincial secretary and minister of mines, education and immigration.
The BC government was eager to develop the province’s resources, including agriculture. Wealthy industrialists, whose interests were well-represented by Premier Theodore Davie and his ministers, benefited greatly from increased immigration. New settlements needed railway and steamship connections, and healthy profits could be made from freight and passenger operations. In addition, new transportation schemes often attracted huge land grants and subsidies, and opened up additional territory for mines, lumber mills and canneries.
In the Okanagan and elsewhere in the interior, well-heeled gentlemen farmers, mostly of British origin, were snapping up the better ranch and orchard lands. At the Chicago world exposition of 1893, a BC exhibit lured potential US immigrants with maps, brochures and giddy descriptions of the future. The Victoria Daily Colonist described the fair as “little more than a giant advertising scheme.” In 1894, Colonel Baker championed a special type of land grant as a means of persuading groups of settlers to clear and farm more remote areas, especially on the coast: the immigrant lease.
The terms by which such a lease might be obtained were still vague when Saugstad first approached the BC government in August 1894. His group from Minnesota turned out to be the first suitable applicants. Their exchange of letters was a form of negotiation—exploratory on Baker’s part, deferential on Saugstad’s. The initial missive seems to have been lost, but most of the correspondence survives at BC Archives. Saugstad apparently asked for land in the Bella Coola valley to be put aside for three years to allow his followers time to get fair prices when selling their US properties.
Colonel Baker, who considered the Norwegians a “most desirable class of immigrants,” wrote back that the land could be reserved for only three months. At least twenty families would be required for a free grant, he added, and declared that “it would have to be shewn that they possessed sufficient means of their own to make them useful settlers.” His ended his letter by saying that “if the settlement was of an advantageous character to the Provincial Government, the Government would no doubt assist the settlers by the constuction of a waggon road.”
Had the equivocating tone of Baker’s final statement rung warning bells for Saugstad, he might have saved himself a lot of letter writing later on: most archival correspondence from BC’s early colonies consists of complaints about the government’s promises to build roads. But the pastor was more concerned with Baker’s “sufficient means” remark. “We have never intended to bring paupers into your Province to make a burden,” he wrote back. His group intended to support itself until “we, with honest work, can raise the means from the land we occupy.” He also tried politely to discover whether the eventual Crown grant would give his settlers clear title to their land or if hidden strings might be attached.
By September, Baker had worked out the details of the proposed lease: the land would be reserved for six months; a minimum of thirty families or mature adults were required; each would receive a quarter-section and must have $300 in cash; settlers had to occupy their lands for five years, with only minor absences tolerated, and increase them in value by five dollars per acre. At the end of that period, Crown grants would give clear title to each property. If the conditions weren’t met, the land might be reclaimed or the settlers might purchase it at five dollars per acre. Immigration leases did not actually become law until late October, at which time the Norwegians were already in Victoria preparing to head north. The leases were discontinued in 1899, when a new administration came to power.
In the meantime, the colonists were getting organized. Saugstad drew up a constitution and a set of bylaws for his group, which he named the Bella Coola Colony of British Columbia, and started signing up members. At a meeting in September, the members adopted Saugstad’s rules, elected him president and also elected a five-person managing committee. Saugstad and colony secretary Hagen Christensen were authorized to negotiate with the BC government. Anyone wanting to join the colony had to be screened by the managing committee, “which must be furnished [with] satisfactory evidence of a good moral character, working ability, and possession of necessary means to cover travelling expenses and provisions for one year.”
On October 17, 1894, about eighty Norwegians, mostly men, left Crookston for Winnipeg, where they changed trains and continued their westward journey. Saugstad brought along his young daughter, Gea; his wife and other children would join him the following year. At Sicamous, in central BC, the immigrants were visited by Lord Aberdeen, the Governor General of Canada, and his wife. Aberdeen owned the Coldstream Ranch fifty kilometres to the south. His palatial coach was joined to the train, and he welcomed the newcomers, urging them “to hold fast to the fine religious principles which have brought you together.”
Five colonists from Seattle joined the group in Vancouver, and a steamship carried them all to Victoria, where they spent a week buying supplies. Iver Fougner, the colony’s articulate schoolteacher—whose diary and magazine articles are a useful early source of information—noted that 147 sacks of flour were purchased, plus coal oil, soap, sugar, tobacco, tools, stoves and “Japan tea.” A number of custom-made tents were run up. A major expense, at $62.64, was coffee; 332 pounds of the wilderness-enhancing stimulant were required. The Norwegians’ patron, Colonel Baker, met them, gave a speech and passed out “indenture forms” to be signed, setting out the terms of the lease.
The immigrants received Victoria’s stamp of civic approval. “Scandinavians make good settlers,” the Daily Colonist informed its readers on October 25. “They are intelligent, sober, pious, industrious and self-reliant. They do not expect too much. They come from a country where nature is not very generous—where men have to work hard and continuously to gain a comfortable livelihood, and they therefore will not be discouraged when they are required to face the difficulties and endure the hardships and privations incident to pioneer life.”
The newspaper report was not entirely accurate. One colonist, for instance, flagrantly abused the rule against alcohol consumption by going on a substantial bender in Victoria. A hastily convened meeting condemned the unfortunate fellow and he was left behind. The rest of the Norwegians, along with government surveyor Peter Leech (“an old man of seventy,” according to Fougner), boarded the Princess Louise and made their way slowly up the coast. En route, they formed into parties of four individuals or four families, with each party drawing a section, or square mile (260 hectares), of land by lot. This was done in order to avoid conflicts and also to share the work of home building, as four men could erect one shelter fairly quickly, then live in it while other houses were being built. Each party would subdivide its land as it saw fit.
Andrew Svisdahl, left, and Mathis Hammer, photographed squaring timber for cabin construction, were two of the original Norwegian settlers. Image G-00977 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives
The colonists’ first impression of Bella Coola was “not encouraging,” wrote Fougner. “Out of the sea rose the almost perpendicular mountains dark with evergreens, their tops hidden by fog; to eastward we could see the valley, which seemed like a mere fissure in the immense mountain masses.” Colonel Baker had recommended that the settlers not arrive in winter. “It seems to me that you have chosen a bad time of the year,” he wrote to Saugstad. “Would it not be better to wait until the Spring? … Think well over it before starting.” But Saugstad was adamant. “Hope we will stand the hardships as well in your province as we have done it here,” he replied.
The initial hardship was to get ashore. The steamer’s lifeboats leaked so badly that the colonists had to wait for canoes from the nearby Nuxalk village to ferry them and their possessions to dry