A legendary Arctic explorer died on this date in 1962. He was Vilhjalmur Stefansson, born in 1879 to Icelandic immigrants in Manitoba. When he was two, the family moved to the Icelandic community of Mountain, in northeastern North Dakota, where Vilhjalmur remainder of his younger years.

Stefansson is said to have been a rugged boy who loved the outdoors and who only had occasional access to schooling. His father died when Vilhjalmur was just a boy, and to ease his mother’s hardship, he moved in with his sister and helped a brother with his cattle and horses.

The early Icelandic settlers have become recognized for their strong quest for higher education, especially in the field of law. Stefansson enrolled at UND in 1898, where he shared a small drafty house with another Icelander, Gudmundur Grimson, who later gained national recognition while investigating the death of a North Dakota boy in a Florida work camp.

Three years later, Stefansson was forced to leave UND for allegedly inciting a student protest. He transferred to the University of Iowa, and upon receiving his degree, he was offered free tuition at Harvard Divinity School to become a Unitarian minister. Stefannson soon lost interest in theology, however. He was more interested in learning about other cultures, and in 1906 he joined the Anglo-American Polar Expedition. He spent the next two years in the Arctic, spending the winter months with the native Inuit of Tuktoyyaktut.

In an early example of his independence, he failed, at times, to stay in contact with his colleagues.

Upon returning in 1908, Stefansson immediately went to New York’s American Museum of Natural History to ask for funding to conduct a second expedition. With some financial help from the Canadian government, the Stefansson Anderson Expedition set out for northern Alaska to continue the study of the native cultures. Stefansson became particularly interested in a remote group of primitive Inuits during the next four years. The tribe had strong Caucasian features, and it was speculated they descended from Vikings.

Of one experience during this expedition, Stefansson wrote, “...the group was short of three things: ammunition, which we all knew was a necessity, and tea and tobacco, which the Eskimos believed were necessities. When we reached the mouth of the Horton on our way back to camp, we divided our party in two (and our) troubles began. It took us thirteen days to get to camp. We were delayed by blizzards, and found the hunting poor along the way. There was not enough food for the six of us,” he went on. “We ate what we could, including the tongue of a beached bowhead whale. Four years dead, the carcass would have been hidden in the snow except that foxes had been digging into it... The pieces we ate were more like rubber than flesh.”

The Stefansson Anderson Expedition concluded four years later, and arrangements were immediately made for another – the Canadian Arctic Expeditions – which took place from 1913 to 1918. Stefansson’s findings were now being published in scientific journals and literary digests, and he also published a book titled, “My Life with the Eskimo.”

Stefansson’s success unfortunately became laced with controversy, but that’s a story for another time…

 

This text and audio may not be copied without securing prior permission from North Dakota Public Radio.