Perhaps it was because most media attention was focused on the opening of a new addition to the art museum, but Denver somehow managed to have a Columbus Day parade Saturday without any arrests.
The protesters, however, plan to be back next year, as do the paraders.
There might be a way around these annual difficulties, though: Replace Columbus Day with Leif Ericson Day, set on Oct. 9 by a 1964 act of Congress.
It’s not something I paid much attention to until the fall of 1993, when our older daughter, Columbine, was an exchange student in Iceland. On a call home, she said something odd had happened at school in Saudarkrokur, when she had mentioned that the day was a holiday in America, Columbus Day.
“Who was he?” a classmate asked.
“He discovered America in 1492,” Columbine explained.
“No, everybody knows that Leif Ericson discovered America 500 years before that.”
Well, everybody in Iceland, perhaps, for he is a national hero there. They study the Viking sagas, which can also be instructive to us.
One lesson is that the New World began as a big real-estate hustle, starting a tradition that continues to this day. Go back 1,200 years, and the fierce Vikings were exploding out of Scandinavia southeast into modern Russia and southwest to England and France.
The Vikings sailed west, too, and encountered an island that Floki Vilgerdarson christened “Iceland” on account of a fjord full of ice. Others came and settled, but it was hard to attract immigrants to a place with such a chilling name.
Thus, when Eric the Red found an even icier island to the west and wanted to attract settlers to his new real-estate claim, he knew better than to give it an honest name like “Glacier Land” or “Frozen Isle.” Instead, he called it “Greenland.”
The process continues to this day, with half-acre parcels in sagebrush flats becoming “The Estates at Sierra Vista.”
In about 1000 A.D., Eric’s son Leif heard about some land to the west from a wayward mariner who had seen it while lost, but not gone ashore. So he put together an expedition and sailed out there. The first land was little but rocks (probably today’s Baffin Island), and so they went south. Eventually, they found a habitable spot they called Vinland.
Some say it was so named because they found grapes growing there; others argue that grapes don’t grow that far north. My suspicion is that they named it Vinland, even without grapes, in order to attract settlers.
They were able to stay there for a while and maintain contact with the rest of the Viking world, but the “Skraelings,” as they called the locals, eventually outfought them and the settlement withered away.
Thus Native Americans could rightly see Leif Ericson Day as the commemoration of a victory. The European invaders came – and these were some of the most war-like invaders known to history – and were duly repelled.
For history buffs like me, the Viking era is one of those mysteries. How is it that a backwater can suddenly expand so quickly, then fade away? In 800, Scandinavia was an obscure fringe of Europe. Two centuries later, there were Scandinavian domains across the Northern Hemisphere. Two centuries after that, they had been eclipsed.
The Incas were just one tribe among many in 1400; by 1500, they held sway over a goodly portion of a continent. They were supplanted by the Spanish – from a peninsula that in a century went from tiny contending duchies to dominating a hemisphere to a nation that no one would confuse with a world power.
There should be a lesson in those episodes (imperial over-reach, perhaps) and Leif Ericson Day is a good time to look for it.
Why is Leif Ericson Day on Oct. 9? It’s not the day that Leif Ericson set foot in North America, or anything like that, for the old sagas do not list calendar dates. It was on Oct. 9, 1825, that the first Norwegian immigrant ship arrived in the United States, and that seemed like as good a day as any.
It could still be officially celebrated on the second Monday in October, with the Denver parade on the preceding Saturday. It has something for everybody. It honors both immigrants and the Skraelings’ expulsion of illegal immigrants 950 years ago. It celebrates bold expansion while cautioning against over-extension. And it commemorates a millennium of real-estate hustles, thus giving due respect to Colorado’s major industry. Who could ask for more from a minor holiday?
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
