Olof Krarer – The Little Esquimaux Lady, Part 2

In my last column, I described the Icelandic impostor, Olof Krarer, a dwarf who had adopted an Inuit (at the time, Eskimo) persona, and some of the more outlandish claims she made in her popular lecture series in the United States. 

The American public believed her stories and she was accepted on the lecture circuit for almost 40 years.

Who was this 40-inch tall impostor?

Olof Krarer was born Olof Solvadottir on Feb. 15, 1858, in Outer Langamyri, a district of Iceland. 

She left her homeland on an immigrant ship to Canada in 1876 with her father and his second wife, Olof’s step-mother. Shipmates remembered her as being “vivacious” and “ambitious,” and that she “talked of the opportunities for distinction and advancement which awaited her in the New World.”

The fellow immigrants on the ship felt sorry for this young woman of 18; she was obviously clever, but “her physical handicap seemed more than her gifts could surmount.”

Olof Krarer, out of her usual “Eskimo” costume. (Image from the Kenn Harper Collection)

The Icelandic immigrants spent about a year in Nova Scotia before moving on to Manitoba, settling in the Gimli area. Olof very quickly moved on and for a time worked as a waitress in Winnipeg.

One who knew her in those days said that she “seemed to have a good and firm character and was intelligent above the average.”

Eventually, she drifted to the United States, claimed to be an “Eskimo,” and was soon working in a travelling circus in North Dakota, exhibiting herself as an Indigenous person.

But simply exhibiting herself in the tawdry venue of a circus was not what Olof had in mind for her future. She didn’t last long there, graduating quickly to the lecture circuit, speaking mostly in small halls, with bookings made by a personal manager.

But she yearned for even more. At that time the public lecture business was dominated by the lyceum, a for-profit circuit of lectures, entertainments and debates.

Henry L. Slayton, owner of the Slayton Lyceum Bureau, made a personal trip to Minnesota to meet this “Eskimo” of whom he had heard much, and signed her in the 1880s.

Slayton’s son later recalled, “She was glad to come under our management and we booked her for the next 30 years or until her eyesight failed and she had to give up platform work. She filled over 2,500 lecture engagements for us, of which over eighty were delivered in Philadelphia alone.”

Perhaps Olof Krarer made her biggest mark on succeeding generations of the American public through her influence on school curricula.

Rand McNally and Company had published a book by Mary Estella Smith of the Jenner School, Chicago, in 1902. Titled Eskimo Stories, it drew in part on My Arctic Journal, by Josephine D. Peary, and The Children of the Cold, by the explorer Frederick Schwatka.

But it also included a lengthy chapter, “The Story of a Real Eskimo,” the autobiography of none other than Olof Krarer. Moreover, the introduction ends with the statement that “the author acknowledges her appreciation of the valuable suggestions of Miss Olof Krarer, who read the book in manuscript, and whose interesting autobiography appears at the close of the volume.”

Miss Smith, the author, suggested that “The Story of a Real Eskimo” be read to the children before they begin study of the book itself. 

Thus Olof’s fictions influenced two generations of American school children. Rand McNally was still selling Eskimo Stories 34 years after its initial publication and a year after Olof’s death. In those same years, Columbia University’s teachers’ college also used the text.

Olof Krarer in an early CDV advertisement, showing a slightly different spelling of her name. (Image from the Kenn Harper Collection)

Miss Krarer was highly respected in the world of the lyceum and in educational circles. The Slayton Lyceum Bureau said this about her:

 “Miss Olof Krarer has become one of the best known lecturers that ever appeared on the lyceum platform. She does not appear as a freak or a curiosity, but on her merits. The Bureau always guarantees that she will give entire satisfaction to any audience, however critical. Large sums of money have been made by her lectures by churches, charity organizations and lyceums. Many a church debt has been raised and a weak lecture course freed from debt by the receipts from one of her lectures.”

Reports from local newspapers where she lectured routinely praised her.

“Olof Krarer fairly captivated her audiences at the Normal yesterday afternoon and last evening,” read one, which went on to say, “The story of the life of the inhabitants of Greenland became doubly entertaining when related in the quaint broken English of this bright and witty little native of that frozen land.”  

Still, some people were wise to her deception. Jon Olafsson was an Icelander living in Winnipeg; in 1892 he wrote in a newspaper that Olof Krarer was a fraud.

“I most positively assure you,” he wrote, “that the possibility of walking over the ice from Greenland to Iceland, is exactly the same as walking from Manitoba to the moon over rays of the rainbow.”

Nonetheless, audiences continued to believe her stories.

Olof Krarer spent the last two years of her unusual life in the Old Peoples Baptist Home in Maywood, Ill. She died in 1935, aged 77. Toward the end, her fraud was increasingly suspected by many, but never exposed. 

Was her fraud harmful? In one sense, yes; she was responsible for American school children reading — and believing — preposterous tales about Inuit.

But, in a time when someone with a handicap like hers might well end up in a circus or a travelling freak show, which was her fate for a time, Olof, through perseverance, initiative and hard work, had escaped the circus, had never become a charge on the public purse, and, against all odds, carved out her own existence as a respected and highly-paid lecturer.

Taissumani is an occasional column that recalls events of historical interest. Kenn Harper is a historian and writer who lived in the Arctic for more than 50 years. He is the author of “Minik: The New York Eskimo” and “Thou Shalt Do No Murder,” among other books. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.