LIef Erickson

Leif Erikson was an Icelandic explorer and is generally believed to be the first European to reach North America, some 500 years before Christopher Columbus. Leif Eriksson was the son of Erik the Red, founder of the first European settlement on what is now called Greenland. In the early 1960s, the discovery of the ruins of a Viking settlement in Newfoundland lent further weight to accounts of Eriksson’s voyage, and in 1964 the United States Congress authorized President Lyndon Johnson to proclaim each October 9 as Leif Eriksson Day.