![Dawson City Nuggets](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Dawson_City_Nuggets.png)
The Dawson City Nuggets (also known as the Klondikes) were an
ice hockey
Ice hockey (or simply hockey) is a team sport played on ice skates, usually on an ice skating rink with lines and markings specific to the sport. It belongs to a family of sports called hockey. In ice hockey, two opposing teams use ice hock ...
team from
Dawson City
Dawson City, officially the City of Dawson, is a town in the Canadian territory of Yukon. It is inseparably linked to the Klondike Gold Rush (1896–99). Its population was 1,577 as of the 2021 census, making it the second-largest town in Yuko ...
, Yukon, that challenged the reigning champion
Ottawa Hockey Club
Ottawa (, ; Canadian French: ) is the capital city of Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core of ...
, aka "the Silver Seven", in January 1905, for the
Stanley Cup
The Stanley Cup (french: La Coupe Stanley) is the championship trophy awarded annually to the National Hockey League (NHL) playoff champion. It is the oldest existing trophy to be awarded to a professional sports franchise in North America, an ...
. The Dawson City team was composed of hockey players from the city, most of whom did not have any elite hockey experience. The Nuggets made the 4,000 mile (6,400 km) journey to Ottawa over several weeks, travelling by
dog sled
A dog sled or dog sleigh is a sled pulled by one or more sled dogs used to travel over ice and through snow. Numerous types of sleds are used, depending on their function. They can be used for dog sled racing. Traditionally in Greenland and the e ...
, bicycle, foot, train, and ship. They arrived in time to play the best-of-three game series. In the first game, Ottawa defeated Dawson City 9–2. In the second game, Ottawa defeated Dawson City 23–2 to win the series. The second game remains the most lopsided game in Stanley Cup playoff history. Ottawa's
Frank McGee scored 14 goals alone in the second game, which is a record for a player in a Stanley Cup playoff game.
1905 Stanley Cup challenge
Background
![Silver7](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Silver7.jpg)
The Nuggets issued a
Stanley Cup
The Stanley Cup (french: La Coupe Stanley) is the championship trophy awarded annually to the National Hockey League (NHL) playoff champion. It is the oldest existing trophy to be awarded to a professional sports franchise in North America, an ...
challenge against the reigning champion
Ottawa Hockey Club
Ottawa (, ; Canadian French: ) is the capital city of Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core of ...
, known at the time as "The Silver Seven", in the summer of 1904. Ottawa accepted the challenge in October. The Dawson City team was sponsored and managed by the Klondike entrepreneur
Joseph W. Boyle
Joseph Whiteside Boyle (6 November 1867 – 14 April 1923), better known as Klondike Joe Boyle, was a Canadian adventurer who became a businessman and entrepreneur in the United Kingdom. In the First World War he came to see service assisting t ...
, and it was composed of men from the mining camps during the tail-end of the
Yukon gold rush. Dawson City had two former elite hockey players,
Weldy Young
Weldon "Weldy" Champness Young (October 4, 1871 – October 27, 1944) was a Canadian businessman and athlete. Young was an ice hockey player for the Ottawa Hockey Club, playing in its founding years in the 1880s and in the 1890s. Young later beca ...
who had played for Ottawa in the 1890s and Randy McLennan who had played for Queen's College against the
Montreal Victorias
The Victoria Hockey Club of Montreal, Quebec, Canada was an early men's amateur ice hockey club. Its date of origin is ascribed to either 1874, 1877 or 1881, making it either the first or second organized ice hockey club after McGill University. ...
in the challenge of 1895. Other players were selected from other Dawson City clubs.
Dawson City's challenge was accepted in the summer of 1904 by the Stanley Cup trustees, scheduled (inauspiciously) to start on Friday, January 13, 1905. It was to be a best-of-three series. The date of the challenge meant that Young had to travel later, as he had to work in a federal election that December, and meet the club in Ottawa. Some historians have since questioned why Dawson City was even granted a chance at the Cup, as Dawson City had won no championships and did not belong to any recognized senior league. On the other hand, Ottawa had considerable championship experience, having defeated all challengers since winning the Stanley Cup in March 1903.
To get to Ottawa, 4,000 miles (6,400 km) away, the Dawson City club would have to get to Whitehorse (which was approximately 600 km away) by road, catch a train from there to Skagway, Alaska, then catch a steamer to Vancouver, and a train from there to Ottawa. On December 18, 1904 several players set out by dog sled and the rest left the next day by bicycle for a 330-mile trek to Whitehorse. At first the team made good progress, but the weather turned warm enough to thaw the roads, meaning the players had to walk several hundred miles. The team spent the nights in police sheds along the road. At Whitehorse, the weather turned bad, causing the trains not to run for three days, causing the Nuggets to miss their steamer in Skagway. The next one could not dock for three days due to the ice buildup. The club found the sea journey treacherous, causing seasickness amongst the team. When the steamer reached Vancouver, the area was too fogged in to dock, and the steamer docked in Seattle. The team from there caught a train to Vancouver, and finally left Vancouver on January 6, 1905, arriving in Ottawa on January 11.
Despite the difficult journey, the Ottawa squad refused to change the date of the first game, only two days away. Otherwise, Ottawa was hospitable. The Klondikers received a huge welcome at the train station, had a welcoming dinner, and used the Ottawa Amateur Athletic Club's rooms for the duration of their stay. Young would not arrive in time to play for Dawson.
Series
Eight men played for each team during the best-of-three series. The Dawson City roster consisted of: goaltender Albert Forrest, point Jim Johnston, cover point Lorne Hannay, rovers Randy McLennan and Dave Fairburn, centre Hector Smith, left winger Norman Watt, and right winger George Kennedy. The Ottawa roster consisted of: goaltender
Dave Finnie, points
Bones Allen
Angus J. "Bones" Allen (September 12, 1881 – June 28, 1941) was a Canadian ice hockey and lacrosse player in the early 1900s. He was a member of the Ottawa Silver Seven team which won the Stanley Cup from 1904 until 1906. Allen played in the S ...
and
Harvey Pulford
Ernest Harvey Pulford (April 22, 1875 – October 31, 1940) was a Canadian athlete at the turn of the twentieth century, winning national championships in ice hockey, lacrosse, football, boxing, paddling and rowing. A highly regarded defenceman w ...
, cover point
Art Moore
Arthur Augustus Cutler Moore (August 25, 1880 – January 7, 1935) was an elite amateur ice hockey defenceman for the Ottawa Hockey Club during the era that it was known as the ''Silver Seven'' from 1903 to 1906. The club won the Stanley Cup in Ma ...
, rover
Rat Westwick
Harry "Rat" Westwick (April 23, 1876 – April 3, 1957) was a Canadian athlete in ice hockey and lacrosse. Westwick – nicknamed the ''Rat'' for his small size – is most noted for his play with the Ottawa Hockey Club, nicknamed the ''Silver ...
, centre
Frank McGee, left winger Fred White, and right winger
Alf Smith. Ottawa's Pulford, Westwick, McGee, and Alf Smith would eventually be inducted into the
Hockey Hall of Fame
, logo = Hockey Hall of Fame Logo.svg
, logo_upright = 0.5
, image = Hockey Hall of Fame, Toronto.jpg
, caption = The Hall's present location on Yonge Street since 1992
, map_type =
, former_name =
, established = 1943
, location = 30 Y ...
.
The first game started decently for Dawson, being down only 3–1 at the half, but things turned ugly afterwards. Norman Watt of Dawson tripped Ottawa's Art Moore, who retaliated with a stick to the mouth of Watt. Watt promptly knocked Moore out, hitting him on the head with his stick. The game ended 9–2 for Ottawa (the
Frank McGee entry says 9-3), with Alf Smith scoring a game-high four goals. The game left a poor taste in the Yukoners, who claimed that several goals were
offside.
[McKinley(2000), pg. 52]
After the game, Watt was quoted as saying that "
rank
Rank is the relative position, value, worth, complexity, power, importance, authority, level, etc. of a person or object within a ranking, such as:
Level or position in a hierarchical organization
* Academic rank
* Diplomatic rank
* Hierarchy
* H ...
McGee doesn't look like too much", as McGee had only scored once in the first game. In the second game of the series on January 16, McGee scored 4 goals in the first half and 10 in the second half, leading Ottawa to a 23–2 series-clinching win. This game was, and remains, the most lopsided in Stanley Cup playoff history. McGee's 14-goal game, which included eight consecutive goals scored in less than nine minutes, is still the record for the most goals scored by a single player in a Stanley Cup game or any other major senior hockey game.
After the second game, ''The Globe'' reported:
The visiting team was outclassed to-night quite as decisively as the score indicates. In fact had it not been for the fact of Forrest's presence in the Dawson goal the score against them might have been a great deal larger. Ottawa simply skated away from them at the whistle, and continued to pile up the goals with a merciless monotonous regularity which was farcical in the extreme.
Ottawa celebrated its victory by hosting Dawson at a banquet at the Ottawa Amateur Athletic Association clubhouse, after which the players took the Cup and attempted to
drop-kick
A drop kick is a type of kick in various codes of football. It involves a player dropping the ball and then kicking it as it touches the ground.
Drop kicks are used as a method of restarting play and scoring points in rugby union and rugby league ...
it over the
Rideau Canal
The Rideau Canal, also known unofficially as the Rideau Waterway, connects Canada's capital city of Ottawa, Ontario, to Lake Ontario and the Saint Lawrence River at Kingston. It is 202 kilometres long. The name ''Rideau'', French for "curtain", ...
. The stunt was unsuccessful, with the Cup landing on the frozen ice, to be retrieved the next day.
The news got worse for McLennan and Watt, who were employed by the Yukon Territory gold commissioner's office when not playing hockey. The day after the second game, the Yukon Territory announced that the pair would be laid off from work, effective immediately, albeit with pay until June 30, 1905.
After playing Ottawa, the Nuggets team played a series of exhibition games in the east before returning to the Yukon.
Michael Onesi, a Whitehorse newspaper columnist, speculated, shortly before a 1997 re-enactment, that had the Dawson team triumphed, they would have had the longest dynasty in Stanley Cup history. Challenges normally took place in the cup-holder's town, and visiting teams could not effectively play, the columnist wryly commented, after the brutal journey by overland coach to Dawson, their bodies blacker than a hockey puck from all the bruises of a dog sled ride.
1997 re-enactment
In 1997, a team from Dawson competed against
Ottawa Senators
The Ottawa Senators (french: Sénateurs d'Ottawa), officially the Ottawa Senators Hockey Club and colloquially known as the Sens, are a professional ice hockey team based in Ottawa. They compete in the National Hockey League (NHL) as a membe ...
alumni in a re-enactment of the 1905 match, this time at the
Corel Centre
Canadian Tire Centre (french: links=no, Centre Canadian Tire) is a multi-purpose indoor arena in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, located in the western suburb of Stittsville. It opened in January 1996 as the Palladium and was also known as Corel Cent ...
, complete with organ music, spotlights, and other such hullabaloo. The team symbolically recreated the trip to Ottawa, though train service no longer ran between Whitehorse and the Pacific coast. Dawson managed a slight improvement in score: 18–0, with 25 shots-on-goal. The event was held for charity with 45 percent, the Senators' take of receipts, was contributed to the Heart Institute, while the Dawson team donated 25 ounces of gold, or the cash equivalent, to the Yukon Special Olympics, another 45 percent of the receipts. The rest was designated to Yukon Minor Hockey.
Notes
References
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Ice hockey teams in Yukon
Dawson City
History of the Ottawa Senators