“Hockey has been played by nearly every man and boy in Winnipeg this winter,” the local Tribune advised in March of 1893, “and not only by them, but a number of ladies, and nearly every school-girl who can skate — are adepts in the art.”
Matches of every conceivable kind have been played, and some of them very amusing ones.” Military teams figured in all of this, and we know from the paper’s report of a late winter match-up that the officers of the local garrison’s Royal Dragoons prevailed over those skating for the 90th Battalion of Rifles. The hockey then and there was a seven-man game, and the score ended up 5-3 for the cavalry. That the reporter on the scene decided to go all-out on the battle analogies I guess isn’t so surprising. “Fire flew from the eyes of Col. Knight and Capt. Boswell as they faced off in the second half,” he prattled. “Then there was Capt. Evans, bearing the scars of many a hard-won field, dealing destruction at every blow. Lieut. Verner dashed into the thick of every fray like the bolt from a Roman catapult; while Capt. Gardiner wore through it all the haughty air that marks the soldier’s calm disdain of death.” A Lieutenant Lang seems to have been tending the 90th net, and “like the warrior of old, directed the sheaf of deadly shot into his own bosom, that the goal might be saved. And saved it was, except when the puck went between his legs or outside the territory of his spread-out overcoat.”
The soldiers pictured here taking pause are on Winnipeg barracks’ ice, but this isn’t the heroic clash recounted above: the photograph is an earlier one, from 1891. Some of the players could be the same, possibly. It doesn’t look like a formal game, more like a scrimmage — or sorry, properly I guess that should be skirmish.
(Image: Henry Joseph Woodside/Library and Archives Canada/PA-016009)
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