Canadian Folk by Peter Unwin

Author:Peter Unwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2013-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

10

Cracked Heads and Bloody Noses:

A Brief History of Lacrosse

In 1667, French explorer and translator, a man who was perhaps entirely mad, stood on a hill near Sault Ste. Marie, watching local tribesmen at play. As far as Nicholas Perrot could determine, the object of the game was to use a webbed stick to hurl a deer-hide ball between two poles planted in the opponents’ territory. There were no boundaries, the goal areas were miles apart, the game had been going on for days, and more than two thousand men were involved in the action.

Nearly one hundred years later, in 1763, British soldiers stationed at Fort Michilimackinac in today’s Michigan, stood on the ramparts watching the same spirited sport taking place in the fields beyond the fort. When a seemingly errant pass put the ball inside the walls, soldiers opened the gates, only to have the Ojibwe and Sauk players race inside and kill them. This event, one of the bloodiest actions of the Pontiac uprising, and a centrepiece of Major John Richardson’s Wacousta, etched the sport forever in the North American imagination — a sport that graphically lived up to its Algonkian name, baggataway, or tewaarathon, “the little brother of war.”

To the French, the game was “lacrosse,” and had been known as such since the 1630s when Jesuit priest Jean de Brébeuf remarked on the resemblance of the webbed stick to a bishop’s crozier, or “crosse.” In 1837, a Montreal newspaper referred to the games as “Indian lacrosse,” announcing that Natives from the village of Caughnawaga had been invited to Montreal to demonstrate the game. This is the first known mention of lacrosse to appear in print. A decade later, the first known lacrosse match between whites and Natives took place. The Montreal Courier noted sadly that the seven “gentlemen” from Montreal “were not a match for the (five) red antagonists.”

Whether they were a match for their opponents or not, there is no doubt that the light-skinned newcomers were eager to play the game. It has often been remarked that immigrants bring their sports with them. But in Canada it worked the other way. It is doubtful that new Canadians understood much of the game’s origin; how it was handed down from the Creator to the First People to strengthen their medicines, resolve disputes, and prepare young men for battle, or that according to an Ojibway tale, the birds themselves flew south each year to atone for losing a lacrosse match. They understood that the game was fast, rough, required considerable skill, and they could not get enough of it.

By the start of 1867 there were six lacrosse teams in Canada. By the close of the same year, there were eighty. Some matches were played in front of crowds of four thousand spectators. It was stated, wrongly, that the new parliament had proclaimed lacrosse “the national game of Canada.” A lacrosse-struck dentist from Montreal, the game’s first pioneer, promoter, and author, George Beers, enthusiastically, if prematurely, announced that the newly formed Parliament of Canada had given the game its national status.

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