Thomas Daniel Green packed his life with firsts: first president of the world's first hockey league, first aboriginal accredited as a land surveyor in Canada, possibly the first native to graduate with honours from a Canadian university.
But there was one barrier that the Mohawk Indian, also a star with Ottawa's first hockey team in the 1880s, was unable to break through: the discrimination that kept aboriginals from acquiring full-time work with the Dominion government in the late 19th century.
Not even a personal recommendation from the prime minister of the day, Sir John A. Macdonald, could provide the muscle required to get Green permanent work as a government surveyor.
Green's long-forgotten story has been unearthed by Paul Kitchen, an Ottawa hockey historian whose exhaustive book on the Ottawa Hockey Club -- the team that became the original Senators -- will be published later this year by Penumbra Press.
That team, featuring Green as a star recruit from Montreal's McGill College, took to the ice for the first time on March 5, 1883 -- 125 years ago next week -- an anniversary to be marked in tomorrow's Citizen and on the paper's website.
Mr. Kitchen considers Green's story nothing short of a tragedy.
"He was obviously an impressive guy," he says. "His teammates elected him to be their representative in Montreal at the founding of the world's first hockey league. And those guys were so impressed, they made him president almost right off the bat."
At the same time, according to government correspondence uncovered by Mr. Kitchen, there was a systematic effort to keep him off the public payroll.
"The excuses they used were pretty far-fetched," he says. "There was never a vacancy, there were always other clerks who were more deserving, there were remarks that he was a poor draughtsman or not a very good surveyor. There's absolutely no question his native roots held him back."
All the while Green struggled against discrimination in official Ottawa, he was treated with respect and admiration in the hockey world. He performed well on the ice, was elected Ottawa team captain and in 1886 was sent as the club's representative to the founding meeting of the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada, a forerunner to the National Hockey League.
"He must have found it a great relief to be appreciated for his intelligence and accomplishments," says Mr. Kitchen, whose book Win, Tie or Wrangle: The Inside Story of the Old Ottawa Senators (1883-1935), comes out in December.
While the Ottawa period of Green's life is fairly well known, the details of his early years and the time he spent later in the northwest are a bit sketchier.
In the late 19th century, it was still unusual for an aboriginal to attend university, but Green's childhood near Brantford, Ont. seems to have been anything but typical.
His grandfather was Peter Green, a white man of Dutch descent who came to Ontario from Wisconsin as a 17-year-old. He soon married an aboriginal woman in her mid-30s, one of the "chief-maker" clan of women who made the teenaged Green a chief.
With that came 600 acres of land, which Green kept separate from the lands that were eventually gathered up to make the Six Nations Reserve in the 1840s.
"He had the foresight to separate our family lands ... and that helped to set us on the path toward prosperity while still maintaining our native heritage," says Floyd Doctor, Thomas Green's great-nephew who still lives on a piece of that land.
Not living on the reserve meant young Thomas Green was allowed to go to regular public schools in Brantford, rather than the infamous Mohawk Institute residential school reserve children were forced to attend.
He had the highest marks at his elementary school and was among the top students at his high school, from which he graduated in 1876, a year ahead of the famous Mohawk poet, Pauline Johnson. Her grandfather, Smoke Johnson, had also kept his land separate from the reserve.
According to documents gathered by his descendants, Green tutored younger students to raise the money to attend McGill. It is also believed he received some sort of scholarship for his good grades in high school.
At some point during his years in Ottawa, he married Mary Catherine Plumb, a Prescott women who was staying with a sister in the capital when they met.
Over the years they lived in Kenora, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Wetaskawin, Sask., Dawson City, Yukon, and on a homestead farm near Rocky Mountain House, Alta., where they died six months apart in 1935. They had no children.
In a 1967 native history, Trail of the Iroquois Indians, Green was described as a "raconteur with a splendid command of English." He was also a noted world traveller, the book said, mentioning a tour of Europe he took with his wife in 1910.
He died at 77 in a Rocky Mountain House hotel corridor after spending the day saying goodbye to old friends before his departure for the winter to British Columbia. He was buried with full Masonic honours.
"I think of him as one of the great unsung native heroes," says Mr. Kitchen. "Maybe one day he'll get the recognition he deserved during his lifetime."
A wonderful candidate, founding the IIHF and lobbying for standarding rules for international play.
