Picked up by the Vancouver Sun today from Canwest News Service is a report that Deline, NWT is ready to declare itself as the birthplace of hockey. Many of the historians here probably have been following this debate closely, but it was news to me. I also learned that Stephen Harper is working on a book about the early days of the NHL and is an historian of the sport. I didn't know that.
Here is an excerpt from:
Hockey's northern origins take centre ice on PM's N.W.T. tour
Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Here is an excerpt from:
Hockey's northern origins take centre ice on PM's N.W.T. tour
Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Based on discoveries in 2003 by sport historians and CanWest News Service, the town of Deline on the southwest shore of Great Bear Lake has a strong claim to being the site of the world's earliest documented account of hockey being played on ice.
References to the game 181 years ago on a small lake near a remote northern fort were found in the writings of John Franklin, the famously ill-fated British explorer who died while leading another Arctic expedition decades later.
Overlooked for nearly two centuries, the 1825 documents were freshly interpreted in the light of a thorny debate in Canada about hockey's origins and hailed as important new records in tracing the game's evolution.