PrimumHockeyist
Registered User
Joe Cope's famous 1943 letter to the Halifax newspaper was in large part a response to a discussion of 1860s Halifax ice hockey that involved Bryron Weston, the former Dartmouth mayor and childhood playing companion of James Creighton, the father of Montreal ice hockey.
It's quite bizarre, that Cope's letter has been consistently misprepresented, with a sentence being mentioned to the exclusion of two rather thick paragraphs. I suspect this is because, right after famously saying the Mi'kmaw had a winter and summer game long before the pale faces showed up, Cope then goes on to describe a "batless" game that was banned prior to 1843, which Weston (born 1850) could have never played.
I had long since thought that Cope had to be referring to two different games in his letter. But I only recently found corroboration of this via an 1888 writer named Silas Rand. Turning to Cope's letter again, with this separation in mind, and since he mentions 20 players and Weston in nearly the same breath, I think that another question warrants reflection:
Was Cope saying, indirectly, that Halifax ice hockey was played with ten-player teams?
I lean in this direction, but not a hard lean.
For anyone who's interested, the primary sources all here in this short essay.
It's quite bizarre, that Cope's letter has been consistently misprepresented, with a sentence being mentioned to the exclusion of two rather thick paragraphs. I suspect this is because, right after famously saying the Mi'kmaw had a winter and summer game long before the pale faces showed up, Cope then goes on to describe a "batless" game that was banned prior to 1843, which Weston (born 1850) could have never played.
I had long since thought that Cope had to be referring to two different games in his letter. But I only recently found corroboration of this via an 1888 writer named Silas Rand. Turning to Cope's letter again, with this separation in mind, and since he mentions 20 players and Weston in nearly the same breath, I think that another question warrants reflection:
Was Cope saying, indirectly, that Halifax ice hockey was played with ten-player teams?
I lean in this direction, but not a hard lean.
For anyone who's interested, the primary sources all here in this short essay.
