The Road Trip From Frozen Hell

Long road trips are the bane of a pro athlete's season. The traveling, the seemingly endless cross-country miles over several cities in a week or more can be more exhausting then the games themselves. For example, in late December of 1969 the NBA's New York Knicks were on an unusually long road trip and when then-Knick announcer Marv Albert mentioned to star point guard Walt Frazier that the team was really seeing the country, Clyde, in describing it quipped, "You don't see too much of anything but the airports and your bed."

The worst modern-day case was in 1992 when the Republican Convention took over the Houston Astrodome and forced the Astros on a 26-game, eight-city, 9,186 mile voyage - with only one day off. The fact that they managed to go 12-14 is a credit to their durability. The longest trip ever in Major League Baseball occurred in 1899, the year the National League's infamous Cleveland Spiders, the worst team ever, went 20-134 (No, that's not a typo). They were so bad that at one point they were forced to go on the road to avoid the wrath of their own fans. Seven weeks, three days, 51 games, 15 doubleheaders (0-10-5), and a record of 6-45. However, the plights of the Astros and Spiders pale considerably when compared to the saga of hockey's Dawson City Nuggets in 1905.

The Stanley Cup was donated by Lord Stanley of Preston in 1893 as Canada's official hockey championship trophy, 24 years before the formation of the National Hockey League. In those days hockey was mostly an amateur sport that was played by seven-man teams on outdoor rinks that were primarily made for curling. There were no helmets, no protective padding and no goal nets - just two poles embedded in each end of the ice. The goal judges stood on the open ice behind the goalies. It was a very primitive game at the time, but hockey was a Canadian tradition even then and there were many leagues and teams throughout The Great White North. Whoever held the Stanley Cup could be challenged at any point in the season with the champs having the privilege of defending the Cup on their home ice.

In 1905, the Ottawa Silver Seven were the 2-time defending Stanley Cup champions and were challenged by the Dawson City Nuggets. The Nuggets consisted of players who formed the four-team senior league in Dawson City, a very remote town in the Yukon located about 50 miles east of the Alaskan border. The immediate consideration in Dawson City’s challenge was financial, but Colonel Joseph Boyle, a well known millionaire prospector, announced that he would bankroll the team's upcoming adventure. With the the expenses taken care of, the substantial problems of the trip itself remained. For one thing, there was no direct way to get to Ottawa from Dawson City because air travel was science fiction and trains didn't run on the frozen tundra during those snowy Canadian winters. Nevertheless, the Nuggets were undaunted.

The best-of-three series was scheduled to start on January 13, 1905. After much preparation, the team embarked on December 19 1904. They had to travel over 200 miles south to Whitehorse and then on into the southwestern part of Alaska because the only sea exit from the Yukon was in Skagway. The first leg of the trip was done by dog sled (A couple of players tried to go by bicycle, but snowstorms forced them to walk before they rejoined the team shortly thereafter). They covered 46 miles the first day and 41 the next. They took to walking on the third day and some players developed blisters on their feet and had to remove their boots even though the temperature dropped to 20 below zero. Still, they made it to Whitehorse but missed the boat connection at Skagway by two hours and had to wait at the docks for five days before another boat arrived to take them to Seattle. A player spoke to the Ottawa Journal about the layover: "We had one practice while we stuck around Skagway. It was a rink 40 feet by 50, half of it covered with sand, which dulled our skates."

They finally shoved off for Seattle on New Year's Eve. When they arrived they immediately boarded a train to take them back across the border to Vancouver where they got on another train for the 1,400-mile trip east to Ottawa. The players reportedly tried to keep active on the train by skipping rope in the smoking car.

Finally, weary beyond imagination, the Nuggets arrived in Ottawa just one day before the first game. They asked for the series to be delayed a couple of days so they could rest up, but were denied. As expected, the Nuggets were completely overmatched in Game One as they suffered a 9-2 whipping. Ottawa's Frank McGee, one of hockey's first superstars and one of the nine original inductees to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1945, went absolutely ballistic in Game Two by firing in an incredible 14 goals and led the Silver Seven to a 23-2 rout and their third of four consecutive Stanley Cup championships. McGee, by the way, was blind in one eye.

Tired, bloodied and beaten, the Nuggets decided to take advantage of the situation and stayed in the East for a few weeks. They went on a 23-game barnstorming exhibition in the Maritimes to recover and enjoy life before the long trip back to Dawson City. Thousands attended their matches as the newspaper accounts of their epic story made them national heroes. And to this day, more people know about the 1905 Dawson City Nuggets than the 1905 Stanley Cup champion Ottawa Silver Seven.

 

The Dawson City Nuggets