WOMEN, SKATES AND STICKS
B.C. has a long history of women playing hockey.
Congratulations to the winner and all, but the team that emerges victorious at the hockey women’s world championship tournament in Kamloops in nine days time will not be the first to claim a women’s world title in British Columbia. This province once produced a surprising array of hockey laurels awarded to teams that were the true pioneers of the sport.
It’s high time we recognize that the growing popularity of women’s hockey in Canada since the 1970s is actually a renaissance. The women’s game in this province has a history that stretches back well over a century.
The first recorded game of women’s ice hockey in this province took place in what is now the ghost town of Sandon back in 1897, and it was also in West Kootenay that a tournament offering provincial championship status was soon organized.
The Rossland Winter Carnival added women’s hockey to its program in 1900, and for a decade and a half the Rossland Ladies’ Hockey Team defeated every challenger. Even when rivals from nearby Nelson included members of hockey’s famous Patrick family, the women of Rossland prevailed.
Clearly trying to raise the profile of the annual event, carnival officials announced in 1911 that the victorious women’s team would be crowned “world champions.” Although “the world” did not extend beyond Grand Forks, Nelson and Revelstoke, the Rossland Ladies’ Hockey Team — with a stable roster and everimproving skills — was the first in B.C. to be able to claim such a title. Rossland was the home of a sports dynasty, and it’s remarkable that the community’s historic women’s team has yet to be included in the BC Sports Hall of Fame.
Rossland may have soon moderated its claim to confer a world title, but the introduction of artificial ice and the establishment of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association resulted in a claim almost as bold. With the rink at Queen’s Park in New Westminster finally ready in January 1914, a group of local women formed a hockey team and challenged Victoria to produce an opponent. When Vancouver Millionaires owner/ manager/ player Frank Patrick heard of it, he immediately issued a call to create a team in Vancouver. Wilfully ignoring the long-established women’s tournament at Rossland, the threecornered contest was quickly promoted as a series of games to determine “the championship of British Columbia.”
Competing for this new crown were three teams of women who likely had not played the game previously. Reporters for the local newspapers who witnessed the practices filed columns that were condescending and even contemptuous of these players’ skills. The Vancouver Sun, for example, could not refrain from mentioning “the laughter that emanated from the sidelines.” If women’s hockey at Rossland had long outgrown its novelty status, it was certainly still regarded as such on the coast.
With the team from Victoria twice defeated, the contest became one between Vancouver and New Westminster, communities that sustained a sometimes bitter sports rivalry in those days. Wearing the colours of the hometown Royals, the women from New Westminster defeated the visiting Vancouver squad and were duly proclaimed B.C. champions.
Rise of the Amazons
When arenas in Victoria and New Westminster were requisitioned for military purposes during the First World War, the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Team found itself without opponents and struggled to survive. Its last game came in 1918 against a squad of King George High School students calling themselves the Amazons. They played a more aggressive style of hockey, won the game, and controversially insisted they were the new provincial champions. Like their predecessors, however, the Amazons soon found themselves without a local opponent as women in Victoria and New Westminster did not return to the game at war’s end.
It became necessary to look farther afield. As the Rossland Winter Carnival declined late in the war, quite separately Banff had launched its own winter carnival, and. like Rossland, made a women’s hockey tournament one of its main events. When the Alpine Club of Canada in 1921 donated a trophy intended to be the female equivalent of the Stanley Cup, the Banff women’s tournament took on a greater significance. Frank Patrick wanted that Alpine Cup and also thought there may be commercial potential in women’s hockey. He revived the Amazons and, under his sponsorship, the team travelled to Banff where they performed well but were no match for the seemingly unbeatable Regents from Calgary.
Disappointed at Banff, Patrick was nevertheless intent on a title of some description. Repeating the formula of 1914, he declared a new three-cornered competition — this one to determine the continent’s first international West Coast women’s championship. Sponsored by managers of the other clubs in the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, the Seattle Vamps and the Victoria Kewpies were quickly organized amid considerable local publicity. Not surprisingly, the instant teams proved no match against Vancouver. Patrick and his Amazons had their title. However, it was not successful as a commercial venture and the international West Coast women’s championship was not repeated.
The Amazons returned to Banff in 1922 better prepared, but still the underdogs. An initial loss seemed to knock them out of contention, but internal quarrels among the organizers of the Banff carnival saw that game declared “unofficial.” Somehow the Amazons found themselves facing the Calgary Regents for the championship. History and the smart money were all on the side of the Regents. The game was surprisingly close until Kathleen Carson — acclaimed for having “a shot like a man’s” — tied the game late in regulation and then won it with a second goal in overtime. In a rather bizarre fashion, the Amazons from Vancouver had captured the Alpine Cup and were crowned the “Lady Champions of Western Canada.”
Having upset the world of women’s hockey at Banff in 1922, the Amazons were themselves surprised by an upstart team from Fernie a year later. Photographs of the team shock the modern eye, but their emblem at that time symbolized good fortune and nothing more. The Fernie Swastikas, like successive Vancouver women’s teams, found no opponent locally but had been playing against strong squads from Calgary.
That preparation served them well. Invited to the Banff Tournament of 1923, their first draw was against the champion Vancouver Amazons. Led by Dahlia Schagel — described by one reporter as “a fast- travelling brunette” — they won, and by the rules of the day the title was theirs unless they, in turn, were defeated. The mighty Calgary Regents — determined to regain the Alpine Cup — tried three times without success.
Homecoming
The reception the Swastikas received upon their return to Fernie is still unequalled in the history of women’s hockey in Canada. Merchants closed their doors and schoolchildren were given an hour of freedom to greet the morning train. As spectators lining the streets cheered, the local RCMP and the Fernie Pipe Band led the team to the steps of City Hall where the mayor and the district’s MLA delivered congratulatory speeches. The Fernie Free Press reported that the Swastikas were the champions, not only of Canada, but of the entire world.
Despite determined attempts, neither the Amazons nor the Swastikas were able to repeat their initial successes, and by the mid-1930s women’s hockey teams in Western Canada had all but disappeared.
Of course, the IIHF title contested in Kamloops has no direct connection to laurels awarded in this province 90 and 100 years ago. However, even if today’s players are unaware of it, the foundations of their game were established across Canada long before the so-called pioneer players of the 1970s more recently revived women’s ice hockey. That revival has rekindled in a new generation dreams of victory like those that once inspired the historic women hockey champions of British Columbia.