Playing in the Neutral Zone: Meanings and Uses of Ice Hockey in the Canada-U.S. Borderlands, 1895–1915

The part performed by Canada in making contributions to the list of the world's amusements has been by no means slight. Lacrosse and canoeing for the warm bright days of summer, snow-shoeing and tobogganing for the crisp cold nights of winter, these make up a quartette of healthy, hearty sports, the superiors of which, in their appropriate season, any other country might safely be challenged to show. But apparently this ambitious colony not content with the laurels already won, and in the bringing of the of rink hockey to perfection would add another to her garland; for this fine game, as played in the cities to-day, is, without question, a distinctly home product. --J. Macdonald Oxley, My Strange Rescue and Other Stories of Sport and Adventure in Canada (1895). (1) Still there was a time, and I feel deeply for the man who can't remember such a time himself, when I had winged heels and, like Hermes, I flashed swift-footed over inch-thick black on the Black River for miles at a stretch, for hours at a time, day and night, by sun, by moon, and by firelight; with ankles that wearied but never gave in; with feet that chilled to numbness but never succumbed ... I was most at home in the rough-house type of skating that went with hockey, and when the puck went out of bounds, I think I never faltered (though I sometimes fell through) in following the puck over a piece of tenderloin ice of cellophane thinness, that bent with grace and broke with much embarrassment. --Charles Edward Crane (b. 1884), Winter in Vermont (1941). (2) Our puny boundaries are things That we perceive, and not that we have made. --Wordsworth, The Prelude II For historians and other scholars, the place of hockey in society as enigmatic as it undeniable. The term game has a celebratory ring for most students and fans, but in historical scholarship hockey has generally been seen as an interesting cultural problem, a lens through which other, sometimes contradictory, social and political patterns can be seen and analyzed. When hockey appears in history textbooks, for example, it fleeting and normally used to demonstrate national frailty or disunity. (3) Hockey has divided Canadians--French from English, westerners from easterners, and men from women--as much as it has brought them together. Canada's national memory peppered with moments of hockey-induced cleavage, like the 1955 Richard Riot and the triumphant regionalism of the 1920s Western Hockey League. (4) Just as problematic, hockey has been portrayed as a vehicle for continentalization, the Americanization of Canada. In the 1920s and 30s, John Herd Thompson and Allan Seager write, Canadian Hockey was revolutionized by American money. The development of the National Hockey League in the 1920s illustrated this trend clearly. Though made up almost wholly of professional players, fully six of the ten NHL teams for 1926-27 were located in American cities. Canadian sport has become more and more American, Archibald MacMechan argued in the Historical Review in 1920. Hockey, F.B. Edwards lamented in Maclean's in 1927, is Big Business now. (5) Central to these narratives the often unstated assertion that hockey was, in its origins and essence, an exclusively construct. The crises that it caused, or revealed, were at all times crises of the garden variety--regionalism, language-based rivalry, and the bugbear of American domination. According to these assessments, hockey both united and divided Canadians in distinctly ways. Told in these ways, the story of hockey fit neatly into the big boxes that historians have used to package the past--nation-building, regional disparity, multiculturalism, and anti-Americanism. As conceptually tidy as they may be, these treatments of the game's history leave only a partial impression. …

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