Where ice hockey began.

Older games on ice

Stick-and-ball games are old and widespread. History.com notes games resembling hockey in ancient Greece, Egypt and Persia, and calls hockey's true origins murky. Wikipedia's history of the sport describes ice hockey as growing out of bandy, hurling and shinty, played in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere in the 18th and 19th centuries, with lacrosse also feeding in. The word "hockey" appears in a chapter title of Richard Johnson's Juvenile Sports and Pastimes, which Wikipedia dates to both 1772 and 1773 in different places.

Where the name came from is not settled. The Hockey News, summarising a book by researchers of the Society for International Hockey Research (SIHR), reports their theory that it came from a cork bung from Hock Ale casks, used as an early puck in England. That theory could not be confirmed from a second source.

The rival birthplace claims

Britain

SIHR members Carl Gidén, Patrick Houda and Jean-Patrice Martel argue in their book On the Origins of Hockey that hockey was played on ice in Britain as far back as the 1790s, as The Hockey News reported in May 2014. Wikipedia, citing Gidén and Houda, points to an engraving of a skater with a stick and bung on the Thames, probably from December 1796, and a 1799 letter from Chesham describing the game; the engraving's own collection record could not be traced. Charles Darwin wrote to his son William on 1 March 1853 that he had been very fond of hockey on the ice in skates (the Friends of Darwin site gives the same date); The Hockey News places his playing in Shrewsbury in the 1820s. Wikipedia adds that Oxford University's claimed 1885 match at St. Moritz is now thought to have been bandy.

Windsor, Nova Scotia

Windsor's claim rests on Thomas Chandler Haliburton. His 1844 book The Attaché has characters recall playing "hurly" on the ice of a long pond, and Windsor's supporters place those games in his school days. Nova Scotia's Provincial Sport Act of 2008 (Bill No. 225, a private member's bill from Chuck Porter) declared ice hockey the province's sport. Its preamble says Haliburton wrote of playing hurley on the ice at Windsor no later than 1810, cites an anonymous 1876 writer in the Windsor Mail recalling games in 1816 to 1818, and names Dr. Garth Vaughan's book The Puck Starts Here and Howard Dill's promotion of Long Pond as the "Cradle of Hockey in Canada".

According to Wikipedia, the SIHR set up a committee at its 2001 annual meeting to examine the claim; it found that Windsor's supporters had offered no credible evidence, and took no position of its own on where or when hockey began. The report's date is given differently: Wikipedia and Up Here magazine date it to 2002, while a search summary described an 18-page report from January 2011, which may be a separate document. Historians quoted by Nunatsiaq News say the claim rests on a fictional reference. Up Here reports that the Dill family, who own Long Pond, dismissed the SIHR report as biased.

Deline, Northwest Territories

Deline, formerly Fort Franklin, on Great Bear Lake, bases its claim on Sir John Franklin's expedition, whose men played "hockey on the ice" while wintering there, as Franklin wrote in a letter home. The year is disputed: Up Here gives 1824, Nunatsiaq News gives 1825, and a search summary of a Library and Archives Canada page gives 25 October 1825. Franklin listed skating among the men's winter amusements, but Nunatsiaq News notes it is not known whether they wore skates for hockey. SIHR founder Bill Fitsell called the claim "flimsy", and Gidén and Houda argue the games were an isolated event, with no further local hockey for more than a century. On the other side, Up Here reports that the Northwest Territories legislature unanimously approved a heritage designation supporting Deline, and that Dene National Chief Norman Yakeleya argues Deline has factual evidence that Windsor lacks.

Kingston, Ontario

The Hockey Hall of Fame's own history records that the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA) set up a committee on hockey's origins on 17 April 1941, and that Captain James T. Sutherland's statement dated organised hockey in Kingston to 1888; the Hall says the correct year is 1886. The Hall itself was established in Kingston on 10 September 1943. Search summaries say the CAHA recognised Kingston as the birthplace in 1943 and that Kingston historians later conceded their early game was shinny, but no primary record of that decision was found.

Queen's University's encyclopedia does not claim the birthplace for Kingston. It lists Windsor, Halifax (where soldiers played "ice polo") and Montreal as rival claimants and presents Kingston as home of the game's longest rivalry. On 10 March 1886 Queen's students played garrison soldiers and Royal Military College cadets on the frozen harbour and won 1-0 on a goal by Lennox Irving; RMC won the 1887 rematch 4-1. There were no ice markings, the sticks were about a metre long, a lacrosse ball served as the puck, and goalies were not allowed to lie on the ice.

Montreal, 3 March 1875

On 3 March 1875 James Creighton organised a game at Montreal's Victoria Skating Rink. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) calls it the first public exhibition of ice hockey: Creighton's nine-man team beat a side captained by Charles Torrance 2 goals to 1, playing with a flat, round piece of wood as the puck. A search summary of an IIHF page gives the opposing captain as Fred Torrence instead. The Government of Canada's 2009 backgrounder calls it the first recorded indoor game played before spectators, announced in advance and reported afterwards by The Gazette. According to Wikipedia, the SIHR committee called it the earliest eyewitness account it knew of a specific game, at a known place and time, with a recorded score between two identified teams. History.com says the teams were held to nine a side because the rink was small, and that about 40 spectators attended according to the next day's Gazette.

James Creighton

Creighton was born in Halifax on 12 June 1850, graduated from Dalhousie College in 1868 and, according to the DCB, played an informal game on ice called "ricket" or sometimes "hockey" as a boy. The DCB says he moved to Montreal in 1872; the Government of Canada backgrounder says 1873. He never claimed to have invented the game. In a letter to a teammate he claimed only to have captained the first regular hockey club formed in Canada, in Montreal in 1877. From 1882 he was Law Clerk of the Senate of Canada for 48 years, and in Ottawa he helped organise the Rideau Hall Rebels, a team that included two of Lord Stanley's sons. He died in Ottawa on 27 June 1930. The Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame inducted him in 1993 as the "father of organized hockey".

The first rules and clubs

The Gazette of Montreal printed the rules of the game in February 1877. McGill Athletics dates the publication to 27 February 1877 and says Creighton probably submitted them, though there is no hard proof. The DCB says they differed from field hockey rules only in adding the word "ice"; Wikipedia counts seven rules, six of them based on the rules of England's Hockey Association. McGill had already formed an organised club, which beat the Victorias 2-1 on 31 January 1877 according to the McGill University Gazette.

Who wrote McGill's later rules is disputed. McGill Athletics reports that Richard F. Smith claimed in a 1908 interview to have drafted rules in 1878 and presented them in 1879, that W. L. "Chick" Murray claimed to have drafted the first official rules on 10 November 1879, and that Arthur Farrell's 1899 book said no rules existed before 1880, which McGill Athletics calls wrong given the 1877 publication. McGill Athletics also reports, from a single account, that the first game under the 1879 rules was played on the St. Lawrence River with a square puck cut from a rubber ball.

The game organised quickly from there:

• Teams went from nine to seven a side around 1880, according to Wikipedia citing Gidén, Houda and Martel.
• At the 1883 Montreal Winter Carnival McGill won the Winter Carnival Cup, which McGill Athletics calls the first official hockey championship.
• The Amateur Hockey Association of Canada was founded on 8 December 1886, with McGill among its five original senior members.

Within six years of the 1886 association's founding, Canada's Governor General would announce the trophy that became the Stanley Cup.