The Dawson City Nuggets (also known as the Klondikes) were a hockey

Ice hockey

Ice hockey, often referred to as hockey, is a team sport played on ice, in which skaters use wooden or composite sticks to shoot a hard rubber puck into their opponent's net. The game is played between two teams of six players each. Five members of each team skate up and down the ice trying to take...

 team from Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 that challenged the reigning champion Ottawa Hockey Club

Ottawa Senators (original)

The Ottawa Senators were an amateur, and later, professional, ice hockey team based in Ottawa, Canada which existed from 1883 to 1954. The club was the first hockey club in Ontario, a founding member of the National Hockey League and played in the NHL from 1917 until 1934...

, aka "The Silver Seven," in January 1905, for the Stanley Cup

Stanley Cup

The Stanley Cup is an ice hockey club trophy, awarded annually to the National Hockey League playoffs champion after the conclusion of the Stanley Cup Finals. It has been referred to as The Cup, Lord Stanley's Cup, The Holy Grail, or facetiously as Lord Stanley's Mug...

. They suffered the most lopsided single-game defeat in the history of Stanley Cup play.

Sponsored by the Klondike entrepreneur Joseph W. Boyle

Joseph W. Boyle

Joseph Whiteside Boyle , better known as Klondike Joe Boyle, was a Canadian adventurer who became a businessman and entrepreneur in the United Kingdom....

 from men of the mining camps during the tailend of the Yukon gold rush, the Nuggets travelled an epic month-long voyage by dog sled, approximately 600 km from Dawson to Whitehorse, narrow gauge rail from Whitehorse to Skagway, ship from Skagway to Vancouver, and train from Vancouver to Ottawa

Ottawa

Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...

 in time for the games. The team had only one bona-fide player, ex-Ottawa star Weldy Young

Weldy Young

Weldon C. Young was a Canadian businessman and athlete. Young was an ice hockey player for the Ottawa Hockey Club, playing in its founding years in the 1880s and in the 1890s. Young later became a member of the Dawson City Nuggets which played against Ottawa in the 1905 Stanley Cup challenge...

, but he was unable to make it to Ottawa in time, delayed in Dawson City as an election official. Exhausted by the trip and without Young, they lost the first game of the two-game total goal series 9-2, and the second 23-2, in which Ottawa star Frank McGee set a record that still stands by scoring fourteen goals (see Ottawa vs. Dawson City). The team then played a series of exhibition games in the east before returning to the Yukon.

Michael Onesi, a Whitehorse newspaper columnist, speculated, shortly before a 1997 re-enactment (see below), that, had the Dawson team triumphed, they would have had the longest dynasty in Stanley Cup history. Challenges normally took place in the cup-holder's town, and visiting teams could not effectively play, the columnist wryly commented, after the brutal journey by overland coach to Dawson, their bodies blacker than a hockey puck from all the bruises of a dog-sled ride.

The challenge

The Nuggets participated in perhaps the most famous Stanley Cup challenge of all, against the Ottawa Hockey Club, aka "The Silver Seven" in 1905. Dawson City had two former elite hockey players, Weldy Young

Weldy Young

Weldon C. Young was a Canadian businessman and athlete. Young was an ice hockey player for the Ottawa Hockey Club, playing in its founding years in the 1880s and in the 1890s. Young later became a member of the Dawson City Nuggets which played against Ottawa in the 1905 Stanley Cup challenge...

 who had played for Ottawa in the 1890s and D.R. McLennan who had played for Queen's College against the Montreal Victorias

Montreal Victorias

The Victoria Hockey Club of Montreal, Quebec, Canada was an early men's amateur ice hockey club. Its date of origin is ascribed to either 1874, 1877 or 1881, making it either the first or second organized ice hockey club after McGill University. The club played at its own rink, the Victoria Skating...

 in the challenge of 1895. Other players were selected from other Dawson City clubs. Dawson City's challenge was accepted in the summer of 1904 by the Stanley Cup trustees, scheduled (inauspiciously) for Friday, January 13, 1905. The date of the challenge meant that Young had to travel later as he had to work in a federal election that December, and meet the club in Ottawa.

To get to Ottawa, several thousand miles away, the club would have to get to Whitehorse by road, catch a train from there to Skagway, Alaska, then catch a steamer to Vancouver, and a train from there to Ottawa. On December 18, 1904 several players set out by dogsled and the rest left the next day by bicycle for a 330 mile trek to Whitehorse. At first the team made good progress, but the weather turned warm enough to thaw the roads, meaning the players had to walk several hundred miles. The team would spend the nights in police sheds along the road. At Whitehorse, the weather turned bad, causing the trains not to run for three days, causing the Nuggets to miss their steamer in Skagway. The next one could not dock for three days due to the ice buildup. The club would find the sea journey treacherous, causing seasickness amongst the team. When the steamer reached Vancouver, the area was too fogged in to dock, and the steamer docked in Seattle. The team from there caught a train to Vancouver, and finally left Vancouver on January 6, 1905, arriving in Ottawa on January 11.

Despite the difficult journey, the Ottawa squad refused to change the date of the first game, only two days away. Otherwise, Ottawa was hospitable. The Klondikers received a huge welcome at the train station, had a welcoming dinner, and used the Ottawa Amateur Athletic Club's rooms for the duration of their stay. Young would not arrive in time to play for Dawson.

The first game started well for Dawson, being only down 3–1 at the half, but things turned ugly afterwards. Norman Watt of Dawson tripped Ottawa's Art Moore, who retaliated with a stick to the mouth of Watt, who promptly knocked Moore out hitting him on the head with his stick. The game ended 9–2 for Ottawa. The game left a poor taste in the Klondikers, complaining that several goals were offside

Offside (sport)

Offside is a rule used by several different team sports regulating aspects of player positioning. It is particularly used in field sports with rules deriving from the various codes of football, such as association football, rugby and field hockey, as well as in ice hockey.Offside rules are...

.

Watt then made the mistake of saying that Frank McGee wasn't that good, as he had only scored one in the first game. McGee would score 4 goals in the first half of the second match and 10 in the second half, leading Ottawa to a 23–2 win. Despite this high score, the newspapers claimed that Albert Forrest, the Dawson City goalie, had played a "really fine game," otherwise the score "might have been doubled." Ottawa would celebrate by hosting Dawson at a banquet, after which the players would take the Cup and attempt to drop-kick it over the Rideau Canal

Rideau Canal

The Rideau Canal , also known as the Rideau Waterway, connects the city of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada on the Ottawa River to the city of Kingston, Ontario on Lake Ontario. The canal was opened in 1832 as a precaution in case of war with the United States and is still in use today, with most of its...

. The stunt was unsuccessful, and the Cup landing on the frozen ice, to be retrieved the next day.

The news got worse for McLennan and Watt. The day after the second game, the Yukon Territory announced that they would be laid off from work, effective immediately, albeit with pay until June 30, 1905. The pair worked in the gold commissioner's office.

1997 re-enactment

A team from Dawson competed against the Ottawa Senators

Ottawa Senators

The Ottawa Senators are a professional ice hockey team based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. They are members of the Northeast Division of the Eastern Conference of the National Hockey League...

 alumni, in a re-enactment of the 1905 match, this time at the Corel Centre, complete with organ music, spotlights, and other pizzazz. The Dawson team managed a slight improvement in score: 18-0, with 25 shots-on-goal. 45 percent, the Senators' take of receipts, was contributed to the Heart Institute, while the Dawson team donated 25 ounces of gold, or the cash equivalent, to the Yukon Special Olympics, another 45 percent of the receipts. The rest was designated to Yukon Minor Hockey.

The team symbolically recreated the trip to Ottawa, though train service no longer runs between Whitehorse and the Pacific coast.