Adapted from Chapter 9
On and off for about five years, the Ottawas had been hearing about hockey in the Yukon and the aspirations of hockey people there to one day challenge for the Stanley Cup. Finally, in a letter dated August 24, 1904, the president and secretary of the Klondike Hockey Club issued a challenge to the Ottawas.
The challenge was reluctantly accepted. Except for former Ottawa player Weldy Young, the names being bandied about to play for Dawson were pretty much unknown in hockey circles. Ottawa believed the team from the Yukon was simply not good enough to warrant a challenge. Regardless, the challenge was on, and the Dawson quest became a serialized adventure in newspaper columns. Stories claimed the team of underdogs from “the northern zone” walked the 350 miles to Whitehorse; took the train to Skagway; missed the boat to Vancouver, but caught one to Seattle; doubled back to Vancouver by rail; caught the train east, meeting throngs of well-wishers along the way; and arrived rubber-legged in Ottawa on January 11, 1905 two days before their first game and twenty-five days after their odyssey began.
The games were to be played at Dey’s Rink, to which the Ottawas had returned after one season at the Aberdeen Pavilion. A sell out for the first game was assured. Resplendent in their new uniforms of gold-trimmed black jerseys, white pants and black stockings, the Klondikers posed for a team photo outside the rink.
Then the hockey began, and the sham was soon revealed to all. Four goals by Alf Smith, two by the unheralded Fred White, two by Rat Westwick, and one by Frank McGee. Dawson’s two replies were by a handlebar-mustachioed medical doctor originally from Glengarry, Ontario, Randy McLennan, and West Selkirk, Manitoba’s George Kennedy.
With two full days of rest before the second game, the challengers would surely do better. The crowds came back but the game was an utter fiasco; 10 to 1 for Ottawa at the half; 23 to 2 at the final whistle.
After disposing of Dawson City, the Ottawas breezed through their regular season schedule, winning seven of eight games and finishing first. Their single loss was not to the second-place Montreal Wanderers, the only other legitimate senior team in the league, but to Brockville. Their title as Stanley Cup champions thus confirmed, the Ottawas faced one more task, defending the Cup against the Rat Portage (later Kenora) Thistles.
Two years before, Rat Portage was the first team to challenge the Ottawas after their succession as champions. The Thistles had four prominent holdovers from the earlier roster: Matt Brown, Tom Hooper, Si Griffis and Billy McGimsie. Tom Phillips, who had played for the Toronto Marlboros in their 1904 series against Ottawa, was seen as a formidable addition. According to reports from Rat Portage, the team weighed “1,060 pounds” and had an average age of twenty-one and one-seventh years.
Based on the experience of their opponents, the Ottawas knew they would be in for a tough match, especially since both Frank McGee and Billy Gilmour would be out with injuries. Game one turned out to be even more challenging for the Ottawas than they had cautiously anticipated. The Thistles ran away with a 9 to 3 victory.
As predicted, game two proceeded in ugly fashion. “Frank McGee was at the side for too long,” reported the Ottawa Journal. “His cruel jabs to the face of opponents cost the team twenty minutes of his play.” Admonished the paper, “McGee is far too good a man to have to descend to this sort of thing.” Despite the penalties, the Ottawas won 4 to 2.
Frank McGee entered the deciding game three with a broken right wrist and management were concerned that the Thistles, who knew he had been injured, might try to hack at it. To fool them, the trainer encased it in a concealed steel band, but put a heavy, showy wrapping on his left wrist. The Thistles were fooled and McGee sailed through the game free of any punishment to the vulnerable wrist. While the formidable Phillips scored three times for the Thistles, McGee netted three goals for Ottawa including the game winner with less than five minutes left in regulation time. Their 5 to 4 win meant the Silver Seven could keep the Cup, for now.
Ottawa faced two challenges for the Cup in 1906. They first swept Queen’s University in a best-of-three series in February and did the same to Smiths Falls in early March. The Montreal Wanderers snatched the Cup away from Ottawa later in the month when they defeated Ottawa in a two-game total-goals series. The Silver Seven era was over, and Ottawa would not win the Cup again until 1909.
Source: Kitchen, Paul. Win, Tie, Or Wrangle: The Inside Story of the Old Ottawa Senators, 1883-1935. Manotick: Penumbra Press, 2008.