Dawson City Nuggets

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The Dawson City Nuggets were a hockey team from Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada that challenged the reigning champion Ottawa Silver Seven in January, 1905, for the Stanley Cup, and suffered the most lopsided single-game defeat in the history of Stanley Cup play.

Sponsored by the Klondike entrepreneur Joseph W. Boyle from men of the mining camps during the tailend of the Yukon gold rush, the Nuggets' best players were ex-Ottawa star Weldy Young and Lorne Hannay. They took the ice wearing striped uniforms in black and gold.

The Nuggets travelled an epic month-long voyage by dog sled (Dawson to Whitehorse), ship (Skagway to Vancouver) and train (Whitehorse to Skagway, and Vancouver to Ottawa) to reach Ottawa in time for the games. Exhausted by the trip and without Young -- delayed in Dawson City as an election official -- 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 of scoring fourteen goals. 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.

[edit] Re-enactment: 1997

A team from Dawson competed against the professional NHL team, the Ottawa Senators, in a re-enactment of the 1905 match, this time at the Senators' new home arena, complete with organ music, spotlights and other pizazz. 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.

[edit] References

Dawson City Seven, by Don Reddick, Goose Lane Editions, Fredericton, NB, ISBN 0-86492-158-6