In the early 1900s, indoor arenas started to come into vogue, accelerating the growth of the sport for all genders.
Similarly, the organization of women’s hockey leagues, and in the case of Rossland’s Winter Carnival, an annual championship aided. growth Perched in British Columbia’s Monashee Mountains, the town of Rossland features two women’s hockey teams. Those teams were the Crescents and the Stars. In 1900, the town’s Winter Carnival marked the birth of organized women’s hockey in Western Canada. That year, a combined roster known as the Rossland Ladies, wearing ankle-length dresses, beat Nelson (British Columbia) 4-0 in the first major women’s hockey tournament on record. By 1911, Rossland’s organizers were referring to the tournament as the “Ladies Championship of the World.” The Carnival and women’s hockey tournament ran for 17 consecutive seasons until, as with many sports, the Spanish influenza of 1918 ended the Rossland event.
In the first decade of the 1900s, women’s hockey experienced a boom in Canada that would set the sport on a path to recognize their first superstars in the coming years. Simultaneously, the sport was reaching new locations globally.
Do you come from a land down under?
Whether they were called Glaciariums or Ice Palaces, indoor arenas and refrigeration systems revolutionized the sport of hockey and tool it from climate dependent, to climate independent in the early 1900s. This included in Australia, where in 1904, a refrigeration executive named Henry Newman Reid opened the first Glaciarium in Adelaide. Two years later in 1906, the Melbourne Glaciarium opened, followed by the Sydney Glaciarium in 1907.
Originally played as “field hockey on ice,” hockey quickly evovled into more traditional manners. In 1908, the first documented game of women’s ice hockey was staged at the Melbourne Glaciarium to entertain several hundred officers and men of the American Fleet visiting for a week. Newman Reid’s only daughter, Mireylees, later played ice hockey in New South Wales. In a March 9, 1950 interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, she said, “I grew up skating. I was carried over the ice before I could walk, and put on it as soon as I could.”
1915 and the Eastern Ladies’ Hockey League
Founded in Montreal in 1915, the Eastern Ladies Hockey League (ELHL) became the most competitive women’s hockey league in the world. With teams in Montreal, Ottawa, and Cornwall, the league became a spot where working women embraced hockey. The league was filled with teams of telephone operators, store clerks, secretaries, and factory workers. The league drew crowds into the thousands, and started to produce women’s hockey’s first bona fide stars.
In Ottawa it was players like Edith Anderson, who was called a “phenom” by the Ottawa Citizen, and Eva Ault was nicknamed “Queen of the Ice.” The biggest star of the era however, was also one of the most short lived. Albertine Lapensée was the first superstar of women’s hockey. Hailed by fans and newspapers as “the lady hockey marvel”
she was unquestionably “the world’s premiere women’s hockeyist.”
A Cornwall, Ontario product, Lapensée joined the ELHL at age 17 for the 1915-1916 season as a member of the Cornwall Victorias. “She was the attraction that resulted in most of the spectators being present. Everyone wanted to see her perform,” wrote the Ottawa Journal that season of the packed arenas that flocked to see Lapensée. That year, Lapensée dominated pacing the Cornwall Victorias to an undefeated season with a 45-0-1. Their lone tie came the Ottawa Alerts, where Edith Anderson and Eva Ault played. But at the time, it was Lapensée, dubbed the “Miracle Maid” and “Star of Stars” by newspapers, who was the premiere attraction.
Lapensée, was said to be able to “shoot as good as any forward in the NHA,” and as The Montreal Star observed, “there are a good number of boys in Cornwall who wish they were as adept with the stick and as clever on skates as Miss Lapensée. If they were they could be commanding good salaries in one or other of the big league teams.”
She’d play the following season and continue to dazzle through the next season. Seeing the crowds that followed her game in and game out, Lapensée asked to be paid to play. She was refused, and in 1917, the star walked away from the game. Lapensée also faced continued scrutiny of her gender. Following the 1916-1917 season, Lapensée moved to New York, and fell off the map…forever.
The First International Games Between Canadian and American Teams
In 1916, the Cornwall Victorias and Ottawa Alerts played a three-game series in the USA. The games took place in front of packed crowds at Cleveland’s Elysium Arena. Cornwall won all three games, with Lapensée collecting fifteen of her team’s eighteen goals.
The Alerts returned to the USA the following year to play a three-game series against the Pittsburgh Polar Maids. It was the first international series between two women’s hockey teams. At the time, Pittsburgh had multiple women’s hockey teams, including the Polar Maids and Pittsburgh Arctic Girls who played in the city’s Winter Garden League. As the Pittsburgh Post wrote following a game between the Pittsburgh teams in February 1917, “Since the introduction of girls’ hockey, considerable interest has been aroused among the local followers of the winter sport and each succeeding game finds a larger crowd.” When the Polar Maids won the city title, they also earned the opportunity to play the visiting Ottawa Alerts.
In the first game of the series, Hazel Quinney scored twice for the Ottawa Alerts. Edith Anderson and Beatrice Hagan also tallied for a 4-0 Ottawa Alerts win. As the Ottawa Citizen wrote following game two, “Ottawa proved tonight that their victory over the Pittsburgh Polar Maids last night was no fluke, as they again demonstrated their superiority on the ice…” This game was a 5-1 win for Ottawa with Quinney scoring another pair. Eva Ault, Anderson, and Hagan rounded out the Alerts’ offence. Pittsburgh captain Margaret Hanney had her team’s goal.
The final game of the series was the closest. Ottawa jumped out to a quick 3-0 lead in the opening 10 minutes of the game. Goal scorers were Lillian McCarthey, Anderson and Miss Loashy. Pittsburgh closed the gap however, and shut down Ottawa’s attack. Miss Demuth scored for the home team just past the midway point in the game. The game would end in a 3-1 decision, with Ottawa sweeping the series.
Stars and Stripes and Stars On Ice
In 1899, Kathleen Howard moved to New York from Canada alongside her husband, Tom. Tom Howard was a Stanley Cup champion with the Winnipeg Victorias in 1896 and played professionally in new york until the 1905-1906 season. In 1916, Kathleen, herself “a hockey player of more than passing ability,” formed a women’s hockey team, St. Nicholas Club, that became the cornerstone of American women’s ice hockey. The team and club were located in Brooklyn.
The St. Nicholas Blues’ top player was Elsie Muller who grew up skating outdoors on the Hudson River and later at Lake Placid. Muller would go on to represent the United States in speed skating at the 1932 Olympics. Captaining St. Nicholas, Muller “proved herself to be among the very best women ice hockey players of her era.”
At the time, New York City was in “the throes of skating madness” that extended to hockey. “The craze has clutched the old as well as the young; the girls and matrons just as it has the youths and papas. And the girls—well, they aren’t content merely to skate this season. They want to play hockey, a game regarded by many as far more strenuous than football. Their wants are being filled,” wrote papers at the time.
Kathleen Howard remained the leading advocate for the sport in New York.
“There is no reason why a woman who can skate well should not develop into a hockey player,” Howard said. “Hockey on ice is no more dangerous than field hockey, and throughout England, Canada, and some sections of the United States, field hockey is a very popular sport with women…Once they master the knack of skating while carrying a stick, they soon pick up the finer points of the game.”
First Game Between American Cities
Alongside the Polar Maids, Arctic Girls, and Winter Garden Girls in Pittsburgh, teams formed in other eastern cities. In Boston, a new team, the Boston Girls’ Hockey Club was led by Ruth Denesha. Her brother Harry, a player for the New York Athletic Club, coached the team.
On March 22, 1917, the first recorded women’s hockey game between Boston and New York took place. St. Nicholas Rink of New York, nicknames the Blues, faced off against the Boston Girls’ Hockey Club. The game was played in the new Boston Arena, now known as Matthews Arena.
“The Boston girls have practiced faithfully for the past several months,” wrote the Globe, “And although the young women were entirely unfamiliar with the game at the start, coach Harry Denesha has rounded out a team that should give a good account of themselves.”
It proved prophetic in Boston’s favor as the home team didn’t disappoint. When the teams faced off “in a match full of fancy falls and slides but a lot of good all round sport,” as New York’s Sun newspaper reported the following day, it was Boston who came away with a 3-2 win. Ruth Denesha paced her team scoring twice in the win, while left winger Gertrude Hawkes had the other for Boston. Scoring for New York was rover Elsie Miller and Mildred Mann.
Sunshine and Hockey
Long before the Los Angeles Kings, San Jose Sharks, or Anaheim Ducks, hockey was popular in California. That includes for women. In 1916, the San Francisco’s Techau Tavern Ice Palace opened. On May 26, 1916, the rink saw the first recorded women’s hockey game in California history. “An ice-hockey match between two teams composed of of women proved a sensation,” the San Francisco Bulletin wrote. “All the players exhibited marked facility in handling the difficult plays of the game, and shot the puck around the rink with the skill of veterans.”
On June 3, 1916, newly formed teams, the Minerva Hockey Club of Oakland and San Francisco’s Diana Club women’s team, faced off. They played in front of a reported 1,200 fans. Oakland earned a 4-1 victory, in “a game that never lost its tense interest for a moment.”
Carol George scored the lone goal for San Francisco before leaving the game with an injury. Sisters Helen Uksila and Lena Uksila were stars for Oakland, with Lena Uksila scoring a hat trick in the win. Edith Brooks scored the other Oakland goal in their win. The referee for this first game was Pete Muldoon, who would win a Stanley Cup with the Seattle Metropolitans the following season, and who in 1926-1927, became the first coach in Chicago Black Hawks history.
Lena Uksila was an integral early builder for women in skating and hockey. Uksila, born in Michigan, travelled across the country to perform skating demonstrations. This included a residence in New York at the Hippodrome alongside her brother Charles Uksila. Charles was a former professional hockey player who competed with the Vancouver Millionaires, and Portland Rosebuds. Playing for the Rosebuds in the 1916 Stanley Cup final against the Montreal Canadiens, Uksila was believed to be the first American to play for the Stanley Cup. While in New York, Lena Uksila also performed at the Ice Palace alongside Robert Jackson, who would become the team captain for Australia’s Victoria ice hockey team. Following their time in San Francisco and New York, the Uksila’s travelled to Australia. Here, Lena helped re-introduc women to ice hockey in 1923.
The Uksila sisters played for the Minerva Club and the Diana Club, with Helen Uksila earning accolades in local papers. As the San Francisco Bulletin wrote, “Miss Helen Uksila, point player for the Minerva Ladies’ Hockey Club, will astonish the spectators…by her wonderful play. She runs the puck down the sideboards better than the average male player.”
The following winter, San Francisco opened the Winter Garden, a second indoor ice skating facility.
In 1917, competition in the city expanded with the formation of the Princess Pats and Wanderers. Both teams were filled with women who originated and played hockey in Canada. Those women included Princess Pats’ captain Florence Trehurne and Adreodine Davis, and Wanderers players, who would become the stars of the league, Catherine Sudden and Rose Schak.
In the spring of 1917, the Princess Pats and Wanderers played a series to decide the champions of San Francisco. In the opening game of their series played on April 16, 1917, the Wanderers beat the Princess Pats 2-0. Catherine Sudden and Rose Schak scored the goals. The Examiner called the game “every bit as thrilling as the contests between Seattle and Les Canadiens” who faced off for the 1917 Stanley Cup with the Seattle Metropolitans winning the Cup that year. The Wanderers took game two as well shutting out the Princess Pats 1-0 with Schak again scoring, assisted by Sudden. The third game of their series saw a 1-1 tie with Schak tallying for the Wanderers, and Clare Pinchuck recording the Princess Pats’ only goal. With the Wanderers winning the opening two games and tying the third, they were named league champions.
The teams again returned to the ice in 1918 with Sudden captaining the Wanderers, and Trehurne again guiding the Pats. The University of California also formed a team. But the promises of that season seemed to fall flat. None of San Francisco’s papers reported on a game actually happening. On multiple occasions the papers stated games would occur soon, but no date or results were recorded. It’s believed the season never got underway. As with many sports globally, the outbreak of the Spanish influenza stopped activities.
Banff Winter Carnival Becomes Another Paramount Event
Women’s hockey had found a permanent home in Canada’s eastern provinces. Similarly, the game was about to get a significant boost out west. Powerhouse teams including the Calgary Regents and Edmonton Monarchs formed in the second decade of the 1900s. Formed in 1914, the Edmonton Victorias were one of the only teams coached by a woman at the time. Renamed the Monarchs, they became “the team that has kept ladies’ hockey before the public for the last decade or more.” As papers wrote, the Monarchs were “composed of a collection of real athletes, and a splendid type of young womanhood, who play the game for the delight and pleasure that they get out of having mastered the fastest game played.”
The first recorded women’s hockey in Alberta took place in Medicine Hat in 1897. A few years later, in the winter of 1904-1905, the first women’s hockey game was organized in Red Deer. As teams formed in British Columbia and Alberta, a new avenue for women’s hockey formed in what would be the most prestigious event of the era, the Alpine Cup at the Banff Winter Carnival.
Beginning in 1917, top western Canadian teams met annually at the Banff Winter Carnival to contest the Alpine Cup. The Calgary Regents were the inaugural winners. Except for a loss to the Edmonton Monarchs in 1918, the Regents reigned supreme until 1921. The Alpine Cup was contested for 19 straight years. The Monarchs won the Cup six times. Following the Monarchs were the Calgary Regents and Calgary Hollies who each won the Alpine Cup four times. Other teams to win the trophy between 1917 and 1935 included the Vancouver Amazons, Fernie Swastikas, Edmonton Rustlers, and the Red Deer Amazons (twice).