Game on Yukon!: Mystery of the Dawson City Nuggets and the 1905 Stanley Cup

By Kieran Halliday, Keith Halliday and Ewan Halliday

Aurore, Yves, Kip and the gang are back, this time fighting to save the Stanley Cup!

Its 1905 and the Dawson City Nuggets have challenged legendary One-Eyed Frank McGee and the Ottawa Silver Seven for hockeys most famous trophy.

It just seems like more fun to the hockey-crazed kids of Dawson City, until mysterious accidents start to knock out the Nuggets stars one by one.

Yves and Kip join Joe King of the Klondike Boyle and the Nuggets as stick boys. They follow the team on its staggering four-thousand-mile trek to the Cup. The team suffers one mishap after another as they travel by dogsled, bike, train and ship across frozen rivers, impenetrable forest and deadly sixty-below-zero cold snaps.

Can the Yukon kids find out whats happening before its too late? Was Captain Bennets sled accident really an accident? What did Malamute Mike mean about the Sheriffs Curse? And who can explain the mysterious disappearance of the Stanley Cup itself?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 2, 2009
• ISBN: 9781440145490

Kieran Halliday

Keith Halliday is a fourth generation Yukoner raised on ripping yarns about the Klondike Gold Rush and his pioneer fur trading family. After detours in the diplomatic service in Brussels and consulting in Toronto, Keith lives in the Yukon with his wife and four children.

Book preview

Contents

Foreword

Flycatcher Morris drops the ballMy journal # 1

Dawson City, Yukon Territory

August 28, 1904

Joe Boyle’s big picnic

My journal # 2

Dawson City, Yukon Territory

September 1, 1904

The secret is out!

My journal # 3

Dawson City, Yukon Territory

September 1, 1904

The Stanley Cup challenge is on!

My journal # 4

Dawson City, Yukon Territory

September 2, 1904

How to Play the Fastest Game in the World

The sheriff’s curse?

My journal # 5

Dawson City, Yukon Territory

December 1, 1904

Weldy’s dilemma

My journal # 6

Dawson City

December 16, 1904

By bike to Whitehorse!

My journal # 7

Wounded Moose on the Overland Trail, Yukon Territory

December 18, 1904

Frozen stew

My journal # 8

Somewhere near Yukon Crossing on the Overland Trail

December 20, 1904

Sourdough thermometer

My journal # 9

Still on the Overland Trail

December 23, 1904

Christmas in a police shed

My journal # 10

Takhini River Crossing, Yukon Territory

December 26, 1904

Too much snow!

My journal # 11

Skagway, Alaska

January 3, 1905

Aboard the S.S. Vomit

My journal # 12

Seattle, Washington

January 5, 1905

The light springy step of the man in perfect health

My journal # 13

On a Canadian Pacific train somewhere

January 7, 1905

The mysterious busboy

My journal # 14

On a train somewhere in Ontario

January 10, 1905

Dinner with the Ottawa Silver Seven

My journal # 15

Ottawa, Ontario

January 12, 1905

Goal-napped!

My journal # 16

Ottawa, Ontario

January 13, 1905

The big game!

My journal # 17

Ottawa, Ontario

January 14, 1905

Black Jacques

My journal # 18

Ottawa, Ontario

January 17, 1905

Game Two!

My journal # 19

Ottawa, Ontario

January 17, 1905

The end

My journal # 20

Ottawa, Ontario

January 17, 1905

About This Book

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Illustrators

About the MacBride Museum

To my son Ewan

and the boys who shovel the rink across the street

Foreword

This amazing story was written by a young Yukon hockey player named Yves Dutoit in 1905. In riveting detail, Yves describes the Dawson City Nuggets’ legendary Stanley Cup challenge versus the Ottawa Silver Seven. He also tells the tale of the Nuggets’ gruelling four-thousand-mile trek to Ottawa, with the first three hundred miles by bicycle and dog sled on the Yukon’s frozen Overland Trail.

Yves brings us back to a time when hockey was a young sport and hockeyists (as they were called) from across Canada challenged the infamous Ottawa team on natural ice with straight steel blades and real wooden sticks.

The journal makes for ripping reading. Besides being a unique historical artefact, it describes the harrowing adventures of Yves and his siblings as they battle not just frostbite and seasickness, but also rival hockey teams, devious train conductors and Ottawa crime bosses. And all in the high stakes world of hockey, as the game changed from big fun to big business.

Yves’s tale is the fourth package of remarkable historical journals discovered hidden in various trunks and squirrel-proof tin boxes at the old Dutoit cabin at Marsh Lake, Yukon.

Building on the sensational discovery of his sister’s 1898 Chilkoot Pass diary (published as Aurore of the Yukon), this journal reveals startling and previously unknown facts about the 1905 Stanley Cup. Yves’s journal also sheds new light on Joe Boyle at the height of his King of the Klondike days, before he left the Yukon during World War One. Yves depicts the energy and intensity that would later lead to Boyle’s heroic feats as a British spy during the Russian revolution, where he stole entire trains, rescued aristocrats and won the heart of Queen Marie of Romania.

Our team of historians has done a minimum of editing. We have corrected some of Yves’s spelling, including modern spellings for place names. For example, Whitehorse instead of White Horse. However, all the newspaper clippings saved by Yves are reproduced as originally printed. All the photos and drawings found with the journal had a short note from Yves on the back. We have included these as captions under each one. Otherwise, the journal is how Yves left it when he put it in a sturdy Taylor & Drury tin box over one hundred years ago.

Yves’s descriptions of the Dawson City Amateur Athletic Association, Joe Boyle, the games in Ottawa and Sureshot Kennedy and the other famous 1905 hockey players are all consistent with historical sources. But some parts of his story cannot be confirmed, such as the existence of Black Jacques and Malamute Mike, the theft of the Stanley Cup and details of the exhilarating match on the frozen Rideau Canal.

We will leave that to readers, especially those who know—in Yves’s words—the sound a steel blade makes as it cuts into Yukon river ice.

Professor H. I. Story

Whitehorse, Yukon Territory

2009

Flycatcher Morris drops the ballMy journal # 1

Dawson City, Yukon Territory

August 28, 1904

Strange things are done under the midnight sun, as Mr. Service at Papa’s bank in Whitehorse always says.

Well, seeing Flycatcher Morris drop that baseball was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. And that means something coming from a boy who hiked the Chilkoot Pass in the middle of the world’s wildest gold rush.

It was the biggest game of the Dawson baseball season and baseball is pretty much the biggest thing in the Klondike. Not counting hockey and gold, of course.

If the Colts beat the Idyll Hour team they would clinch the Yukon pennant. The Colts were down by one run and there were already two outs, but they had three men on base.

Sureshot Kennedy stepped up to the plate. He wiped the sweat from his brow and looked up at the scorching Klondike sun. He watched two pitches go by.

Sheriff Vossler, who the Dawson Daily News called the Colts’ president, chief rooter and mascot, shifted nervously on the sidelines and looked out towards Flycatcher in left field. Jimmy Blackball Houlihan, the nastiest boy in the Klondike, was biting his nails and looking out to left field too. Blackball had been the youngest member of Soapy Smith’s gang. But the judge took it easy on him since he was so young, which was pretty much the worst decision in the Yukon since those guys sold that million dollar claim to the Lucky Swede for eight hundred bucks.

Out in left field, Flycatcher also looked nervous, and fiddled with his glove.

Sureshot winked at Miss Beam in the crowd and dug in his feet for the next pitch. His eyes narrowed as he watched the ball roll off the pitcher’s hand. It was a fastball, hard and straight. I knew he would swing, and he did.

Crack! The crowd gasped. Everyone jumped to their feet. The ball soared into the sun. Miss Beam fainted and fell over, but no one even looked at her.

There was total silence.

Then the ball sagged. You could tell it wouldn’t make the fence.

The Colts’ boosters moaned as the ball headed to left field and Flycatcher Morris. Flycatcher had the sweetest ball-hands in the Klondike. He could juggle balls or broken bottles. During last winter’s axe throwing competition, I saw him catch a flying axe with a laugh. The Colts on base didn’t even try to run. They just turned and started walking off the field. Cecil MacGuinty, the accountant at the Good Samaritan Hospital, jumped to his feet and shrieked yeehah! like he’d struck it rich on Eldorado Creek.

Flycatcher jogged towards the ball and lifted his glove easily, as he had so many times before.

But then he stopped. His glove arm swung down limply by his side.

And the ball bounced right off his head.

I couldn’t believe it. Neither could anyone else. We just stared. Then the screaming, cheering and cursing started with a roar. Someone finally shouted Miss Beam’s fainted! and we gathered round to brush the dirt off her puffy white dress and sit her up on a chair in the shade.

Did we win? she gasped weakly as half the miners in the Yukon fanned her with their hats. The other half kept arguing as Sureshot rounded the bases.

Sureshot ran up with a glass of water, acting like a knight on a white horse, and offered it to Miss Beam. He had a Gosh, did I score the winning run again? sort of look on his face.

Miss Beam smiled at him sweetly as she held the glass to her lips with dainty, white hands. You’d never have guessed that those hands held the stick that broke Miss Burkholder’s ankle in ladies hockey last winter.

My brother Kip and I left the arguing miners and retreated to the bleachers out by left field. We passed people celebrating and other people cursing. We saw Mr. MacGuinty standing by the fence with Blackball.

I thought we had it for sure, said Mr. MacGuinty, shaking his head and putting a mittful of money into Blackball’s hand.

Blackball tried not to smile. Hope you have better luck at the hospital, he said, folding the cash deftly with one hand and stuffing it into his inside pocket.

We found our hockey sticks under the bleacher where we’d left them. Before watching the baseball game, we’d been in the sun playing dirt hockey with our pals behind the new rink over by Queen Street. We play hockey so much that people call us the Dawson Ice Rats.

Baseball is fun, but it doesn’t compare to hockey. Even at the baseball championships, most of the people had been talking about how the Dawson hockeyists had just challenged Ottawa for the Stanley Cup.

Kip and I were thirsty and tired. We slid into the shade under the bleachers and stretched out our shirtless bodies on the cool Klondike dirt. It’s not often you have to hide from the Yukon sun. But the midnight sun lived up to its name that summer. It seemed to be glaring down on us around the clock through the dry, blue Yukon sky.

The day of the Colts game was the hottest of the whole summer. It was just like Australia, but with sun-bathing gophers instead of kangaroos.

Kip and I were darkly tanned, from the tops of our bare feet to the backs of our necks. My legs had rings of dirt on them, showing how many times I’d waded in the Yukon River that day.

Kip rubbed the Dawson dust on the back of his neck and looked at me. Yves, there are only two seasons in the Yukon… he began.

Ice hockey and dirt hockey, I finished. With a few days of mud hockey in between, but they don’t really count. It was a joke we’d been making all summer. Every day we’d pick sides, with one team pretending to be the Klondike champions and the other a big team from Outside. Sometimes the bad guys were the Montreal Wanderers, the Toronto Marlboroughs or the Winnipeg Victorias. But usually the bad guys were the Ottawa Silver Seven, with all the boys on the team pretending to be One-Eyed Frank McGee. Most people say there will never be a better hockey player than McGee.

Ottawa holds the Stanley Cup right now. A British lord named Stanley bought it for just fifty dollars, but now it’s the most famous trophy in the entire country. It’s supposed to go to the best hockey team in Canada. It’s a challenge cup. That means the top team from any city in Canada can challenge the cup-holders for it, which is exactly what the best hockeyists in Dawson had just done.

Kip seemed to be reading my mind. Do you think Ottawa will accept Dawson’s challenge?

They have to. That’s how Lord Stanley set it up. Sheriff Vossler, Joe Boyle and all the big shots say so. Dawson’s a major city now. Plus, you know how much hockey talent is here. All kinds of famous players came north during the gold rush. Like Weldy Young!

Kip thought about this for a moment. Once we get the Stanley Cup in Dawson, the rules say all the teams will have to come here to challenge for it. Can you imagine? Seeing the Wanderers or Ottawa play at the Dawson rink?

Maybe. But Ottawa has already whipped Montreal, Toronto and Brandon. Not to mention Rat Portage and Winnipeg. The team will have to play better than you did today to beat Ottawa.

Hey! I got a hat-trick.

I twisted you into a pretzel that last time I went around you. If you’d been wearing socks, I would’ve double-dodged you right out of them!

Kip may be bigger than me, but he’s a sucker for my double-dodge. Kip punched me playfully on the arm and held something up. It was a nickel.

We both smiled.

Kip’s actually my step-brother, but he’s not the evil kind of step-brother you find in most books. In fact, at that very moment, he was planning to spend his last nickel on a shaved ice for us to share.

That’s when we heard footsteps crunch up beside the bleacher. I squinted into the bright light from under the bleachers. I could see a pair of shiny, new baseball shoes. In them were two skinny legs wrapped tightly in Colts socks. Above the knees, the baseball britches quickly expanded to surround a pair of mammoth thighs and a very unathletic rear end.

It was Sheriff Vossler. And Blackball was right beside him.

Blackball handed something to the Sheriff. Cecil MacGuinty’s poke, laughed Blackball.

I looked at Kip, who raised an eyebrow. Blackball was more than just a boyhood rival, as Mr. Service called it. He was an enemy. Ever since we met him on the Chilkoot Pass, when he helped Soapy Smith’s gang steal every last cent Maman had.¹

I remembered when the judge let him go, saying he was just a wayward youth in need of guidance. Blackball had just laughed. And since then he loves nothing more than tormenting people, especially my sisters and me. He steals tuques and hockey sticks. He throws iceballs when you aren’t looking. He calls us frogs because we are French Canadian and he mercilessly bullies the native kids in town.

You have to be careful not to get caught alone by him and his friends. Especially if you are small like me. It’s even worse now that Blackball is working in Sheriff Vossler’s office. Despite the Sheriff’s talk about rehabilitating Blackball, he’s cockier and mouthier than ever before.

Just then, another pair of feet jogged up. These ones were wearing Idyll Hour socks.

The Sherriff slapped Blackball on the shoulder.