By Davy Crockett

Both a podcast and a full article

As the Great Depression began raging across the world, race events for professional ultrarunners pretty much dried up in the United States. All professional sports suffered in America during that time. For a few years, promoters in Canada filled the void, and were able to attract some of the most talented American ultrarunners to head northward, to run in their races.

One such race was the 1930 Peter Dawson Relay held in the province of Quebec. This was one of those forgotten races that deserves a place in the history of ultrarunning. Both New York and Boston bid for the race but it was awarded to Quebec. It included many of the greatest American ultrarunners of that time. Most of them have been totally forgotten and all have now passed away, but some of them lived into the 1980s and 1990s.



Please consider becoming a patron of ultrarunning history. Help to preserve this history by signing up to contribute a little each month through Patreon. Visit https://ultrarunninghistory.com/member





The race participants were an interesting breed. They had a passion for endurance running and enjoyed the attention it gave them. Most of the American entrants in the relay had run together for many weeks in 1928 or 1929, racing across America in C.C. Pyle’s "Bunion Derbies," They knew each other well. Several of the Canadians had competed against each other at a 200-mile “Green Stripe” snowshoe race held the previous winter, an event that caught the imagination and attention of Quebec and elsewhere.

The Race Formation

Armand Vincent

The 1930 Peter Dawson Relay was organized by sports promoter, Armand Vincent (1900-1948). He was a well-known boxing promoter in Quebec. The race involved teams of two runners each, using a similar relay format that was popular at the time for six-day bicycle races. A description of the race included, “Unlike the man-killing Pyle 1928-29 marathon races across America which saw individual runners plodding along wearily the width of the continent, the Peter Dawson event will be raced in relays. The relay arrangement ensures more sustained and greater speed, a far more testing race.” The distance for the race was planned for about 500 miles, in daily stages, for eight days. The top runners would average running the entire distance at nearly six-minute-mile pace. Rules for each stage would determine how often the runners were allowed to switch off with their teammate.

The race was set for July 1930 by the sponsors, Samuel and Allan Bronfman of the Distillers Corporation of Montreal. Yes, it was sponsored by a liquor company during the period of prohibition in America. These two businessmen had successfully put on the Great Stripe International Swimming Marathon in 1929 and the 1930 Green Stripe 200-mile six-stage snowshoe race from Quebec City to Montreal. The sponsors named this running event, “Peter Dawson,” after a popular brand of Whisky. They had made a fortune exporting alcohol to the United States during the prohibition years, which wasn’t against the law to do in Canada.

The start was set to start in Montreal. The course would follow roads, mostly dirt at that time, making a giant circle within the Quebec Province. For the last stage, a marathon (26.2 miles) was planned to be held in the large baseball stadium at Montreal.
It is important to put this and other ultradistances races of the time it their proper historical perspective. These runners were true trail ultrarunners who ran dirt roads. They would not be running six-minute-miles on nice smooth paved roads, they were running on rutted dirt roads that went over hills and became muddy. Several of these runners had already run up and over mountains, running across America -- twice. Many had recently run against horses for hundreds of miles and beat them. Think about the inaccurate claim that was told in recent decades,