“Powerful athletic looking” young
men have a way of getting into the media and this is what happened in Malone,
NY in September 1869. The Malone
Palladium carried a story about two Mohawk lacrosse teams passing through
Malone on a train from Canada headed for New York City. The athletes were on
their way to play an exhibition game at Jones’s Wood, a resort for working
class New Yorkers on the Upper East Side, in the vicinity of present day 66th
to 75th Streets on the banks of the East River.
Readers
in Malone may not have appreciated it at the time, but they were reading about a
significant event in American sports history. An exciting “new” sport was
beginning its invasion of the nation through New York State.
Jean
de Brebeuf, a French Jesuit missionary in Canada, first documented lacrosse for
Europeans in 1636. The game got its name from early French settlers who saw
Mohawks playing the game with a curved stick, a “crosse” in French, and a ball.
During the early nineteenth century, English-speaking athletes in Montreal
began organizing amateur clubs and adopting written rules and in 1859, Canada
made lacrosse its official game. Because of lacrosse’s popularity, it soon spread
south to the United States.
Mohawk
and Canadian teams introduced the game to sports enthusiasts in New York City,
Queens and Brooklyn, which sparked the formation of lacrosse clubs in what would
become the New York metropolitan area. Newspapers touted the game as one that
could easily rival the rapidly growing sport of baseball for fan allegiance.
![]() |
The 1908 Columbia University lacrosse team. Library of Congress. |
Sports
writers generated interest in the new sport by writing stories about lacrosse
action that appealed to a wide variety of people. Some stories extolled speed,
endurance, strategy and ball handling skill. Others raved about mayhem,
crushing blows and spurting blood. When all the excitement was added together,
what more could a Gilded Age sports fan want to see?
Fans
began to flock to lacrosse games that were played on polo fields, racetracks
and baseball diamonds. In 1871, at the height of the August horse racing season
in Saratoga Springs, promoters hosted a lacrosse match between “the champion
red men of Canada and the champion white men of the world” at the Glen Mitchell
resort hotel.
Victoria,
Queen of the United Kingdom, gave lacrosse a huge boost by attending a lacrosse
game between two visiting Mohawk teams in Windsor, England in 1876.
The
highlight of the 1878 lacrosse season was a tournament played in Gilmore’s
Gardens, soon to become the first Madison Square Garden, in Manhattan. Four
teams competed for a silver cup that had been especially made for the event by
Tiffany & Co. They included a Mohawk team that had just returned from
playing in England, an Onondaga team from Syracuse, the Ravenswood Lacrosse
Club in Queens, and a team from New York University, the first college in the
U.S. to establish a lacrosse team.
![]() |
Early twentieth century college lacrosse teams. Library of Congress. |
By
1879, the lacrosse invasion of New York State and the nation was complete.
Delegates from eleven lacrosse clubs met at the Astor House in Manhattan to
form the United States National Amateur Lacrosse Association.
Today,
lacrosse is arguably the fastest growing team sport in the U.S. Teams from New
York State are perennial powerhouses in Division I men’s lacrosse. They
include: Cornell, which won the first NCAA championship in 1971; Syracuse,
perhaps the most dominant college lacrosse team in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, Army, Albany, St. Johns, Hobart, Marist, Colgate and
Hofstra.
The
harbingers of modern American lacrosse were the “powerful athletic looking”
Mohawk lacrosse players on the train in Malone, headed south for New York City,
in September 1869.
fascinating!
ReplyDeleteWho knew
Thank you for sharing this review with us. I'm looking for an article that is very interesting and it tackled the new york sport club. Like your article, it is very nice and informative blog. I've learned a lot about the Lacrosse and my friends knows about this. Keep sharing!.
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