The following concerns a letter that was written in 1943 by an Indigenous Mi’kmaw hockey player named Joe Cope. Cope confirms that he played 10-man hockey with Byron Weston and others. Weston was a former president of the Dartmouth Amateur Athletic Association, a former mayor of Dartmouth and a Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge.
Weston had described Halifax’s hockey rules in the 1860s, prior to the time that his childhood friend introduced their game to Montreal in 1872 or 1873. Joe Cope’s confirmation of his involvement with Weston and others like James Creighton is surely one of the more definitive documents in early ice hockey history. It proves that Halifax hockey was a hybrid indigenous-colonial game.
This was Montreal’s inheritance: an evolutionarily dominant version of ‘hockey’ that cannot be explained by birthing scenarious that only mention Europe or North America. I have included both source documents on a single pdf file here. 
The Four Stars of Early Ice Hockey 
