Have you ever wondered where modern ice hockey came from? This six-page essay uncovers the untold story of the game’s true origins, tracing its roots back to no earlier than the winter of 1749-50 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, when English settlers first encountered the Mi’kmaq people playing a game on ice. This pivotal moment, arguably the most significant in the history of 18th-century Ice Hockey, marks the birth of the stick game that would evolve into the modern version of ice hockey we know today.
Click here to read A Brief History of Early Ice Hockey
A century later, around 1863, Halifax hockey players created a superior version of the game, built on Dartmouth’s revolutionary Acme skate and the flat-bladed Mi’kmaq stick. For a decade, their game evolved largely unseen by the rest of Canada until 1872, when James Creighton introduced this refined version of ice hockey to Montrealers. Given their response, this moment is arguably the most important episode in 19th-century Ice Hockey history.
Through Montreal’s promotion and the insatiable demand for Halifax hockey technologies—or their imitations—this Halifax-Montreal, Canadian-Mi’kmaq version of ice hockey rapidly spread around Montreal and then across Canada, eventually becoming the nation’s official game through the 1892 introduction of the Stanley Cup.
The end result was a version of hockey on ice that was based on a fusion of Halifax’s dominant technologies and Montreal’s ever-evolving (AHAC) rules that eventually conquered all other versions of “ice hockey” in North America and Europe. This produced an ever-evolving technological-legislative template that has been adopted by all subsequent versions of modern Ice Hockey, globally, in a story that dates back no further than the winter of 1949-50 in present-day Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Mark Grant
The Four Stars of Early Ice Hockey 