The Vitally Important Joe Cope- Byron Weston connection

These documents are perhaps the two most misquoted and generally ignored primary source documents in 19th century hockey history.

Their immense importance is two-fold. First, they prove that the settlers of Halifax and Dartmouth and the Mi’kmaw who lived there played together. This proves that ‘the stick game that became Ice Hockey’ before being transferred to Montreal was a uniquely Canadian-Mi’kmaq game.

This testimonials deserve first consideration, before all other pre-Montreal versions of hockey, since hockey historians know very well that Byron Weston knew James Creighton, the father of Montreal hockey, from the age of 10.

This image shows how these two 1943 articles relate to each other, in the boxed areas. They can be found in singular, larger forms in our Source Documents section.