against teams from Ottawa. They had a good baseball field, a splendid fairgrounds, and, even as far back as 1907, they had a very good indoor hockey and skating rink. The rink, which was in a substantial building, was situated on the Desert River Road, midway between the two villages. As a matter of fact, it was the first of three closed links built on the same spot. Two of them burned down.

      I think it might be in order here to recall some of the more prominent players of that era. In hockey, there were the Gilmours (Billie, Suddie, and Ward), Jim Nault, Redmond Daly, Jim Quaile, Mike Lawless, Wally Lawless, Bob Mooney, Gray Masson, Lionel Bonhomme, Fred Rochon, Joe Gendron, et cetera, et cetera. The quality of hockey played in that era was of very high caliber. It was a notable fact that Billie and Suddie Gilmour had both played for the Ottawa Silver Seven, the world's champions of that day. The other members of the Maniwaki Hockey Team were relatively good . ..

     Hockey at Maniwaki was perhaps more glamorous than the other sports. I believe one could divide the hockey of the early days into three separate eras. The first group, who played from about 1907 until about 1919, was comprised of Billie and Suddie

Gilmour, Mike Lawless, Fred Rochon, Redmond Daley, Joe McFaul, Bob Mooney, and Tresor Godbout. Their competition was mainly from Ottawa city teams. The Valley teams of that day were must not good enough to compete. During all of this period Jim Donovan was the referee, and sometimes the visiting teams didn't get the best of the decisions. The second era, which lasted from 1920 until 1926, was graced by such players as Ward Gilmour, Charlie Logue, Jim Nault, Wally Lawless, Jim Quaile, and Lionel Bonhomme. This group, with the exception of Wally Lawless, had previously played senior hockey in either the Montreal or the Ottawa City League. I have forgotten to mention Gray Masson, who played for Maniwaki for four years. Gray, Jim Nault, and Ward Gilmour had previously played in the Ottawa City League. Jim Quaile had played with McGill University in the Intercollegiate, and Charlie Logue had played for Loyola College in Montreal. They were no mean group of hockey players and could entertain fast company. They had some illustrious years and brought great credit to the town.
      The third era, with which I was associated, lasted from 1927 until 1934. Some of the better-known players in this group were Joe Gendron, Jim Quaile, Ken Taylor, Doc Luduc, Gerard Hubert, Joe Joanis, Truman Raymond, Leo Lacroix, Paul Valliancourt, Tommy Westwick, Bob Forest, Wally Lawless, Ray Lawless, Skip Britt, and Allan Lauriault. Perhaps the most successful year was 1933, when Maniwaki won the championship of the Gatineau, beat Shawville, the Pontiac champions, and then went on to meet Brockville, who were champions of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence districts.

Frank Finnigan also fondly remembered his early career as a hockey player in The Valley, recalling in this interview his first "away" game when the Shawville team crossed the frozen Ottawa River to play Westmeath:

       When I was growing up in Shawville, there were no organized teams on all levels — peewee, junior, intermediate, senior, that sort of thing — the way it is today. But we lived hockey — and without any padding. Hockey on the creeks, hockey on the ponds, hockey on the rivers, hockey on the road — if necessary. We even flooded the Cowan's big black shed and made the first "covered" rink in Shawville. That was before Shawville built the first covered arena in all of Pontiac County. It held 300 standing up and was lit with coal oil lamps overhead. We used to shoot them out, partly for practice, and partly so the other team could see so poorly they'd lose. Of course, we cut off our own noses to spite our faces. But we were young and didn't know any better. Besides, we'd do anything to win. Anything.
       Without any organized leagues, we were always looking to throw down a challenge for a game, any chance we got, to Bryson, Campbell's Bay, Portage-du-Fort, Quyon, anything within range because, remember, there were no cars in those days; players either went by horse and sleigh or by train — if they could afford it — and that was seldom. Remember, we are talking about times when many kids didn't have skates because their parents couldn't buy them and when even buying a new stick was a budgeting problem. That's how I learned to only use one stick a year and I continued that even when I was in the National Hockey League playing for the Ottawa Senators and the Toronto Maple Leafs.
       I was only twelve, the youngest on the team, when the big challenge came from across the Ottawa River from Westmeath, Ontario, to play a game there. If you know your geography of The Valley at all, that meant taking the train up to Fort Coulonge, Quebec, crossing the Ottawa River by ice and then traveling into Westmeath. The Shawville team was called Cy's Pets, after Cy Hodgins who did some of the financing — Shawville was the center of a large prosperous English Protestant farming community — and most of the businessmen were hockey crazy. Besides, most of them were my relatives. We were the pride of Shawville, a very proud town anyhow, and the merchants had outfitted us all out in fine hockey sweaters with socks to match. Some of us even had the expensive fifty cent hockey sticks.
       I remember my teammates so well — Hoddy Rennick, Albert Chisnell, Art Turriff, Archie Dagg, Lyal Hodgins, Rock Findlay, Clark Cowan, all dead now, except me. All fine fellows.
       Well that January night in 1913 we were pretty excited, I tell you, as we got on that train all together at 7:15 sharp, headed up the Ottawa Valley to Fort Coulonge. A big dangerous journey for young lads, you know. Clark Cowan's mother wasn't even going to let him go. But then she was like that. Never let go. None of them married, you know. We had to pull him onto the train by one leg. She was holding on to the other. She even brought some heated bricks to the train to keep her son warm on this terrifying journey into the arctic of upriver. Poor Clark! He turned scarlet in front of the team. We felt for him — being sissified that way. But young boys are cruel too. After that we dubbed him "Precious" — and he had to beat some of us up for that.
       Willie Hodgins, my uncle — all the Hodgins are related to me, you know, all fifty thousand of them now scattered across the country — went with us. He owned the hardware store in Shawville, and he was along to keep us all in line and to see that we had a safe journey.
       At the Fort Coulonge station we were met by a flat sleigh and team of horses driven by a hockey buff from Westmeath come to pick us up. In the dark of the moonless night we drove through Fort Coulonge and out onto the wide, dark, deep Ottawa River to do a two-mile crossing to the Ontario side. It wasn't the first time I had gone to and from a hockey game in the dark night of the wintertime in The Valley. Sometimes it was so cold, you'd get off and run behind the sleigh to keep warm, to keep your feet from freezing before the game. Remember in those days we didn't have wind-proof, arctic-proof, weather-proof, rain-proof garb and gear. Just your long johns, a flannel shirt, and whatever kind of jacket your parents could afford, or that turned up in the stores in town that year. The worst part on a cold winter's night was the return journey after a game. You'd worked up a real sweat during the game — remember in those days we were all Sixty Minute Men — we had no subs — and then you'd get on the sleigh in wet, damp,

sweaty clothes, and your teeth would start to chatter and you'd start to shake, and the chills would set in, and, even worn out from playing a whole game, the only way to survive was to get off and run behind the sleigh. Sometimes there were buffalo robes — if we were lucky — and you'd crawl under those and continue shivering. I often wonder how we didn't die of pneumonia. But we were young and tough, then.
This special night of the Westmeath game was, yes, during January, the heart of winter, but during a January thaw, and that warm, unnatural soft wind was blowing about us. And that poses all kinds of problems for crossing the Ottawa on the ice. It means melt. And sure enough, as we descended onto the river and began the journey across on the ice bridge, we found that there was at least a foot of water on the ice surface. Maybe two. Scary.
     We grew silent and hung onto our hockey sticks tight, listening to the sleigh bells in the wind, and the jingle of the harness, and the muffled sound of the horses hooves, drowned in slush. The driver was silent, too, intent upon watching the ice bridge and keeping within the markers set up for travelers from the Quebec side to the Ontario side.
      We thought of all the stories we had heard back home of ice bubbles and horses, sleighs and men going down. We thought of the drowning of the Downey Boys through the ice, all four of them. But we were young warriors going to war and, although we were scared into cocoons of silence, we knew it might happen to others but never to us.

      When we got to the Westmeath rink, we quickly laced on our skates and jumped on the ice for a warm-up that was really a warm up. But the Junior team, for some reason or other, perhaps they were afraid of us — didn't show at all. So some of the townsfolk, feeling badly about our long journey and the let down, scrambled around town and picked up members of the Westmeath Senior team. Guys fifteen, sixteen, even seventeen. It was 10:30 by the time we got the game started. Naturally, we lost. But only by a score of 7-3. It was one o'clock by the time we finished the game, and the diehards went home to their warm beds.
      Sweating, clammy, and tired, we climbed back onto the flat sleigh and drove back across the ice bridge to Fort Coulonge where we were billeted in the old Fort Coulonge Hotel, the Pearson, which has since burned down. Even hungry and thirsty, we were so tired we just fell onto the beds in our damp clothes. Uncle Willie forced us to undress and got us some extra blankets from the hotel-keeper.
      But I was still so high from the game 1 couldn't sleep at first and lay under the blankets, trying to stop shivering and thinking of the ghosts in the room. For, you see, Fort Coulonge was a big lumbering town — it still is to this day — a big rough lumbering town, and I knew that all the lumbering giants like the Seven Frost Brothers of Pembroke, and Mountain Jack Thomson of Portage-du-Fort, and the timber barons like Gillies and Bryson and Fraser had all stayed over in this hotel. Jesus! I thought as I fell asleep, maybe Big Joe Mufferaw even slept in this bed!
      That was my first "away" game. We were only twelve to fourteen years old. But we had become MEN over night. We had gone, all expenses paid, to meet the adversary and stayed at the Pearson Hotel. I didn't know then that years later I was to share space in the great hotels of North America with my teetotalling teammate Frank "King" Clancy, and with fans who were to become my friends, like multi-millionaire Harry McLean of "Mr. X" fame.
      When I was a little older we had our revenge on the West-meath Senior team. We went back to their town and beat them soundly. I cannot remember that winning score. I think in those beginning days 1 just remembered the scores of games we lost, and plotted return victories.

W.J. Conroy of Aylmer, Quebec, a descendant of the Conroy lumbering family, recalls another classic Ottawa Valley hockey rivalry, in this case between Aylmer and Shawville:

      And Aylmer was a hockey town. I think of the well-known ones like Frank Finnigan; he was at Shawville. I played hockey up in Shawville myself and it used to be a rough place. They came down to Aylmer one time, a team from Shawville — they were all about six-foot-four inches, you know — and they came down here and they played the Aylmer Seniors, and they gave them a pretty rough time in Aylmer, you see. So we were invited up to Proudfoot's Hotel in Shawville, and it was a new hotel at the time. Well, the Seniors wouldn't go back; they wanted to know if we were crazy to go up there and get killed. So we picked up a bunch of the Intermediates. We were pretty young and stupid too. Shawville really worked us over.
      After the game we went into the Shawville restaurant and we ordered ham and eggs and these bottles of pink soda pop for everybody who was in there. I don't know whose idea it was, but anyway none of us had any money because we were still in our hockey clothes, you see. We had rooms in Proudfoot's Hotel. So somebody started to sing in French, "Open the door and we'll all run out," and, of course, everybody from Aylmer understood, but the fellows up there in Shawville didn't. So all of a sudden somebody opened the door and everybody took off for the hotel and we charged into the hotel and ran up the stairs. We had some pretty fat players, you know, and I can remember one fellow ran under the bed to hide and the next couple of guys who came up jumped on the bed, and the bed broke and nearly decapitated the fellow underneath. Proudfoot wanted to put us out in the middle of the night. But, anyway, I remember in the morning we got out and went down to get on the train, and we all had our pads on and we were carrying our sticks and everything. We were still armed and we never undressed all night.
      Behind the scenes, in villages, towns, and burgeoning cities the wealthy, powerful, and influential were gathered to raise money to fund their hockey teams, to buy equipment, to improve rinks, to pay travel expenses, to boost players salaries. We have only an inkling of the intensity of the betting on games in those days, for obviously most of it was unrecorded. But, on occasion, teams were accused of playing to lose because of bets that had been placed beforehand. When Haileybury met Cobalt for The Stanley Cup in the last N.H.A. game of 1910, famous mining magnate Noah Timmins, the Haileybury sponsor, was said to have bet $50,000 on the outcome. Haileybury won 14-9, and we have to presume that, in the manner of the rich getting richer, Timmins collected his bets.

This landmark game is worth evoking. At half-time the score was tied. Timmins burst info the dressing room of the Haileybury team and offered a thousand dollars to the lad who would score the tiebreaker and win the game, a game with surely one of the most bizarre endings in the history of Canadian hockey, as described by H. Roxborough in his book The Stanley Cup Story:

       The tension in the arena was unbearable. Both teams had game-winning scoring chances but goalies Chief Jones of Cobalt and Billy Nicholson of Haileybury came up with brilliant saves. Finally Art Ross passed to Horace Gaul who shot the puck past Jones. Haileybury had won!

       From the galleries crowded with Cobalt supporters, there came cries of despair. Suddenly from the weight of humanity, the railing collapsed; many fans tumbled fifteen feet to the ice and some were so seriously injured that they had to be taken to hospital on sleighs.

        As if that were not climactic enough, the hysteria continued.

       Winning fans showered pennies, dimes, quarters, even dollars on the ice. The air was filled with money and the players were trying to catch their floating fortune on the fly.

But Billy Nicholson somehow had obtained a tub and any money iced in his vicinity was quickly snared and "tubbed." When he could find no more loot, and the sweat was pouring from his brow, he calmly turned the tub and its contents upside down and sat on it so that no one could dislodge him or the

money. How much money he collected Billy never admitted. But there were guesses that he wouldn't have to work for a long time.
Those early years of the N.H.A. and N.H.L. were filled with colorful, eccentric players like Bad Joe Hall, and Harry Smith, who played for Cobalt and who used his hockey stick as much as a weapon as anything else. In a game between Cobalt and the Renfrew Millionaires, Larry Gilmour, who doubled as the team manager when he wasn't playing, was the victim of Harry Smith's free-wheeling stick. The situation worsened in the next game when Cobalt played against its arch enemy Haileybury. Players kept hitting the ice, recipients of Smith's well-aimed and foul blows. The Police Chief, Paddy Collins, was summoned to arrest Smith and take him to jail. In spite of Smith's below-the-belt tactics, Cobalt won 7-6.
      Cornwall was another Valley town which contributed a wealth of outstanding athletes to big-time hockey in Canada, players such as Edouard "Newsy" Lalonde, "Cy" and Corbett Denneny, Carson Cooper, Perce McAteer, the Constant and the Penny Brothers.
       "Hurl" and "Shinny" preceded organized hockey on the ponds and waterways of Cornwall. These games were founded on the principle of "every man for himself as hundreds of skaters would collect on the ice to chase a rubber ball for hours at a time without any semblance of timing, rules, team play.
       Adjacent to the old curling rink on First Street, Cornwall's first hockey rink was open air with two large trees growing out of

the playing area. However, there exists no record of any player being seriously injured during play around them.
      Early entrepreneur John Snetsinger built the first covered rink on the north side of Fourth Street near Pitt. Snetsinger's toboggan slide at the side of the rink carried tobogganers through a field in the rear of Gillies' Foundry, across Fifth Street and out onto Fly Creek.

     Morrisburg was Cornwall's first hockey foe in lively games with Billy Peacock in goal and Billy Adams, Billy Turner, Arthur Mattice, Fred MacLennan, John Milden, George Pettit, Fred Degan, and James Cameer in the lineup. Stuart Rayside of Lancaster and Randy McLennan of Williamstown donned Cornwall uniforms during the holiday season when they were home from university. This team was good enough to hold down

both the champion Winnipeg hockey team and the famed Montreal Shamrocks to tie scores in exhibition games.
      Cornwall then joined the Ontario Hockey Association with Jack Hunter, Fred Degan, George Stiles, Harlow Stiles, Whitely Eastwood, Aeneas MacMillan, and Angus Allen making up the 1900-1901 team. In 1903 the same team was still in action with only one change made when Stronach Warwick replaced Fred Degan.
      This team figured in two contests against the famous Wellingtons of Toronto for the Senior Championship of the Ontario Hockey Association. In the first of the home-and-home games, played in Toronto, Cornwall held the Wellingtons to a 3-3 lie. But in the second game, played at Cornwall, the Wellingtons won what old-timers called afterwards "some of the stiffest competitions ever witnessed in Cornwall." The Wellingtons defeated Cornwall by a 3-2 score and then lost the round to the Toronto team in the third game, 6-5. The Wellingtons thus won the John Ross Robertson Trophy. For that contest John Ross Robertson himself had traveled from Toronto with the Wellingtons to see the playoffs in a place of honor in the upper gallery of the old Victoria Rink, seat of the Cornwall teams until its destruction by fire in 1933.
       For some reason lost in the mists of time, Cornwall seceded from the O.H.A. and joined the old Federal Hockey League

where they played against such teams as Ottawa's Montagnards and the Montreal Wanderers. In succeeding years Cornwall won both the Senior and Junior Citizen Shields in the Ottawa Valley Hockey League. In the St. Lawrence League, Cornwall Canadiens carried off honors again.
      In addition to the Dennenys and the Lalondes, among the Cornwall hockey aces who learned the game at home and then migrated to other towns and cities to make names for themselves in other leagues and higher places were Guy Smith, Donald Smith, George Penny, James Penny, William Penny, Arthur Kinghorn, Bill Cote, Percy MacAteer, George Harrington, George Anderson, Farrand Gillie, Fred Sugden, Mickie DeGray, Ernest Goudie, Leonard Goudie, Albert Lefebvre, Lindsay Langevin, Arthur Daye, Hugh Graveley, Malcolm Upper, Leonard Hurley, Aaron Watson, Jake Stacey, Fred Gillard, Whiteley Eastwood, William Provost, George Fitzgerald, Cyril Dextras, Eddie Aoslet, Ralph Tilton, Clarence Gallinger, Roscoe Lane, Charles Larose, Charles Laroche, Arthur Contant, and Joseph Contant.

      The formation in 1010 of the Creamery Boys or, as they came to be called, the Renfrew Millionaires, probably was the peak event of early hockey in The Valley before the game moved to the big cities and took on its truly professional hockey league face.
       At the turn of the century Ottawa Valley money began to turn its eye to hockey. Whether out of contagious hockey mania, eccentric millionaire's whim, or as a means of making more money, the mining O'Briens and lumbering Barnets of Renfrew began to whisper amongst themselves about forming a challenge team for The Stanley Cup. Kenora (Ontario), New Glasgow (Nova Scotia), Dawson City (Yukon) had all done it. Why not Renfrew?
       Alexander Barnet, scion of the Barnet lumbering dynasty, came out from Ireland about 1840 on a sailing ship and settled at a hamlet back of Renfrew called Ashdad. There he attempted to set up a feudal system as the last Laird Macnab had successfully done down the road at White Lake and Waba. When Barnet's plans with both Irish and Polish immigrants didn't work out, he turned his entrepreneurial talents to timber; at the age of sixteen he took his first raft of squared pine to Quebec City where, with the profits, he bought his mother a Spanish silk shawl but presumably kept enough to plow back into his lumbering enterprise. Barnet worked his timber limits from 1890 until 1916 and became one of the major lumber operators in Canada with cutting rights all through the Ottawa Valley and mills at New Westminster, British Columbia. By the time Big Money in the Ottawa Valley was looking to invest in professional hockey, the third generation of Barnets was living on the amassed fortunes of its lumbering businesses, fortunes uncounted and probably inestimable until 1911 when income tax was ushered in.
       In 1879 Michael James O'Brien, a Maritimer, walked through the bush to Calabogie Lake and there met a man named Jim Barry working in his fields with a team of horses. In the authentic manner of a true Horatio Alger, O'Brien had begun as a water boy for the construction gang working on the "Kick and Push" Railway line from Kingston to Pembroke and was looking at the contract to finish the line to Renfrew. He had walked up the already surveyed right-of-way from Lanark in order to estimate the lie of the land and the problems he would have to cope with laying the rail line. On the Barry farm he met more than he bargained for — his

future wife, Jennie Barry. They were married in Renfrew at St. Francis Xavier Church, 1883. O'Brien, as a contractor, went on to build parts of the Intercontinental Railway all over Canada, including the North Shore Line of the CPR between Montreal and Ottawa, the K&P Line, and lines in the Maritime provinces. M. J. was away from home most of the time, but built Jennie a substantial house on Barr Street in Renfrew where she wished to stay. The servants were hired and the babies were born. Because Ottawa and Montreal were his business centers, M. J. began to use the Russell Hotel in Ottawa and the Queen's Hotel in Montreal as his homes away from home. His eldest son, Ambrose, was initiated at an early age into the mysteries of the O'Brien involvement in lumbering and construction, and later mining.
       By 1901 O'Brien had begun to look to new challenges in mining. He had been appointed a commissioner of the Temi-skaming and Northern Ontario Railway which then terminated at North Bay but was planned for extension northwards. Presumably this time spent in the north exposed O'Brien to mining talk and miners' meetings in Toronto. At one of these Toronto dinners, M. J. O'Brien met J.R. Booth, one of Canada's most famous financial entrepreneurs and "King of the Timber Barons," with whom O'Brien was later to become part owner of a large nickel property near Sudbury.
      It was on one of these Toronto trips in 1903 where circumstances combined to make M. J. one of Canada's richest men, sometimes earning a million dollars a year. The full story of the O'Brien Mine at Cobalt has never been clarified. But it involved a fire ranger named King who sold O'Brien his Cobalt claims for $4,000 and a blacksmith named Fred Larose who sold his claims to the Timmins Brothers, the McMartin brothers, and David Dunlap jointly. The Big Cobalters, as they came to be called, O' Brien and Timmins fought a political-legal battle for years over the rights to the Cobalt silver mines.
       Nine months after the legal dust had cleared O'Brien proceeded to become one of the richest men in Canada. Indeed, it has been said that if he had never invested anywhere else in the country, the O'Brien mine at Cobalt would have made him a millionaire many times over.
       In the spring of 1907 a year or so after the Cobalt strike, the Toronto Telegram raised the ire of the populace of Renfrew, O'Brien's hometown, with stories on its sports pages.
     "And now Renfrew talks of challenging for The Stanley Cup," the Telegram said, "All because they have won a fence-corner league championship." A further report went on to say, "Renfrew has challenged for The Stanley Cup. Now don't laugh. If you never lived in a country town you don't know how seriously these people take themselves." The fence-corner league referred to was the Upper Ottawa Valley League with teams from Arnprior, Pembroke, and Renfrew, and the small-towners were taking themselves very seriously indeed. Towns much bigger than Renfrew did not have its array of millionaires and near-millionaires as residents.

      On December 18, 1908, a meeting was held in Renfrew and the decision made to form a professional hockey team. A few days later a meeting in Ottawa reorganized the Federal Hockey League with professional teams from Renfrew, Cornwall, Smith Falls, and Ottawa (the Senators.) Thomas Low, a local MP and later a minister in a Mackenzie King cabinet, was Renfrew representative. Jim Barnet was chosen vice-president and Ambrose O'Brien, M.J.'s son, executive member. Bill O'Brien (not related) was chosen as the Renfrew trainer and Bert Lindsay, professional goalkeeper, hired along with Larry Gilmour, Ernie Liffiton, and Bobby Rowe.
       Renfrew won the Federal League that winter but, for some reason or other, didn't challenge for The Stanley Cup. In March, 1909 when that team disbanded, only the four named originals were left to become the core of the new team when Renfrew made its grand entrance into big-time hockey the following season.
       O'Brien tended to be a man of mystery, non-communicative according to his family's memories of him, and never prone to leaving papers, diaries, records of his life, times, and fortunes. Indeed, biographers had to did deep to find out anything at all about his early years in Lochaber, Antigonish County, Nova Scotia. And certainly O'Brien's motives for backing a professional hockey team to bring The Stanley Cup to Renfrew are at the very least obscure. A new way of making money? Not likely for a man making millions out of his mining enterprises. A love of hockey? Perhaps. But Ambrose O'Brien said that his father never saw a hockey game in his life. A form of gambling heretofore not experienced? More likely as people like the Ahearns and Gormans of Ottawa could have told him a few decades later. In any case M.J. O'Brien hurled himself into making a championship team.
       In November, 1909, his son Ambrose was on business in La Tuque, Quebec, when he got a momentous telephone call from the Barnets in Renfrew.
       "There's going to be a big meeting in Montreal to form a new hockey league. Can you get there and see if you can get Renfrew in?" Ambrose was asked.
         And it was true. The Eastern Canada Hockey Association had met in Montreal with five teams represented — the Montreal Shamrocks, Montreal Nationals, Montreal Wanderers, Quebec, and Ottawa Senators, the holders of The Stanley Cup at that time.
        In a swift succession of November meetings in Montreal, Renfrew's application for a new franchise was refused and the Montreal Wanderers were cut out. Ambrose was sitting outside the conference room waiting for news when out of the meeting came Jimmy Gardner of the Montreal Wanderers and, swearing like a maddened hockey player, sat down beside the young O'Brien. The famous Montreal Wanderers had been chopped by the formation of a new hockey league, the Canadian Hockey Association with franchises going to the Ottawa Shamrocks, the Quebec Nationals, and a new club called All-Montreal.
        After Gardner had finished swearing he turned to O'Brien and said, "Say, do you O'Briens have other hockey teams up North? Haileybury, Cobalt? Why don't we form a league? We have the Wanderers. And I think if a team of all Frenchmen was formed in Montreal it would be a real draw. We could give it a real French-Canadien name ..." The two men tossed around the idea and came up with the name Les Canadiens. And so it happened out of anger and rejection that two Irish-Canadians from the little Creamery town in the Ottawa Valley known as Renfrew named and bankrolled the most famous hockey club in French-Canadian sporting history, perhaps even in the history of hockey.
       Events began to tumble over one another. Charlotte Whitton later always insisted that M. J. "Imjay" O'Brien and Alec Barnett, principal backers of the Renfrew team, didn't care about The Stanley Cup as much as they wanted to "rub Ottawa's nose in it for queering Renfrew's application for the Canadian Hockey Association." Whatever the myriad of reasons and motivations, The Ottawa Free Press reported a few days after the momentous Montreal meeting that "the biggest hockey grab in history was attempted earlier this week and so far as can be ascertained is still going on. The Renfrew hockey club is at the present moment after every member of the Ottawa team. Only fine organization and the looking-ahead policy of the Ottawa Club has prevented what might have meant the necessity of buying up an entirely new team to defend The Stanley Cup." George Martel of the Renfrew Club was put in charge of recruiting, and M. J. and Ambrose met personally with Ottawa players to try to lure them to Renfrew.
       On December 2, 1908, at the old St. Lawrence Hall Hotel on St. James Street, Montreal, a meeting was held to name the new league the National Hockey Association and to formalize the existence of the Montreal Canadiens. Present at that landmark meeting were Doran, Strachan, Boon, and Gardner of the ostracized Montreal Wanderers; Ambrose O'Brien, George Martel, Jim Barnet from Renfrew; T.C. Hare from Cobalt; and Noah Timmins from Haileybury — an impressive group, indeed.
       Following this meeting stones of player raids filled the newspapers, rumor having it that Renfrew had offered four Ottawa players — Marty Walsh, Fred Lake, Albert Kerr, and Fred "Cyclone" Taylor — $2,000 dollars each to desert Ottawa. "Stage money," cried out the Toronto Globe, seemingly unaware of the O'Brien resources or their propensity to follow through once they began something.
        The Ottawa Senators retaliated by sending envoys around the country urging their players to stay with the team and offering good "under-the-table" Civil Service jobs in the off-season. The Ottawa Citizen reported then that Renfrew had raised its offers to $2,500 per man, with two-year contracts, off-ice jobs for any player who wanted them, all the money to be deposited immediately in a bank of the player's choice.
         Throughout all the furor and controversies, true to the character of the O'Briens, Renfrew played it above board and honestly, and won the admiration of all involved, the press included. The Ottawa Free Press said that Renfrew's business-like manner had won the respect of everyone, and quoted George Martel, recruitment manager as saying: "We are not stealing the Ottawa players. All our dickering has been done openly and above board. Before we talked business with any of them we first asked each player to go to the Ottawa Club and tell the officers that they had been approached by us and not until the Ottawa Club had made their terms to any player did we make our offer. We want the very best team that money can buy, the best team in the world, in fact, and we don't care where they come from. We are after the Ottawa men because we think they are the best in the country."
       Despite all Renfrew's efforts and exemplary behavior, all the Ottawa stars, except for Cyclone Taylor, decided to stay with Ottawa. Lester and Frank Patrick were then lured from the West for $3,000 and $2,000. Rumors set Cyclone Taylor's bait at $5,000 per year, but Ambrose maintained the correct figure was $2,000. George Martel went to New Brunswick to recruit George Gregory; M.J. himself traveled to Quebec City to sign on Herb Jordan, who insisted that he wanted more than a hockey contract to give up his amateur standing — he became M. J.'s own private secretary off-seasons.
        The first practice line-up in 1909 for the Renfrew Creamery Kings, or as they became known in hockey history, the Renfrew Millionaires, included Bert Lindsay, goal; Lester Patrick and Cyclone Taylor, point and cover point (defence); Bobby Rowe, center; J. Fraser (from Arnprior), right wing; Herb Jordan, rover; George Gregory, spare. Frank Patrick was still making his way east.
       In 1909 M. J. O'Brien and his son Ambrose found themselves in an unique position in Canadian hockey history; they had four teams to be organized, manned, managed, coached, and financed, a feat never to be repeated in the annals of hockey. O'Brien appointed Mike Kennedy, captain of the Cobalt team, as its manager, and Tommy Hare as manager of the Haileybury team, which had engaged the legendary Art Ross at a salary of $2,700. Jack Laviolette and Joe Cattarinich, former players, were named to run the Canadiens in Montreal. M. J. himself managed The Millionaires with Ambrose the chief dealer and Al Smith, a former Ottawa Senator as coach. As part of an understanding that the Canadiens would get first call on players of French-Canadien extraction, Didier Pitre went immediately to Les Habs.
       The 1910-11 season was a mightily exciting year for Renfrew hockey fans, all 4,000 of them jammed into the Renfrew Arena for each game in a season where the team lost to Cobalt, beat the Canadiens 9-4, tied the Shamrocks, lost to Montreal and the Ottawa Senators, and then shellacked Ottawa 17-2 in a game which cost M. J. O'Brien $2,250 in player bonuses.
      So important did The Ottawa Citizen consider the Renfrew Millionaires games that they sent sportswriter Tommy Gorman, later to become a famous hockey manager and promoter with Ottawa, Montreal, New York, and Chicago, to cover the games.

The roads up The Valley were closed off with snow in those days, as Gorman reminisced later in the Weekend Magazine in 1957: "One of my assignments while covering sports for The Citizen was to catch 'The Timberwolf Special' to Renfrew to cover the hockey games there and then catch the return train to Ottawa with my story at 5 a.m."
      Other fans traveled from near and far by horse and cutter or team and sleigh, and the journey was often perilous. The Shaw-ville Equity reported local citizens going to a Renfrew hockey game and being caught on the way home in a blinding blizzard which drove them into a stable for the night. The next morning the farmer found them there and took them to his house for a warming up by his kitchen stove. Another crowd, not designated, got so mixed up going home after a game that, after traveling for two hours, they struck Renfrew again and had to over-night in a local hotel.
     The high point of hockey playing history in Renfrew was the 1910 Stanley Cup championship game between Renfew Millionaires and the Montreal Wanderers. Hockey mania possessed much of he Ottawa Valley. Every train to Renfrew brought in its fans from Pembroke, Arnprior, Ottawa, Montreal, Brockville, Eganville. When the special from Pembroke and the regular from Ottawa both arrived at the Renfrew Station at the same time, the streets were filled with people from the station to the rink.
      Friday afternoon, the day of the match, the 1:40 train from Montreal arrived at the Renfrew Station with a special car for the Montreal Wanderers attached to the long line of regular passenger cars. Half the town of Renfrew was there to look over the team which had already won so many championships. " Never before has there been such excitement in Renfrew as there is today," reported The Renfrew Journal.
     All afternoon hockey fans streamed in from the countryside, some walking, some by horse and sleigh or cutter, from Burns-town, Springtown, Spruce Hedge, Black Donald, Goshan, Ashdad, Haley Station, Adamston, Cobden, Mount St. Patrick, Dacre, and all the farming communities in between. "The country people," The Journal reported, "were coming in loads from two to fifty!"
       An hour after the arena ticket office had been opened all reserved sets were sold. Even with the rink expansion O'Brien had engineered and paid for, the new balconies almost doubling capacity, it began to be apparent early in the afternoon that not everybody who wanted to see the game could be accommodated. All seats were sold by 6:00 and it was Standing Room Only after that.
     Three to two betting after, the Renfrew Millionaires lost to the experienced Montreal Wanderers 5-0. Montreal was presented The Stanley Cup and The O'Brien Cup, a massive trophy made from Cobalt silver, valued in that day at $6,000, but far too heavy to lift in triumph overhead. It now reposes in The Hockey Hall of Fame.
       The O'Briens had lost $11,000 on the first season and were committed for $6,000 more in contracts for 1911-12. Only five out of the thirty hard-won, hard-bought original players returned for the second season, although Ambrose did help sign on Odie and Sprague Cleghorn for the 1911 Millionaires team. Cobalt and Haileybury dropped out of the league, the Big Time being too rich for their blood and/or pocket books.
        Renfrew never did win The Stanley Cup. Ambrose was finding less and less time for hockey as contracting work on M. J.'s railway projects increased. Renfrew finished third in 1911 and then dropped its professional hockey league franchise. However, before they disbanded, the Renfrew Millionaires were invited to New York City's St. Nicholas arena to play-off with the Montreal Wanderers, Stanley Cup winners. On artificial ice, Renfrew won the game 9-4, and the New York press hailed the Renfrew Millionaires as "Champions of the World."
      No small town in the whole Ottawa Valley ever attempted again to support and back, morally and financially, a pro team.

When I was first starting to do oral history in The Valley, my father told me that Cyclone Taylor of the Renfrew Millionaires was leaving his home in Vancouver to visit Montreal and would be staying at the Old Windsor Hotel there. Following a strong intuition, I phoned the hotel, spoke with the legendary Taylor, and made an appointment to go down the following day to interview him. In a three-to-four hour conversation, he graciously gave me the gift of his life story, which in its own way is a story of hockey in the Ottawa Valley:

       So we played the Palmerston boys and, lo and behold, we beat them! I was in the front row all the way along and that cinched me with the Mintos, and I was there until i got to be Junior age, around sixteen, and then I joined the Listowel Junior team. And by the way, in 1904 Listowel won the Western League. We won the Northern League too. Played Barrie and we were even bumped up against the Kingston Frontenacs. And in all of

these championship games we played at home in Listowel. But the O.H.A., for some reason or other, decided we should play a "sudden death" game in Toronto at the old Mutual Rink, and the Listowel people were up in arms because they wanted to see this game. After all, they'd paid good money and supported us all winter. But the O.H.A. insisted on us playing the Beechgroves in Toronto and they beat us 8-6 for the Ontario Junior Championship. I think the trophy at that time was called the John Ross Robinson Trophy, and we missed it. Anyway, that game playing the Kingston Beechgroves in Toronto, the arena was filled with people and again I just happened to be — well, you have to be good some nights and not so good other nights — I scored nearly half of those goals. And that game in Toronto set me up. The teams then started to look to Listowel for a player.

      I started out as a defenceman and became a forward. Yes, it is true that I wore a toque to cover my bald spot. I lost my hair on the back when I was young and I was sensitive about it. But lots of fellows wore toques in Eastern Canada because of the cold weather, and that would make a good enough excuse any time.

        Charlotte Whitton always said that it was absolutely true and she could have remembered it, even been at the game, because she was a little older than I was and, besides, some of the Renfrew Millionaires boarded at the Whittons — her mother kept a boardinghouse. But you see, the Renfrew Millionaires were only a year or two there in Renfrew and they wouldn't really remember the people. They might have remembered my father, though, because he was always very nice to them and let them play the records. And they were all Red Seal records and Caruso and all high-class music, and they all just loved that music. They'd stay by the hour and play them.

      There were reserved seats in the Renfrew arena. They put them in when the Millionaires came. Before that, I think, it was just benches really, and everybody grabbed a seat where they could. But I must tell you a story that is sort of related to all this hockey. After the Second World War, my Uncle Alex was a great one for telling stories. He had two sons and a daughter, and the older son, Ken, was stationed in Ottawa for a little while and he wrote and asked me if he could come up to Renfrew and see me. Ken had never stayed in Renfrew and would like to come and

     Eventually I played with some of my heroes like Frank Nighbor, Sprague and Odie Cleghorn, Punch Broadbent. And in time I got to know some of the greatest people ever associated with the early game — Frank Ahearn, Frank Selke, Dick Irvin.

    While I was in the Pontiac League we began looking for more competition, and we used to bring up teams from Ottawa for exhibition games, teams that were playing in the Ottawa City Senior League. Big excitement in town for twenty-five cents a ticket! There were four to six players on those early Ottawa teams who could have turned pro, if there had been enough teams to turn pro with. But there were only four teams in the N.H.L. at that time: Montreal Canadiens, Toronto St. Pats, Hamilton Tigers, and Ottawa Senators. Then the league expanded, the New York Americans took over the Hamilton franchise, and Boston Bruins came in.

The roll call of legendary hockey players raised on the rinks of the Ottawa Valley goes on and on ... Bill Cowley of Bristol, Ken  "Cagie" Doraty of Stittsville, Bob Gracie of North Bay, Dave Trottier of Pembroke, Johnny Sorrell of Chesterville. Many of these players would travel up or down The Valley to join the professional ranks of the Ottawa Senators, merging their rugged Valley character with the finesse of native Ottawa players like Hall of Fame legends Frank McGee, Harvey Pulford, Frank "King" Clancy, Harry "Punch" Broadbent, Jack Darragh, Billy Gilmour, Harry "Rat" Westwick, Clint Benedict, Syd Howe, Tommy and Alf Smith, Gordon Roberts, Eddie Gerard, William H. "Hod" Stewart, Alex Connell, Frank and George "Buck" Boucher, Bruce Stuart, E.B. "Ebbie" Goodfellow, and Hector "Hec" Kilrea, to create some of the greatest teams in the history of hockey. Ottawa Valley boys would also stock the teams that challenged The Senators for supremacy . . .