Dawson City Nuggets

The Dawson City Nuggets (also known as the Klondikes) were a hockey team from Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada that challenged the reigning champion Ottawa Hockey Club, aka "The Silver Seven," in January 1905, for the Stanley Cup. They suffered the most lopsided single-game defeat in the history of Stanley Cup play.

Sponsored by the Klondike entrepreneur Joseph W. Boyle from men of the mining camps during the tailend of the Yukon gold rush, the Nuggets travelled an epic month-long voyage by dog sled, approximately 600 km from Dawson to Whitehorse, narrow gauge rail from Whitehorse to Skagway, ship from Skagway to Vancouver, and train from Vancouver to Ottawa in time for the games. The team had only one bona-fide player, ex-Ottawa star Weldy Young, but he was unable to make it to Ottawa in time, delayed in Dawson City as an election official. Exhausted by the trip and without Young, they lost the first game of the two-game total goal series 9-2, and the second 23-2, in which Ottawa star Frank McGee set a record that still stands by scoring fourteen goals (see Ottawa vs. Dawson City). The team then played a series of exhibition games in the east before returning to the Yukon.

Michael Onesi, a Whitehorse newspaper columnist, speculated, shortly before a 1997 re-enactment (see below), that, had the Dawson team triumphed, they would have had the longest dynasty in Stanley Cup history. Challenges normally took place in the cup-holder's town, and visiting teams could not effectively play, the columnist wryly commented, after the brutal journey by overland coach to Dawson, their bodies blacker than a hockey puck from all the bruises of a dog-sled ride.

The Nuggets participated in perhaps the most famous Stanley Cup challenge of all, against the Ottawa Hockey Club, aka "The Silver Seven" in 1905. Dawson City had two former elite hockey players, Weldy Young who had played for Ottawa in the 1890s and D.R. McLennan who had played for Queen's College against the Montreal Victorias in the challenge of 1895. Other players were selected from other Dawson City clubs. Dawson City's challenge was accepted in the summer of 1904 by the Stanley Cup trustees, scheduled (inauspiciously) for Friday, January 13, 1905. The date of the challenge meant that Young had to travel later as he had to work in a federal election that December, and meet the club in Ottawa.

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