The Battle of Alberta—The "Eye" Of The Storm

Nearly a century before the Flames and the Oilers sparked one of the most heated rivalries in National Hockey League history, teams from Calgary and Edmonton took to the ice to spark the Battle of Alberta, even though the province of Alberta would not be proclaimed for another decade.

The year was 1898, and the Edmonton Thistles, the city’s aristocratic hockey club that founded the game in the city, agreed to play a team made up of members from Calgary’s Fire Brigade. That game featured the first brawl in Calgary/Edmonton hockey history; an ugly stick-swinging incident saw Fire Brigade star E.D. Marshall lose his eye (of course, this was long before the era of helmets and visors) and Calgary’s Les Francis broke his nose in the game—the violent incidents overshadowed the play on the ice.

The bad blood on the ice reflected the animosity between the two cities at the turn of the century. Alberta did not exist as a political entity yet, so there was no provincial camaraderie of any sort between the two cities. Calgary and Edmonton were two rival towns looking to be major players in the Northwest Territories. Calgary prided itself as being the true big-city player of the region, and Edmonton was consistently put down as an outpost town. Edmonton returned that vitriol, doing its best to prove that it, and not Calgary, was to be the major player on the Western arm of the prairies.

Calgarians did not let the eye incident deter them from issuing further challenges to Edmonton clubs. In both 1895 and 1896, a team made up of All-Stars from the fledgling Calgary teams travelled north to take on the Thistles and the Northwest Mounted Police. Much to the shock of the home teams, the All-Stars swept the games. It was not until 1899 that the Thistles could boast the first Edmonton victory over the Calgary All-Stars, a 15-2 drubbing that saw the Calgary press openly chastise the All-Stars for laziness and not taking the game seriously enough.

The bad blood continued into the 20th century. In 1902, the Jackson Cup was established as the championship for junior teams. Two years later a junior Edmonton club travelled to Calgary to contest the Cup. After one game, Edmonton management accused Calgary of using over-aged ringers in the final. The Edmonton team was so enraged, the club left after playing the first game of the series—and the Jackson Cup was never decided.

As Edmonton hockey officials proposed a new amateur hockey body to oversee the affairs of the game in the new province, Calgary balked. When the Alberta Amateur Hockey Association was formed in 1907, Calgary trustees walked away from the plan, citing that the AAHA would only serve Edmonton teams and continually force teams from southern Alberta teams to head north to take on the powerhouse clubs from the new provincial capital. While Calgarians soon relented and joined the AAHA, the dispute was yet another example of the cold-war mentality between the two cities, a rivalry that was born over a decade earlier when a Calgary firefighter had his eye put out.

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