wikipedia disagrees, canada is the birthplace of hockeyHistory
See also History of BandyFrom
oral histories, there is evidence of a tradition of an ancient hockey-like game played among the
Mi'kmaq First Nation in Eastern Canada. In
Legends of the Micmacs (1894), Silas T. Rand describes a Mi'kmaq ball game people called
tooadijik. Rand also describes a game which was played (likely after
European contact) with hurleys, called
wolchamaadijik.
[5] European immigrants brought various versions of hockey-like games to Canada, such as the
Irish sport of
hurling, the closely related
Scottish sport of
shinty, and versions of field hockey played in England. Where necessary, these seem to have been adapted for icy conditions. Early paintings show "
shinney", an early form of hockey with no standard rules, being played in
Russia.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton, in
The Attache: Second Series, published in 1844, reminisced about boys from King's College School in
Windsor, Nova Scotia, playing "hurly on the long pond on the ice" when he was a student there, no later than 1810.
[5][6] To this day, shinny (or shinney) (derived from
Shinty) is a popular
Canadian term for an informal type of hockey, either on ice or as
street hockey. These early games may have also absorbed the physically aggressive aspects of what the
Mi'kmaq in Nova Scotia called
dehuntshigwa'es (
lacrosse).


Ye Gude Olde Days, from
Hockey: Canada's Royal Winter Game, 1899.In 1825
Sir John Franklin wrote that "The game of hockey played on the ice was the morning sport" while on
Great Bear Lake during one of his
Arcticexpeditions. In 1843 a British Army officer in
Kingston,
Ontario in Canada, wrote "Began to skate this year, improved quickly and had great fun at hockey on the ice."
[7] An article in the
Boston Evening Gazette, in 1859, makes reference to an early game of hockey on ice occurring in Halifax in that year.
[6]The first recorded hockey games were played by British soldiers stationed in Kingston and Halifax during the mid-1850s. In the 1870s, the first known set of ice hockey rules were drawn up by students at
Montreal's
McGill University. These rules established the number of players per side to 9 and replaced the ball with a wood puck.
[7]