PINCHER CREEK, Alta. – Cattle ranches and their owners, many with British roots, formed the heart of southern Alberta society in the late 1800s, and that is where the first Canadian polo club was formed in 1889.
Pincher Creek lays claim to the first club for the sport of kings, but it was followed by clubs in Cowley, the north and south forks of the Oldman River and the Beaver Creek-Porcupine Hills area just north of Pincher Creek.
In later years, clubs also formed in Fort Macleod, High River, Cochrane and Calgary, but it was the mighty North Fork team that chukkered its place into the history books.
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The team won the Alberta championship, the H.D. MacMillan cup, in 1908, two more trophies in Winnipeg in 1912 and yet another cup for winning the western Canadian championship.
It followed that with a trip in 1915 to Spokane, Washington, where it lost to the Portland, Oregon, team by one-quarter point, recounts Farley Wuth, curator of the Pincher Creek and District Historical Society.
Two years later, the North Fork team went back to Spokane, this time defeating the championship team from Boise, Idaho.
“The team seemed to predominate mostly in the pre-World War One time period,” said Wuth.
Stalwarts of the North Fork team included William Humphrey, W.E. Smith, J. Milvain, Arthur Kennington, Harry Gunn, Bert Connelly, Rolly Burn, Harry Evans, Walter Knight and Hugh Pettit.
“They all had ranching connections of some sort,” said Wuth. “It’s interesting when you look at these names, how many of them are still in the community 100 years later.”
The Pincher Creek team included E.W. Wilmot, Lionel Brook, Alfred Lynch-Staunton, George Plunkett, Tom Heap and R.B. Clarkson.
Beaver Creek members Peter Briggs, Michael Holland, Bert Humphrey and another Milvain are in the history book for the region, entitled
Prairie Grass to Mountain Pass.
Wuth is now updating the history book, which was published in 1974.
He said Wilmot, a Briton with a ranch in the area, established the first team. He enjoyed polo and brought equipment back to Canada after a visit to Britain.
“The game flourished for a full generation, up until the First World War,” said Wuth. “It was very, very popular. Even if you weren’t on an official team, you’d play the game informally with your friends.”
Polo was a rich man’s sport when it arrived in Western Canada. Only the wealthy had the horses, the property and the time to exclusively pursue the sport, though there was room for other enthusiasts.
“I don’t think any of the North Fork team were wealthy,” said Doug Connelly, whose father, Bert, played for the team.
“They were good horsemen and had good horses.”
In his book,Polo, The Galloping Game,published in 2000, author Tony Rees included this report of a Spokane match played in 1915: “Yesterday’s shining star was Bert Connelly, the Canadians’ youthful, light-haired forward, who seemed to be everywhere at once and anywhere he was needed. He scored five of his team’s eight goals, a feat unequalled by any individual player during the previous games of the tourney.”
The cow horses of Western Canada apparently served polo purposes well.
Cecil Blackburn, a Pincher Creek area rancher who wrote his master’s thesis on sports in 1974, quoted a 1935 historical piece in theCalgary Heraldabout horses the North Fork team took to a 1915 match in Spokane: “Their shaggy, wiry little bodies brought forth more than one derisive comment as they stood near the glossy silk-like hides of the American ponies.”
Blackburn described the riders as “honest to goodness western cow men,” a fact Connelly can verify.
“Dad told me one time he rode from here to Fort Macleod, played polo and then rode back again,” said Connelly.
It was a round trip of more than 100 kilometres.
The horses had to be hardy. Nacho Figueras, a modern Argentine polo player featured in Ralph Lauren advertisements, said in an Empire Club polo history book that horses bestowed success, then and now.
“Without good horses, you can’t win. It’s like race car driving. You could be the best driver in the world, but if I give you a 1964 Oldsmobile and I drive a Ferrari, you can never beat me. With polo, it’s more or less the same.”
The sport gradually died out in southwestern Alberta after the war. Many of the players enlisted, some didn’t return and a later influx of new settlers didn’t have the same attachment or interest in the game.
“After the coming of the railroad here in 1898, you got a lot more homesteaders and settlers coming into the area,” Wuth said.
“Many of them came from non- British backgrounds, which is fantastic, but they didn’t have the same interest in polo that the British players did.”
However, polo clubs still operate in Calgary, Black Diamond, Grande Prairie, Winnipeg and Victoria as well as in Eastern Canada.
Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village in Pincher Creek retains numerous polo artifacts. Among them are photos, polo mallets, balls and boots, a trophy won by the North Fork team and newspaper clippings.
