The Montreal Canadiens are well-known for their vast lore and deep history. Books have been written about the team, the players who have worn the jersey, and the deep-rooted relationship the team has with the city and its fans. Annual passionate arguments make the rounds about which jersey should be retired next, and videos of favourite goals over time circulate freely on social media. The fans pride themselves on their profound knowledge of all things to do with the team, and the team celebrates them. However, there is an accepted fact as part of all the backstory that the history of the Canadiens goes all the way back to the formation of the National Hockey Association in 1909, but this is, in fact, not accurate and needs to be corrected.

1909-10: Le Canadien

Ambrose O’Brien came to Montreal in the fall of 1909 with the intent of asking the Eastern Canada Hockey Association (ECHA) for the inclusion of his Renfrew team into the Major League circuit. O’Brien was the heir of a rich mining empire, and wanted to leverage the healthy finances to bring the Stanley Cup to the small Ontario town. The Ottawa Senators, current holders of the cup and most influential team in the league, spearheaded the rejection of O’Brien’s application due to severe acrimony stemming from Renfrew ‘stealing’ some of their players the year prior.

O’Brien left the meeting humiliated and ran into Jimmy Gardner of the Montreal Wanderers in the hallway. Gardner was facing his own humiliation as the ECHA moved against the Wanderers to get them expelled from the league by folding the ECHA and starting up a new league, the Canadian Hockey Association (CHA), without including the Wanderers. Gardner was furious, storming out of the room where the meeting was taking place, and ran into O’Brien. The two began talking, and Gardner convinced O’Brien that the two of them could form their own league, comprised of the Wanderers, O’Brien’s hockey teams in Renfrew, Cobalt, and Haileybury, and Gardner’s idea of a French-Canadian team to act as a natural foil for his Wanderers. And from that chance encounter in the hallway the National Hockey Association (NHA) was born, and along with it “Le Canadien,” O’Brien’s French-Canadian team out of Montreal. O’Brien launched the team with the intent that it be transferred to French-Canadian interests as soon as possible, as his only passion was for the Renfrew team and a chance to play for the Stanley Cup.

O’Brien tasked popular Montreal sportsman Jack Laviolette with assembling the Canadien team. The new league launched on January 5, backed by the boundless finances of the O’Brien mining empire. Outmatched completely, the CHA quickly folded, and the NHA absorbed the Ottawa and Montreal Shamrock clubs from the CHA, growing to seven teams in its first season.

The naming was a bit muddled, with English newspapers alternating between “Le Canadien,” “Les Canadiens,” and “the Canadiens.” French newspapers were not much clearer alternating between “Le Canadien” and “Les Canadiens.” But generally speaking, the official name was “Le Canadien,” which was a direct take on “Le National,” the equivalent team that played in the CHA.

The Montreal Wanderers were champions at season’s end and were declared Stanley Cup champions. “Le Canadien” finished in last place.

1910: Where the story diverges from reality

By summertime 1910, O’Brien saw the opportunity to start pulling financial interests out of the NHA. It was already being mentioned that Cobalt and Haileybury would no longer be part of the league, as they were too far geographically and too small a town to be financially viable members as the league struggled to find qualified officials for these games. Renfrew was still O’Brien’s darling, so they would remain in the NHA, but there was the issue of the Le Canadien franchise. O’Brien tried to sell the franchise to the owners of the Montreal National, the other French-Canadian hockey team in town, but they rejected the offer due to a binding contract with the Jubilee Arena.

Enter George Kendall, known professionally as George Kennedy, a very successful wrestling and boxing promoter in Montreal, and secretary-treasurer of the Club Athlétique Canadien (CAC). By the time O’Brien was launching his Le Canadien team, Kennedy, already very well established in the city, was spearheading the amalgamation of the boxing and wrestling empires in the city of Montreal under the CAC banner. The organization’s finances were only getting stronger as they were undergoing rapid growth, readying the opening of a brand new building to house a gymnasium, billiard room, bowling alley, and smoking rooms on the corner of Ste-Catherine and St-André. As part of their expansion they set their sights on professional hockey, and Kennedy knew exactly where the hook would be.

According to Stan Fischler’s book “The Flying Frenchmen,” Kennedy took out an ad in the Montreal Herald to denounce Le Canadien and staking a copyright claim to the name “Canadien.” He demanded that the National Hockey Association eliminate the team name “Canadien” or face the full legal weight of their organization, claiming that the CAC owns the name through copyright and incorporation. The NHA certainly didn’t have the finances to fight off any such claims, and it didn’t take long for Kennedy to start negotiating with O’Brien to purchase the team with the full support of the CAC board of directors, as reported by the Montreal Star and the Montreal Gazette in early October.

The other stakeholders in the NHA were more than happy to welcome Kennedy to their ranks to operate a French-Canadian team in the league. O’Brien wanted out, and Kennedy had the finances in place to keep the team running. One of the main understandings in negotiations was that Kennedy’s team would have first rights to all French-Canadian players, something that O’Brien didn’t have the previous year.

Kennedy brimmed with confidence in an interview with Le Canada ahead of the NHA board of directors meeting saying, “I received the promise from all the magnates, and I don’t believe them capable of lying to me. I have no desire to enter a team into the league without all the necessary precautions. Tell the public that I took every necessary precaution to assure them first class hockey. The magnates have granted me the first option on all French-Canadian players, so in this way I will be able to triage them at my own pace.”

The negotiations took an unexpected turn. About a month later, in early November and still ahead of the NHA meeting, the Montreal Star reported that Joe Power, representing a club from Quebec, was also negotiating with O’Brien to purchase the Canadiens. If Power acquired the franchise, he agreed to change the team to appease the directors of the CAC who continued threatening to take action on the name if negotiations didn’t go their way.

To add some additional weight to the threats/negotiations the Montreal Star reported on a rumour that the CAC will start their own four-team league should they not be admitted into the NHA. This was denied by Kennedy of course, although there does seem to be some fire behind the smoke as reports emerged of the potential new league being formed by Quebec and the CAC if they were not admitted into the NHA, and which would also include the Montreal Shamrocks.

“We do not presume to dictate,” said Kennedy regarding the rumour of a new league, “but we have made up our minds to go into hockey this winter, and to stay in it. We would like to get into the NHA, and we have this in our favour that we probably are as safe financially, or safer, than any other member of that body, barring, perhaps, Renfrew. We can also bring such support in the matter of patronage as no other organization probably has brought for years past. We have had a tentative promise that our application would be accepted. If it is refused and I do not say this as a threat, but merely as a matter of fact, because we have made up our minds to play senior hockey, we will immediately start to form a new senior hockey association, and I think we will at least have the French-speaking hockey enthusiast with us, and perhaps a few English-speaking ones, too.

“I do not think, however, in reality that we will have to do this, and, with all my sporting experience, I still have some faith in promises made by honourable gentlemen; in fact, to tell the truth, I really think the four club story was just a common everyday ‘pipe dream.’”

November 12, 1910: The NHA meeting

The NHA board of directors meeting was held on November 12, 1910 at the Windsor Hotel in Montreal. Kennedy seemed to be holding all the cards heading into the meeting, including one final surprise that Mr. Adolphe Lecours, former president of the National Athletic Association, would be joining Kennedy for the meeting to represent his interests. There was talk that the Nationals would try to submit an application for a French-Canadien team in Montreal, but by joining Kennedy in representing the CAC, all chances of the National joining the NHA were gone.

The majority of the all-day meeting was spent ratifying the new league Constitution and by-laws as well as setting a salary limit of $5,000 per team. Another important change was to make the game three 20-minute periods rather than two 30-minute periods, with a rest of 10 minutes between periods. Then it came time for George Kennedy and Joe Power to present their cases for NHA franchises. Both applications of Quebec and the CAC were accepted, however, in a shocking twist, neither team would take over O’Brien’s Canadien franchise.

O’Brien kept his French-Canadian franchise, while Power received the Cobalt franchise for Quebec and Kennedy received the Haileybury for the CAC. The Canadien franchise remained within the association but would be inactive for the upcoming season. Meanwhile, news emerged that a third suitor from Toronto was promised the franchise, with the deal expected to close the following year. The group from Toronto expressed their interest just prior to the NHA meeting, but stated that it would not be ready to ice a team for the upcoming season.

Unfortunately, the reasoning behind these decisions is unknown, perhaps just random allocation, but this accurately describes the outcome of the meeting as it was reported. Perhaps both Quebec and the CAC wanted the French-Canadian team, so neither one received it as a concession. Or perhaps there were different prices for the franchises.

A team with no players

Kennedy was granted the NHA franchise that the CAC sought, although it wasn’t O’Brien’s Le Canadien, but rather the Haileybury franchise which was sold to him. Kennedy did not inherit any players with the purchase as the NHA did not have a player reserve system in place until the constitution was ratified, and the rights to French-Canadian players were not granted because Renfrew abstained from the vote in order to keep the rights to Newsy Lalonde. O’Brien asked to consult with Mr. Barnett, president of the Renfrew club, before giving a final answer to the CAC.

The common misconception that Kennedy bought all of O’Brien’s players from “Le Canadian” is another falsely accepted truth. Although there is no mention of it in the papers, there is at least a couple pieces of evidence beyond the lack of a player reserve that would indicate that players were free to negotiate with whichever team they wanted.

On the day following the NHA meeting, La Patrie mentioned that the only players who were somewhat assured of signing with Kennedy’s team were Jack Laviolette and Skinner Poulin. It became known soon after the meeting that Laviolette was openly being courted by the new Quebec hockey club to run their team, making an offer that Laviolette claimed was very attractive. If Laviolette was in any way on Kennedy’s reserve list, he would certainly not be able to negotiate with another NHA club, especially publicly in the newspapers.

Meanwhile, Canadien player Didier Pitre was negotiating with the new Haileybury team, who was now part of the semi-professional Timiskaming hockey loop. If Pitre was in any way tied to Kennedy, the latter would have certainly loudly laid claim to the former, but there was only mention of negotiations between Pitre and the Canadiens, nothing more.

In both cases of Laviolette and Pitre, the threat of looking to another team could have simply been to gain negotiating leverage with Kennedy. Realistically, if Kennedy owned their rights outright, there would not have been the option to seek competing offers.

The player who Kennedy sought the most was Lalonde, who remained with Renfrew because of Kennedy’s failure to secure rights to French-Canadian players. Kennedy spoke with Le Soleil on November 18 to present his case stating, “If the League doesn’t grant me the privilege of choosing my men from among all the French-Canadians, I will not ice a team this season. Before the assembly, Mr. Emmett Quinn, Eddie McCafferty and Dickie Boon assured me that I would be able to get all my men. That’s what convinced me to enter the league. But now they are telling me that I cannot get Lalonde. I don’t appreciate their way of doing things. If this doesn’t get resolved I won’t put a team together. The Canadian Athletic Club is admitted into the league, it possesses a franchise, but if I’m not given the chance to form my team, the team will not play this season.”

Eduard “Newsy” Lalonde was eventually bought from Renfrew to start the season for a sum of $500.

Only two other players from O’Brien’s Le Canadien signed with Kennedy’s CAC team, George “Skinner” Poulin and Arthur “Art” Bernier, bringing the total of players on both teams to only five. Kennedy recruited elsewhere for the remainder of his team, adding most notably goaltender George Vézina to his inaugural squad.

O’Brien’s exit

As was initially planned, O’Brien’s Le Canadien franchise was sold on September 20, 1911 to the Toronto Tecumseh, and was ratified at the NHA board of directors meeting on November 12. It was in that same meeting that O’Brien’s dream of a Stanley Cup for Renfrew ended up dying, as the team declared that it wouldn’t ice a team for the 1911-12 season due to the inability to come to terms with the other teams on favourable revenue-sharing terms to help turn the tide on multiple money-losing seasons. The franchise was held in escrow for a season by the league while O’Brien tried to decide whether it was financially feasible to continue, but he never did return.

As for the fate of the Renfrew franchise, there is scarce information. The common story has it that O’Brien’s two final franchises were transferred to two new teams in Toronto, but that was only true for the Tecumseh purchasing the Le Canadien franchise. In February 1911, well ahead of Renfrew folding, another Toronto team was already granted a team by the NHA to become the Blueshirts. Both Toronto teams would not play in the NHA until the 1912-13 season due to delays in the construction of their new arena.

Denouement

Certain people might question the validity of the information presented in this article, given the commonly accepted story that the Canadiens were created in 1909 by Ambrose O’Brien, full stop. The research in this article was sourced nearly entirely from newspaper archives from 1910 and 1911. As early as 1945, newspapers published twisted stories around O’Brien selling Le Canadien to George Kennedy, and whether Kennedy was even involved in the formation of the original team in the first place. Books upon books have been written on the team that have repeated this timeline, but there should be at least some critical thought put into analyzing the original source material to see if history hadn’t simply accepted and propagated a false fact. Even if the Canadiens lay claim to 1909 as their birth year, their own recognized history is not free from error (for example, Aurèle Joliat’s forgotten retired jersey).

This article does not endeavour to lessen the impact that O’Brien had on the history of North American professional hockey. If anything it’s quite understated how his family’s mining fortunes helped fuel the emergence of what would become the National Hockey League. It seeks to correct a historical inaccuracy that the Canadiens were founded in 1909. George Kennedy should be credited with the birth of the French-Canadian team that would become the Montreal Canadiens in 1910, but it was not the first such team to give a platform to French-Canadiens in professional hockey, as its predecessors Le Canadien and Le National should be seen as the spiritual inspiration for what Kennedy would ultimately create.

The final conclusion is that this article won’t likely change anything to how history chooses to recount the start of the Canadiens. The 1909 label is just too entrenched in Canadiens lore and marketing to likely ever be corrected.