ABSTRACT
It is firmly established in contemporary Canadian popular culture, and in the Canadian popular imagination, that ice hockey is the Canadian national game.1 One need only watch an hour or two of television in Canada, or leaf through a few magazines and newspapers, to receive confirmation of this fact. Successful advertising campaigns regularly trade on the idea that to be Canadian is to love hockey. However, this was not always the case. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, when ice hockey was a brandnew sport, snowshoeing was already a distinctively Canadian winter activity and lacrosse was the national game.
