page_title: Lacrosse in Canada
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Lacrosse in Canada / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Lacrosse at the 1908 Summer Olympics. Shows Patrick Brennan going for a ground ball.
context_page_description: Modern lacrosse in Canada has been a popular sport since the mid 1800s. Only field lacrosse was played until the 1930s, when box lacrosse was invented. In 1994 Parliament passed the National Sports of Canada Act which declared lacrosse to be "Canada's National Summer Sport", with ice hockey as the National Winter Sport.
context_section_description: Lacrosse was played by First Nations peoples before the arrival of European colonists. The first documented description of the game was in 1637. The game was called baggataway and tewaarathon, which was played by two teams with 100 to 1,000 men each on a field that stretched from about 500 m (1,600 ft) to 3 km (1.9 mi) long.
  The Anglophone middle class of Montreal adopted the game in the mid 1800s. The first known game between whites and First Nations took place in 1843.
  In 1856, the Montreal lacrosse club was established; by the mid-1860s there were active teams in eastern Ontario. The National Lacrosse Association was formed in 1875; in 1880 the league became the National Amateur Lacrosse Association.  By the 1880s the organized sport was found nationwide, and had become a popular spectator sport. To deal with the violence, middle class promoters spoke in Social Gospel terms about the ideal of "muscular Christianity."  As working class players and spectators became more prominent, the rhetoric focused on winning at all costs.
  The 1860s the Montreal Shamrocks introduced a new level of aggressiveness; it was Irish, Catholic, and fought to win. During the 1870s and 1880s the Shamrocks had bloody confrontations with the middle-class Protestant Montreal and Toronto Lacrosse Clubs.  Field lacrosse was spread across Canada by Anglophone migrants from Ontario and Quebec. In February 1887, the Toronto Lacrosse Club began using hockey as a form of exercise during the winter months. By the early 1890s it was the most popular summer game in Canada; the 1900s were the golden years, as two professional leagues were set up.   Escalating violence led to the collapse of the professional leagues in 1914, and the game's base of support shrank to Montreal, Victoria, Vancouver, New Westminster, and a few small-towns. Its failure to establish a solid base derived from a thin organizational infrastructure; for example, it was not played by schools or churches.
  The Canadian Lacrosse Association, founded in 1925, is the governing body of lacrosse in Canada. It presently conducts national junior and senior championship tournaments for men and women in both field and box lacrosse. 
  In 1931, big city hockey promoters introduced "box lacrosse" to turn winter hockey fans into a year-round audience. Box lacrosse was played in a smaller indoor arena space, and competitions could also be held in baseball stadiums, and again, the play was violent. Not enough cities could support teams, however, and the hard times of the Great Depression in the 1930s reduced the number of fans. Entrepreneurs, while failing to make a major commercial success, transformed Canadian amateur lacrosse, making it quite different from field lacrosse as played in the United States, Britain, and Australia. In 1987 the National Lacrosse League began; it has clubs in twelve cities in the United States and Canada.
caption: A lacrosse game between the British and Canadian national teams during the 1908 Summer Olympics.
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