Kenora Thistles - Team Foundings

Team Foundings

The town of Kenora was originally known as Rat Portage. In the late 1880s, an amateur senior hockey club was formed by older professional men, most of them lumbermen, gold prospectors, or individuals in the local mining businesses. By the early 1890s, several young boys of the Rat Portage area, most of them between the ages of 9-11, formed a junior ice hockey team of the same name, which went on to beat the senior team in an exhibition. Among these young men were future Hockey Hall of Famers Tommy Phillips, Tom Hooper, Billy McGimsie, and Silas Griffis.

Over the next five years, these young players began to populate the senior team and quickly established themselves as one of the premier amateur hockey clubs of the western Canadian provinces. In 1903 they challenged the Ottawa Silver Seven for the Stanley Cup and lost. In 1905 they again challenged the Ottawa squad with the same disappointing results. That summer, the town of Rat Portage changed its name to Kenora.