On December 19, 1904, a group of men set out from Dawson City, a small town near the Alaskan border in the Yukon Territory of Canada, their destination of Ottawa over 4,000 miles away. They rode bicycles and dogsleds, eventually switching to their feet after an unseasonable thaw left the road thickly mudded and impassable by wheel or sleigh. It took days to travel the 300 miles to Whitehorse, where they met a train that took them to the Alaskan port city of Skagway. After three days in Skagway waiting for the harbor ice to clear, they traveled by boat to Seattle, then Vancouver, where they caught a train across the continent to Ottawa, arriving on January 11th of the next year. What, you might ask, would compel a group of men to travel for twenty-two days through mud and ice and snow? The answer, this being Canada, is of course the Stanley Cup.
It was the early days of the Stanley Cup. There was no National Hockey League and the holder of the cup was decided by ad hoc challenges. Basically, any team that won their regional league could challenge the current holder of the cup to a game, and the winner would emerge as the new cup holder. There were rules laid out by Lord Stanley himself including a key provision that challenge games should always be held on the defending team’s home ice, meaning that when the regional champions of the Yukon, the Dawson City Klondikers, challenged the current cup-holders, The Ottawa Hockey Club, the Klondikers had quite the journey ahead of them.
They arrived to Ottawa with just two days to spare before the scheduled game date of January 13, 1905. The Klondikers were battered and exhausted after being on the road for nearly a month, and to make their prospects for success even worse, their star player - the only one on the team with professional experience - had stayed behind in Dawson City to serve his duty as a federal employee and would miss the two game series. The first game, a 9-2 loss for the visitors, didn’t actually go that badly when viewed next to the second game, which was a plain and simple 14-0 rout. They played hard, and the Klondiker net minder was even lauded by the media for keeping it from being an even worse rout, but ultimately the Klondikers wouldn't emerge with the cup. It has gone down in history as the worst ever beating suffered in a game with the Stanley Cup on the line, and also as the most disappointing vacation ever.