Early accounts: how Europeans first wrote about the game.

The Jesuit accounts of the 1630s

The Canadian Encyclopedia (Tabitha de Bruin and Jim Calder, 2017) says the first published reference to the game under a French name appeared in reports from the 1630s by French missionaries living among the Huron-Wendat.

One of them is by the Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf. Andrew McFarland Davis, in his 19th-century study Indian Games: an Historical Research, cites Brébeuf's Relation of 1636 (page 113 of the 1858 Quebec edition of the Jesuit Relations). In it Brébeuf names three popular Huron games, crosse, platter and straw, and says the first two were thought very good for health. Davis's summary of the passage describes a sick person being told to play a game of crosse as a cure, matches between villages with wagers on them, and games ordered to heal a sick country.

Not every observer approved. American Indian magazine, published by the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, says the Jesuits condemned the game as violent in the 1630s.

1636 or 1637?

The year of Brébeuf's account is given two ways:

• 1636. The Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame's timeline says Brébeuf recorded the game, which it calls baggataway, at Georgian Bay in 1636. Davis cites the Relation of 1636.
• 1637. A search summary of The Canadian Encyclopedia's main lacrosse article, which could not be opened, gives 1637 for Brébeuf's journals.

The Relation itself is dated 1636. One possible explanation is that 1637 is its year of publication, but which year the encyclopedia means has not been confirmed.

Where the name "lacrosse" comes from

The name is French, and how the game got it is disputed. The sources give these explanations:

• A bishop's crozier. A popular story says Brébeuf named the game after the curved staff carried by a bishop. The Onondaga Nation's own site says early European observers named it for sticks that looked like bishops' staffs.
• Not from Brébeuf. A search summary of The Canadian Encyclopedia's main article says Brébeuf's writings do not mention any resemblance to a crozier. That article could not be opened, so this is unconfirmed.
• A general French term. The Canadian Encyclopedia's article on the Creator's game says the French used the phrase jouer à la crosse for any game played with a curved stick.
• French stick games. The University of Kent's Beyond the Spectacle project blog (2019) says the name probably comes from French games such as la choule à la crosse rather than from a single Jesuit.

The game's own names, in the languages of the nations that played it, are on the Indigenous origins page.

Later observers, 17th to 19th centuries

Davis gathers the later French and British accounts. He cites:

• Nicolas Perrot, whose memoir from the late 17th century describes a "game of cross" that he compared with tennis.
• La Potherie (Paris, 1722), who describes a game among the Miami in 1667 with about 2,000 players. That figure is La Potherie's own report and has not been checked against any other account.
• Charlevoix (Paris, 1744), on the game in New France.
• James Adair (London, 1775), on the southern game among the Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw.

The Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame's timeline adds that a French commandant at Fort Pontchartrain, at Detroit, described large Potawatomi games in 1718, sometimes joined by French settlers. The timeline is the only source the research found for this, so it is unconfirmed.

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival says early 17th-century accounts describe Huron clans, among them Bear, Deer, Hawk, Porcupine and Wolf, playing one another, sometimes with about sixty men playing all day. It also says the artist George Catlin's notes and drawings from the 1830s describe Choctaw games with hundreds of players on a field half a mile long. The Choctaw Nation's newspaper Biskinik likewise names Catlin as having painted Choctaw stickball games in the 1800s.

Fort Michilimackinac, June 1763

One early account of a single game is from the fort at Michilimackinac, in what is now Michigan. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources describes it this way: during the conflict known as Pontiac's War, Ojibwa men playing baggatiway, a game similar to lacrosse, with visiting Sauk outside the British fort used the game to enter the fort and capture it. More than 400 Ojibwa men had gathered. The fort site is now part of Mackinac State Historic Parks, which co-published a book on the 1763 attacks by Keith Widder.

Davis names the fur trader Alexander Henry, whose Travels and Adventures in Canada was published in New York in 1809, as the eyewitness who described the game and the attack.

2 June or 4 June?

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources, the state agency responsible for the area of the historic site, dates the game to 2 June 1763. Wikipedia's article on the fort, seen only as a search summary, is reported to give 4 June. This site uses 2 June 1763, the state agency's date, and notes that the Wikipedia date differs.

Reading these accounts

Every account on this page was written by an outsider: a missionary, an officer, a trader or an artist. They record what Europeans saw and how they explained it, not how the nations themselves understood the game. The nations' own accounts, where the research found them, are on the Indigenous origins page. How the game moved from these descriptions to organised clubs and written rules in Montreal is on Montreal and the first rules, and every dated event is in the timeline.