Indigenous Baseball in the Northeastern Borderlands: From Lou Sockalexis to Charlie Paul

Joe Neptune, a nephew of Lou Sockalexis, played minor-league and semipro baseball for over three decades in the northeastern borderlands. (Baltimore Sun, June 5, 1923)

 

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, baseball was a common pursuit among Indigenous peoples in the Northeastern borderlands. In Maine, competitive native clubs organized at Sipayik (Pleasant Point Reservation), near Old Town, at the Peter Dana Point Reservation and Indian Township, and elsewhere along the Penobscot River among Penobscot peoples. All-Maine Indian baseball championships date from the late nineteenth century. A regional cross-border championship including Maliseet clubs from New Brunswick became a fixture of the interwar years.1 The Maliseets, who occupied territory on both sides of the border around Houlton, Maine, and in New Brunswick at Woodstock, Richibucto, and Tobique, fashioned a solid baseball reputation. The Richibucto Braves, for example, were regional champions on more than one occasion between the wars.2 Farther east, the Mi’kmaq peoples in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island actively involved themselves in the game and occasionally played other Indigenous teams in New Brunswick, Quebec, and Maine.3

At a time when movement across the Canadian-American border was uncomplicated, Indigenous teams competed against semipro teams and town teams on both sides of the line. Traveling by large motorboat up the coast into New Brunswick, for example, the Dana Point Nine Red Aces were frequent participants in matches against Grand Manan Island during Canada’s Dominion Day celebrations.4 Even before the First World War, members of the Dana, Mitchell, Francis, Neptune, Sockalexis, Sabbatus, Ranco, Paul, and Sacobasin families were well known in semipro baseball in the Northeast, following in the shadow of the legendary Louis Sockalexis from Indian Island, Maine, who had a brief career with Cleveland of the National League.

One of the most iconic Indigenous athletes of the first half of the twentieth century – along with multisport star Jim Thorpe and Canadian long-distance runner Tom Longboat – Lou Sockalexis was part of a celebrity triumvirate of First Nations athletes in the years before World War I. A hard-hitting outfielder, known for speed in the outfield and on the bases and a powerful arm that could throw 350 feet on a line to home plate, he played college ball at Ricker College in Bangor before attending Holy Cross. Sockalexis had a brief major-league career with Cleveland, hitting .313 over three seasons.

For a dozen years after retiring from major-league baseball, Sockalexis continued to play semipro ball in Maine and New Brunswick. In 1911 he retired as an active player and joined the independent New Brunswick-Maine league’s umpiring contingent. He continued to officiate through the 1913 season, when the league affiliated with Organized Baseball. Later that same year, Sockalexis suffered a fatal heart attack while working in a lumber camp near Old Town. He was 42 years old.

Although Sockalexis was the only Indigenous player from the borderlands to fashion a big-league career, there were others who went on to play in the minor leagues and on independent semipro teams in the Northeast. One of those was Joe Neptune, a nephew of the big leaguer from the same Indian Island community. In his teens Neptune attended the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania and played with amateur teams throughout New England, including the highly regarded Lynn Amateur Athletic club. In 1907 he began his career in Organized Baseball with Lewiston of the Class-D Maine State League, playing alongside team captain Bill “Rough” Carrigan. Only 15, he was considered a “coming rival of Sockalexis,” who also played in the league that year. Of their first encounter, the Lewiston (Maine) Daily Sun reported that “Big Chief Neptune swung hard, sending the ball out into right field where it was eaten up by Sockalexis.”5

Despite his early entry into Organized Baseball, Neptune spent the next six years playing on semipro clubs in Maine, New Brunswick, and as far away as Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. He occasionally turned down opportunities to play for teams in the New England and Eastern Leagues since borderland teams in mill towns and fishing and mining communities often offered salaries that exceeded those in the minor leagues. Two other native performers – pitchers Sam Sacobasin and Henry “Chief” Mitchell – were also sought after by a number of clubs along the border. When a newly formed New Brunswick-Maine League, flooded with former and future big-leaguers, opened play in 1911, Neptune, Sacobasin, and Mitchell joined the border towns of Woodstock, St. Stephen, and Calais-St. Croix. The Bangor Daily News dubbed Mitchell a “real find” for the Calais club.6

 

 

Although there were close connections between Indigenous baseball in Maine and New Brunswick, Mi’kmaq communities in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island had taken to the game as well.7 As early as August 1877, the Acadian Recorder reported that a Mi’kmaw baseball team played a “white” team in Halifax.8 Over the next quarter-century, baseball appeared on Nova Scotian reserves at Bear River, Eskasoni, Chapel Island, Barra Head, Shubenacadie (Indian Brook), Milbrook, Big Cove, and Lennox Island in Prince Edward Island.

Although baseball became the sport of choice, it existed alongside other bat-and-ball games that were more inclusive. One of these, Old Pussum or Old Fashion, resembled the British game of rounders with players running clockwise and being retired when hit by the thrown ball. This traditional game was played for decades, at least until World War II. Mi’kmaq elder John Basque recalled that when the war ended, “the year I got out, about ’45 or ’46, I had a team two years.”9 With the growing popularity of softball as a social game, Old Pussum was no longer the only alternative to the more competitive game of baseball on reserves in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.10

Although there are few specific newspaper references before World War I to individual Mi’kmaq players, sport was a central component of life on the reserves, and traditional craftsmen produced necessary equipment. Already in the late nineteenth century, Mi’kmaq carvers were internationally acclaimed for producing both baseball bats and hockey sticks. In the 1890s the Starr Manufacturing Company in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, began producing trademarked “Mic-Mac” handmade hockey sticks for the North American market, advertising in newspapers across the continent by 1900. Hockey and baseball clubs from Smith Falls, Ontario, to Vernon, British Columbia, adopted the name “Mic-Macs” as their team name.11 Maliseet craftsmen also produced baseball bats, lacrosse sticks, and axe handles, but the reputation of Mi’kmaq bat and stick makers was unrivaled.

The Mi’kmaw reputation for sporting craftmanship likely explains why the A.G. Spalding Company published Altjematimgeol. Spalding’s Baseball Rules in Micmac as part of its 1912 baseball publications.12 Not only did the publication of baseball rules in the Mi’kmaq language clearly demarcate the game from more informal games such as Old Pussum, but furthered Spalding’s mission to expand the reach of the game. The Spalding Canadian Baseball Guide that same year provided a cross-country survey of baseball with a substantial section on the Maritimes and its connections across the border in New England.13 Although there was shared interest, there is no evidence of the Spalding Company’s appropriation and distribution of Mi’kmaw-crafted equipment.

The most accomplished Indigenous player in Northeastern North America after World War I was Charlie Paul, a Mi’kmaq left-handed pitcher from Springhill, Nova Scotia. Paul grew up playing for the Springhill town team during the war, but quickly developed a reputation as one of the most talented moundsmen in all of the Maritimes and New England. At the time he also worked in a colliery, going underground during the day, washing off the coal dust and heading to the ballfield for games late in the afternoon. Paul’s exploits over the next decade rivaled those of Jimmy Rattlesnake, who subsequently fashioned a marvelous career on the Prairies during the 1930s and has been recently inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. It is fair to say that Rattlesnake and Paul were the two finest Indigenous players in Canada between the wars.14

In 1919 Paul began the season at home but was later recruited to play for Dominion Colliery in the semipro Cape Breton League. Paid on a game-by-game basis, he dominated batters and averaged a dozen strikeouts per game despite working a regular day shift as a coal miner. After an appearance in Halifax, a reporter for the Halifax Evening Mail wrote that Paul “had the ‘Indian sign’ on the locals,” striking out the first five batters who faced him, and adding, “With his wonderful cross-fire [screwball] and fast ball he looked like a million dollars.”15

For a while Paul’s stuff was so dynamic that his catchers had difficulty holding on to his pitches, but this was remedied when Dominion recruited catcher Ralph Hall, who was playing in Detroit at the time. The two were batterymates for a number of years after that. Paul’s subsequent success against barnstorming Black clubs and others from the Boston twilight leagues quickly attracted the attention of big-league teams. A scout who had closely followed his career urged Boston Braves manager George Stallings to offer him a contract, comparing him to former big-leaguer Rube Waddell from the mining districts of Pennsylvania.16

When Stallings resigned as Braves manager at the end of the 1920 season and took on the same job with the Rochester Colts, his first priority was acquiring Paul as his left-handed starter. Rochester business manager Harry Hapgood sent ace pitcher Jack Wisner to Cape Breton to get Paul’s signature on a contract and accompany him to spring training in Darlington, South Carolina. After a few days, however, it became clear that Paul would not sign.17 “Bright Light Is no Magnet for Indian Pitcher,” read a headline in the Baltimore Sun. The best that Wisner could get was an agreement that if Paul signed to play professional ball in the future, it would be with Rochester. He played instead with New Waterford of the three-cornered Cape Breton professional league, winning 16 games against only 4 losses during the 1921 season.18

The following spring Paul was courted again, this time by new Braves skipper Fred Mitchell, who received glowing reports from former big-leaguer Andy O’Connor and other Boston-area players who played against him in Cape Breton.19 Aware of Paul’s reluctance to travel on his own, the Braves arranged for an escort to Boston, where he joined Braves executives, manager Mitchell and a half-dozen players for a train ride to spring training on the Federal Express. Competing for a job as a left-handed specialist against veteran Rube Marquard and young John Cooney, Paul had a good spring. Mitchell was “greatly impressed with his style” but the Braves decided to keep Marquard and Cooney.20 Paul asked for and was granted his unconditional release so that he could return home to play for New Waterford. Over the next decade, Paul played a starring role with a number of teams in the Maritimes and New England and was subsequently inducted into the Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame.21

After his baseball career, Paul continued working as a coal miner. In August 1953 a cave-in at the 11,800-foot level in a Springhill mine took his life along with those of six others.22 By that time baseball had been largely eclipsed by softball on reserves in the Maritimes and was in decline among Indigenous communities in Maine.23 Today the rich history of baseball in Indigenous communities throughout the region has faded into a dim memory.

COLIN HOWELL is Professor Emeritus (History) at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Northern Sandlots (University of Toronto Press, 1995) and Hardscrabble Diamonds. Postwar Baseball in New England and the Maritimes (McFarland Publishers, 2023).

 

Notes

1 Lewiston (Maine) Sun Journal, June 20, 1927: 8.

2 Ottawa Journal, October 7, 1939: 13.

3 Colin D. Howell, Northern Sandlots. A Social History of Maritime Baseball (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995) provides a more extensive look at Indigenous baseball in the Maritimes. See especially Chapter 9, “The ‘Others’”; Jeffrey P. Powers-Beck, The American Indian Integration of Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 18-19.

4 Bangor (Maine) Daily News, June 20, 1917: 8; July 4, 1925: 6; June 7, 1927: 16.

5 Lewiston Daily Sun, June 3, 1907: 6. The nickname “Chief” was widespread for players of Indigenous origin. Jeffrey Powers Beck, “‘Chief.’ The American Integration of Baseball, 1897-1945,” American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 25 (Autumn, 2001): 508-38.

6 Bangor Daily News, July 15, 1911: 3.

7 In Mi’kmaq, the word Mi’kmaw is an adjective, while Mi’kmaq is the noun.

8 Acadian Recorder (Halifax, Nova Scotia), August 7, 1877: 4.

9 Howell, Northern Sandlots, 189.

10 Quoted in Howell, Northern Sandlots, 189. Basque’s remarks are drawn from a series of interviews with Mi’kmaq people by anthropologist Trudy Sable as part of this project on Indigenous bat-and-ball games in the Maritimes.

11 See, for example, the Halifax Herald, December 29, 1900: 8; Merrickville Star (Merrickville-Wolford, Ontario), March 2, 1905: 8; Vernon (British Columbia) News, January 10, 1907: 5. Similar advertisements appeared in newspapers across Canada and the United States.

12 Altjematimgeol. Spalding’s Baseball Rules in Micmac (Rimouskie, Quebec: Spalding Publishers, 1912).

13 Spalding’s Official Canadian Baseball Guide, 1912 (Montreal: Canadian Sports Publishing).

14 “Bright Lights No Magnet for Indian Pitcher. Charlie Paul Turns Down Offer from George Stallings,” Baltimore Sun, March 20, 1921: 89.

15 Halifax Evening Mail, August 25, 1919: 8.

16 Springfield (Massachusetts) Union, December 1, 1921: 17.

17 Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, March 6, 1922: 20.

18 Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, March 6, 1922: 20.

19 Tampa Bay Times, March 7, 1922: 7; “Pro Baseball Thrives in Cape Breton. Imported Americans Are Bolstering Up Dominion, Waterford and Glace Bay Teams,” Halifax Evening Mail, July 23, 1921: 8.

20 Halifax Evening Mail, March 8, 1922: 8; Boston Globe, March 30, 1922: 16.

21 Charles Elbert “Charlie” Paul, Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame. https://nsshf.com.

22 Montreal Star, August 25, 1953: 1.

23 Bangor Daily News, May 17, 1961: 23.