Dartmouth's bellicose braves swarm into Cambridge again this weekend, out to protect then persons and a 70-year reputation for bloody battle with Harvard--some of it by the football teams.
As is its custom for the Crimson games and for every weekend save the Winter Carnival, the tribe leaves the beloved, ice-elated Hangover campus on masse. Only twice has the Big Green played host, and it can boast of but 21 wins and 3 ties in the 55 meetings of the series.
The story of the visitors from the North is as old as it is sad. You can take a man out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the man. Every year the Dartmouths hit the town loaded with rural manners and rural beverage.
Unsober Savages
Indians and alcohol are a common anthropological problem, however, and science may find the Hanoverians an even more fascinating study than the Peruvians, Pueblos, or Polynesians. Anthropologist Robert Redfield says that the typical primitive folk society is "small, isolated, nonliterate, and homogeneous, with a strong sense of group solidarity." No less an authority than Daniel Webster called Dartmouth small.
No matter how it is characterized, the New Hampshire school can be depended upon a good fight. Harvard men are perennially hard pressed to defend their honor and property, when the Green are around; and if business is good for Square merchants during the weekend, it's even better for cops.
The gridiron series began in 1882, but the rivalry didn't. The Crimson won the first 18 games, and teams had met 16 times before Dartmouth could get the damn ball over the goal-line.
The 1882 opener saw the varsity win 4g., 19t. to 0, which means 53 to 0 in English. Said the Boston Globe, "Dartmouth might possibly be able to cope with the Boston Latin School."
Revenge finally arrived for the Big Green, and it couldn't have come at a better time than in 1903. Dartmouth gleefully christened the new Harvard Stadium by triumphing, 11 to 0.
Two ties and a Crimson victory came before the New Hampshire club took its second contest, 22 to 0, in 1907. "The sentiments that were expressed on the field after the game were anything but complimentary," according to the Boston Post.
The varsity bounced back to take the next four, winning, 5 to 3, on a blocked kick in 1911 and, 3 to 0, the following year on a field goal by Charley Brickley, "the most accurate booter who ever lived."
By then, relations between the two schools had become more strained than ever, and each decided to go its own way for ten years.
By 1922, both clubs were ready to have at each other again, with the green particularly fired for the renewal. The seven days before the game were designated as "Fight Week" in Hanover. When Saturday rolled around, 2,300 rabid undergraduates, alumni, and townspeople stormed into Cambridge only to see their boys go down to a 12 to 3 defeat.
Indians Prevail
What happened after that is best forgotten, however, as Dartmouth grabbed 19 of the remaining 26 encounters with one ending in a tie.
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