Dartmouth Weekend: Invitation to Buffoonery

Maybe it's because the time is ripe in mid-season; maybe it's because Dartmouth Indians suddenly become gay when they leave their Hanover reservation and travel to the Hub, whatever it is, things always seem to pop in Cambridge on the weekend of the Dartmouth game.

Ever since the first contest in 1882--except for a ten-year gap from 1912 to 1922 and a four-year wartime halt--Big Green partisans have ben storming annually to Harvard, bringing with them plans for gigantic parties, hoaxes, and raids. and more often than not the Crimson, in turn, strikes back.

Dartmouth started making real noise with its visits in the twenties. It was then that the Indian fanatics centered their merry-making in hotel lobby riots. But by the late 'thirties this brand of deviltry disappeared in favor of the more inviting Yard raid.

For the past ten years the Crimson has been girding for a repetition of the classic stunt--a stunt with all the Indian trimmings. Here's what happened in 1930:

Operation Stoughton Hall

Warning of a big onslaught came Thursday, October 21 when a solitary Dartmouth brave wandered into the Stoughton Hall quarters of one Donald H. Shaw '39 and demanded a lodging for the night. Ughing something about the provisions of a gift of bricks used to build the original Stoughton hall in 1695, he claimed the building's charter entitled all Indians to free lodging.

The brave was eventually forced out, but leaving he whopped a terrible war cry that he would return with hordes of his brethren on the following day.

Live up to his promise he did. Next afternoon a whole tribe of blanket-clad "noble savages" made a full-scale attack on Stoughton. Yard cops and students quelled the attack, however, and the Indians settled for a tepee north of the Old Pump.

As the evening wore on, the invaders war-danced, tom-tommed, and marched through the Yard waving torches. Their signs said, "We wampum injun rights in Stoughton."

The injun rights were claims to rooms in Stoughton, based on the charter tot the original stoughton Hall, which collapsed in 1871, (This 1695 charter is reproduced below.) Obviously unimpressed by the white man's spelling, the Indians had stayed away in droves; the 1939 assault was the first attempt ever to exercise the Stoughton Hall privilege.

Harvard Retailates

It remained for Harvard to try a few ideas of its own. The last blow in the pre-war battle came in 1941 when the pre-game rully made quite a sport of burning to a cinder an Indian effigy. But the big blows came in 1946 and 1947.

Whatever emotion the war suppressed burst out in 1946 when the editors of the CRIMSON entered the little party. On the morning of the game, there were two issues of the Dartmouth circulated in Hanover, and the one that reached students' rooms wasn't put out by the Dartmouth editors.

"Seven Indian Starters Overcome by Food Poison on Eve of Game" blared Dartmouth-style headlines in an edition actually prepared by Crimeds in Cambridge. The original New Hampshire grown copy of the Dartmouth reached the streets later in the morning--too late to quell most of the panicky Dartmouths. Scores of frat boys rushed to the coach to volunteer their services to the team.

The delight of this successful hoax was all the more the following fall when two Crimeds, posing as New York newspapermen, visited Hanover before the game and snared details of a monster Indian attempt to retaliate for the 1946 humiliation.

Crimeds "Mister X and Mister Y" mingled with the Dartmouths for several days, listened to their secret plans for revenge on the Crimson, and then tripped back to Cambridge to share the secrets with Harvard.

The plans included bombing the Yard with toilet paper, kidnapping two or three Lampoon "fruits," and dressing an entire bogus Crimson football team which was to have taken the field just as the Band ended its half-time act, and dyeing the Charles River green,

Either the Dartmouths feared lawsuit or else they got wind that Harvard had caught on to their little plot. Somehow the party never came off.

Last year was a quiet one on the Hanover-Cambridge front. The usually exuberant men from New Hampshire seemed quite content to win the football game and indulged in no extra stadium histrionics.