Indians Lose First 18, But show Improvement

The Crimson has beaten Dartmouth only five times since 1922, but the Indians haven't always had it so good.

When Dartmouth played its first football game with the Cantabs on November 9, 1882, it spent the entire game inside its own 25 yard line while Harvard put across four goals and nineteen touchdowns. The next day the Boston Globe commented that 'Dartmouth might possibly be able to cope with the Boston Latin School."

For the next seventeen games the Hanoverites would have done well to have scheduled Boston Latin instead of Harvard. Until 1901 the Indians stayed camped at their end of the field, allowing the Crimson to roll up 533 points against their own 18.

Home Win

On November 14, 1903 Dartmouth "dedicated" the opening of the present stadium by winning its first game against the Crimson 11-0. Since then, the Big Green has come out on the long end of the rivalry with 18 wins to Harvard's 13. The series now stands at 31 wins, 18 losses and 3 ties for the Crimson.

Though this record is warped by the number of victories Harvard won when football was a family affair with Yale and Princeton, the Indians saved their scalps by staying up in the hills from 1912 to 1922. This was the Golden Age of Crimson football when Percy Haughton's machine won 71 out of 83 games and the Cantabs went to the Rose Bowl.

The ten year moratorium on the Crimson-Green relationship apparently came as a result of the 1912 game which Harvard won 3-0. The CRIMSON remarked in a post-game editorial that "an unfortunate feature of the contest was the unnecessary roughness displayed by Dartmouth."

Missed Big Bill

During this break in the rivalry the Crimson missed the unique opportunity of playing against Bill Cunningham, the Boston Herald's Dartmouth correspondent, when he was a Green center in 1919.

While Dartmouth avoided Haughton's teams Harvard had the misfortune to be on the Green schedule during Red Blaik's Hanover regime. Blaik's power teams ran over the Cantabs seven straight times before Harlow's eleven tripped the Indians 7-0 in 1941.

Harvard has run up the highest score in the series, a 74-0 rout of the Indians in 1888. The CRIMSON commented that "the Dartmouth men played a curious game." Forty-one years later Dartmouth, led by All-American Al Marsters, retaliated by trouncing the Cantabs 34-7.

Hard To Lose

Except for a 21-7 victory in 1946, in the Indians' own camp, the post-war series has been disappointing to the Crimson. Last October Harvard played Dartmouth an oven game--and lost 14-7. There was only one penalty in the contest an it came, against Harvard, on a touchdown play which might have tied the score.

Two years ago, after spotting the Green two first half touchdowns, Harvard got back into the ballgame with some fine broken field running by Hal Moffie and scored twice. But the Crimson had missed a conversion to give Dartmouth a 14-13 win.