Abel Blazed Trail for Oshie and Others

Mere blocks from Capital One Arena, one can find the National Archives Museum, home to the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and The Declaration of Independence, as well as other important and iconic documents and artifacts. Also in that building, in the Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery, and through Jan. 7, 2024, one can visit an exhibit entitled: “All American: The Power of Sports.”

The “All American” sports exhibit includes a panel titled, “Trailblazers,” and two hockey players are pictured – Clarence “Taffy” Abel on the left, and T.J. Oshie on the right. Virtually everyone in these parts knows T.J. Oshie, but who is Clarence “Taffy” Abel, and what makes him and Oshie trailblazers?

Quite simply, Abel was the first Indigenous American to play in the NHL, and the first Indigenous American to participate in the Winter Olympic Games. Abel was a member of the 1924 U.S. Olympic team in Men’s Ice Hockey, and he was chosen as Team USA’s flagbearer for those 1924 Games, held in Chamonix, France, the very first Winter Olympics.

“They’ve made a pretty decent display there,” says George Jones, Abel’s nephew. “In terms of the three Native Americans who have represented the U.S. [in men’s hockey] at the Winter Olympics, Taffy Abel was the first one in 1924, Henry Boucha was the second one in 1972, and T.J. Oshie was the third one in 2014.

“And they were all Ojibwe, though different tribes. To me, that says something right there. I know the Native American spirit that my uncle had, and he was a fierce competitor. People would ask him what business he was in, and he would say, ‘Well, I’m in the business of winning.’”

That same fierce competitive spirit was always visible in the on-ice play of both Boucha and Oshie as well. Boucha, who passed away earlier this year, was Oshie’s uncle.

Abel truly was a trailblazer, but few were aware of it or knew of his achievements during his lifetime, and even fewer were aware of it during the course of his eight-year NHL career, which included two Stanley Cup championships, one with the New York Rangers and one with Chicago. During his playing career, only his closest family members were aware of his heritage. To his employers, his teammates and the fans, he was Taffy Abel, a big (6-foot-1, 225 pounds), bruising defenseman known for his body checks and his competitive nature. No one asked about his heritage; everyone assumed he was a white man from Michigan.

Abel was born on May 28, 1900 in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, just over the bridge from Canada in Michigan’s upper peninsula. Initially, Abel’s family opted to keep their heritage a secret, worried that exposing their Indigenous heritage might result in Clarence and his sister being removed from the family unit and sent away to a boarding school for Native American children.

It’s estimated that as many as 150,000 Indigenous American children were forcibly taken from their families and placed in boarding schools where they were discouraged and/or prevented from speaking their native language and practicing their traditions and tribal and cultural rituals. Even worse, those children were subject to some horrific conditions at those schools, and some of them died there.

“It was like living in two different worlds,” says Jones. “If you're a Native American, you know some of that way of life, and I know he did, because we would always talk about it. After he passed away, my aunt would talk about it. His mother didn’t want it to come out until after she passed away, but the thing is, unless his mother and father protected him and his sister by saying, ‘Hey, they're not native. They're white,’ he would have probably been taken away in, like 1905 to a Native American boarding school in Mt. Pleasant, Mich.

“Among family and friends, we always knew he was Native American. We had no problem with it. But from a professional standpoint, and from a protective standpoint, back in 1905, if I was his parent, I’d have done the same damn thing.”

Clarence came by his nickname because of his love for the candy as a kid. He grew up playing hockey like many kids in that part of the world, and he attended the local public schools. When his father passed away in 1920, Abel took whatever jobs he could get to support his mother and his sister. But he also kept playing hockey at an amateur level.

“He was playing for St. Paul in 1923 when he got discovered to go to the Olympics,” says Jones. “He played for both St. Paul and Minneapolis. Any city of any size up there had an indoor hockey arena.”

Ahead of the 1924 Olympic Games, Abel was recruited to represent the U.S. team. The official who recruited him had earlier tried to have Abel banned from the sport for life because of “ruffianism,” but that same official also recognized his value to the U.S. Olympic team. But Abel had no money for the equipment or the travel.

“Taffy did not come out of wealth,” says Jones. “He didn’t have the money to go to the Olympics, then finally, someone loaned it to him. Then he met a representative for the A.G. Spalding Company, and they donated the jerseys, and the ice skates, and the clothes. And I know some of the other people – the families from Sault Ste. Marie – that put the money together to get him there.”

Abel and Team USA won a silver medal at the Chamonix Games, and the captains of the other U.S. teams chose him to be the flagbearer for the traditional procession before the start of the Olympic Games.

After returning to the States following the Olympics, Abel played for the Minneapolis Millers of the Central Hockey League, which in those days held six teams. Four of them were Minnesota clubs in Duluth, Hibbing, Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the other two were in Canada – in Winnipeg and in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., just over the border from Abel’s Michigan hometown of the same name.

The ’25-26 Millers’ roster was chock full of future NHL players, and it included future Hockey Hall of Famers Cooney Weiland, Ivan “Ching” Johnson and goaltender Cecil “Tiny” Thompson. On a scouting trip to stock the expansion New York Rangers’ roster for the 1926-27 season, legendary hockey manager Conn Smythe discovered and signed Abel and Johnson for the Rangers, the newest entry into the NHL, which was founded in 1917. The two were defense partners in Minneapolis, and they would be paired on the Blueshirts’ blueline for the first three seasons of the Rangers’ existence.

Abel made his NHL debut on Nov. 16, 1926, skating in the very first game in Rangers history. He led Rangers defensemen with eight goals that season, finishing seventh among all blueliners in the League. New York won the Stanley Cup in his second season, and Abel and Johnson played a key role in one of the nascent League’s most famous games, Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final against the Montreal Maroons on April 7, 1928, a game that was played a week after the birth of Gordie Howe.

After Montreal blanked New York 2-0 in Game 1 of the best-of-five set, Rangers’ goalie Lorne Chabot was badly injured after taking a puck to the eye early in the second period of Game 2, which was scoreless at the time. Maroons coach Eddie Gerard would not agree to the Rangers using Ottawa’s Alex Connell in goal; Connell was a spectator at the game and in that era, teams typically used whichever goaltender might be available in an emergency. Gerard also refused to allow the Rangers to use a minor league goalie who was in the building.

Rangers’ coach Lester Patrick – the grandfather of Caps’ chairman Dick Patrick – a former defenseman during his own playing days, decided that he would don Chabot’s pads and tend the net. As 60-minute defensemen in those days, Abel and Johnson combined to keep the shots on their 44-year-old, silver-haired coach from distance, and he was able to stop all but one of the pucks sent in his direction.

With the game tied at 1-1 in overtime, Johnson assisted Rangers’ captain Frank Boucher on the game-winning goal, lifting New York to victory and evening the series. The League allowed the Rangers to add goaltender Joe Miller for the rest of the series, and the Blueshirts went on to win the Stanley Cup.

Traded to Chicago for cash after the 1928-29 season, Abel helped lead the Black Hawks to the Stanley Cup in 1933-34, his final season in the League.

Upon retirement, Abel returned to Sault Ste. Marie. When his mother passed away five years later, he came clean as to his heritage, and he started the Soo Indians amateur hockey program in his hometown. He also operated a resort/nightclub called Taffy’s Lodge in his hometown.

Taffy Abel passed away in 1964. Just under a decade later, in 1973, he was one of the first inductees into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in Eveleth, Minn. In 1989, Abel was inducted into the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame.

These days, an arena in his hometown bears his name. The Taffy Abel Arena was built in 1976, and it is home to the Lake Superior State Lakers men’s ice hockey team of the Central Collegiate Hockey Association.

“Taffy was born a Native American, and he died a Native American,” says Jones. “And most people see him as a white [man], but he lived in two worlds. In terms of athleticism and competitiveness, he was competitive to an extreme amount. He was a leader, not only in hockey at the Olympics, but all of the [U.S. Olympian] team leaders got together, and they picked him as the USA flagbearer, which is a quite an honor.”

Back in 1926, Abel was the first Indigenous American to suit up and play in the NHL. Over the history of the League – which dates back to 1917 – over 8,000 players have suited up for at least one NHL game, but only 100 Indigenous players have played in the NHL, including eight who have suited up for the Capitals over the years:  Craig Berube, Jeff Friesen, Trevor Halverson, D.J. King, Brantt Myhres, T.J. Oshie, Garrett Pilon and Chris Simon. Oshie is the only American-born player of the octet of Capitals, and he and Abel comprise one quarter of only eight Indigenous American players in NHL history.

The Society for International Hockey Research (SIHR) does an excellent job of keeping track of Indigenous players from around the world; it maintains a data base of players going back to even before Abel’s time. Oshie’s grandfather (Alvin) and great uncle (Max) are among those on that list, as is his cousin Gary Sargent, who is a former NHL player.

“It didn’t click to me with how rare it was until I got older,” says Oshie. “To me growing up, those were just the stories I heard from my dad and my grandparents. For me, it didn’t matter that they were Native Americans. They were just my grandpa and my great uncle. And there was uncle Henry, obviously, and also Gary Sargent, who is a cousin. But to me, they were just family members who were good at hockey.

“I didn’t actually realize how rare it was until college days or maybe actually a bit later, when I really started poking around and looking into it and learning more about my heritage. A lot of what I’ve read and what I’ve been taught about that actually came later in life, because I grew up in Washington. A lot of that culture has been mostly me going out and trying to learn more about that culture and the history of the Anishinaabe.”

Oshie was born some 86 years after Abel, and 22 years after Abel’s passing. His path to the NHL and his awareness of his heritage were vastly different from Abel’s experience, largely because society has evolved some since then, too.

“As a man, he was a great hockey player,” says Jones of his uncle Clarence. “And as a Native American, he did a lot for the Native American community. And that was at a time when it wasn’t too far off from Buffalo Bill having wild west shows, and people were saying that Indians were savages. It was a different era, and now we’re in a different era where we’re more accepting of minorities. And I think Taffy’s story will develop more over the years. That’s my hope. He did good. He did the best he could with what he had.”

Boucha and Oshie did as well, during vastly different times and under quite different circumstances.

“I take a lot of pride in my family and those who have come before me,” says Oshie. “And now, sitting on this stage and being acknowledged for my accomplishments, I’m most proud of any young Native American boys or girls that sees me, and if that can help – in their mind – open the doorway to playing in the NHL, playing pro sports, or being successful in whatever it is. At this stage, I’m most proud of having the ability to be – in one way – a role model for younger kids, and really just getting that hope and that belief in there, that they can do it. Someone has done it before them, someone has done it before me. It’s nice to follow in those footsteps.”

As Native American Heritage Month draws to a close, we salute Abel and all those who followed in his skate-steps, especially as the centennial anniversary of his historic participation in the Olympic Games draws near.