Oct. 21—The Bemidji State football team has come a long way since it kicked off its first season 100 years ago.
Many important moments have come since then: the team's first win, the first game at Chet Anderson Stadium, the first game with the Battle Axe on the line. Then there are the moments that are hard to fathom in the present day, like losing to local high school teams and playing a historic Canadian Football League team during World War II.
With BSU celebrating its 100th season, I searched through the Pioneer archives to make sense of the program's significant moments. The obvious start would be the team's first game, which is probably one it wants to forget.
When Bemidji State (then known as Bemidji State Teachers College) kicked off its inaugural season, its first opponents left something to be desired.
That was especially the case in the program's first game, when it made the short trip to Cass Lake High School to take on the Panthers. The result wasn't pretty — the newly-formed college squad got shut out 33-0.
One paragraph that appeared in the Oct. 3 edition of the Daily Pioneer perfectly encapsulates the humble beginnings of Beaver football:
"The college players played good ball, considering that this is their first game of the season, and that not enough men turned out for football to form two lines for scrimmage work. Barely enough have turned out to form one team, and Coach Mendenhall was forced to go thru scrimmage work with the local high eleven, so as to have the practice."
Bemidji State didn't yet have its "Beavers" moniker, so it was referred to simply as the "teachers" throughout their early days in the Daily Pioneer.
Fans didn't have football fever yet either. Rather, they were interested in that year's World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Yankees, which dominated front pages in early October.
To think that nothing in Bemidji was more important to put on the front cover of the newspaper than the previous day's World Series — especially when Major League Baseball wouldn't come to Minnesota for another 35 years — is a testament to the stranglehold baseball had on America at the time, and a testament to how much local newspapers have changed.
No one beats the 1926 Bemidji State football team twice in the same season.
Four days after losing to Deer River High School, Bemidji State welcomed Cass Lake High School to its home field near Diamond Point Park for the program's first win — on a Wednesday, no less.
The teachers scored two touchdowns in a rather drab 13-0 win. Lopsided shutouts were a pattern in Bemidji State's first years, and it went in both ways: Bemidji State shut out Park Rapids High School 44-0 in 1927 before losing 69-0 to Hibbing Junior College 14 days later.
Bemidji State eventually found other colleges to regularly play against, particularly St. Cloud State, Duluth State (now Minnesota Duluth) and Moorhead State (now MSU Moorhead). Along with Winona State, the five schools were the founding members of the Northern Teachers Athletic Conference.
The reaction to the newly-formed conference at the time was muted. The Beavers were already regularly playing most of the schools, so placing them in an official conference was met with little fanfare.
The Beavers' first conference game saw them travel to Winona, where the Warriors cruised to a 13-0 win.
As news about the war in Europe dominated the front page, Bemidji State received a federal grant to build sports facilities in 1939, which included a new football field that was renamed Chet Anderson Stadium in 1996.
The first game at the stadium is in dispute.
The BSU website
states it was on Sept. 27, 1940, against Concordia College, but the stadium was only partially built. It wasn't completed until the Beavers hosted Jamestown on Sept. 19, 1941, which is recognized as the stadium's first game in
Bemidji State's record book.
However, in my deep dive into the Daily Pioneer archives, I found the true first game was Sept. 13, 1940, against Mayville College, a 20-6 victory for Bemidji State. The south stands were the only thing that was completed in time for the season; the north stands were completed the following year. Both are still standing today.
Tickets to the first game were $0.40, which converts to around $9.50 today.
Many readers may recall tales told by previous generations of the Armistice Day Blizzard that hit the northern part of the country on Nov. 11, 1940. Armistice Day, a holiday to remember veterans of World War I, is now known as
Veterans Day
.
The day started unseasonably warm until temperatures cratered to below freezing in mere hours. Winds picked up and snow started falling, totaling over a foot in most of Minnesota. Forty-nine Minnesotans died from the early-season snowstorm.
The storm affected the Beavers, too. The team made a trip to North Dakota to play its season finale against the Wahpeton College of Science. But the game was canceled due to the storm, and roads back to Bemidji were unusable due to the snow drifts, some 20 feet high
by some accounts.
So the Beavers were left stranded in Wahpeton until the snow finally cleared off the roads. Since it was the end of the season, the two teams canceled the game instead of rescheduling it.
It'd be the last canceled scheduled game until the entire 2020 season was canned due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Due to World War II, the NTAC wasn't active from 1943-1945. In the meantime, Bemidji State kept busy against new opponents, from North Dakota State to St. Thomas.
But then there was its Oct. 27, 1945, game against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, who are now in the CFL.
The Bombers were a rugby team at the time competing for Grey Cups. They accepted the exhibition between Bemidji State in what is believed to be a half football, half rugby contest, based on a quote then-Beavers head coach Jolly Erickson gave to the Daily Pioneer.
"We were evenly matched in the football portion of the contest," he said, "but it was their game all the way in the rugby."
Bemidji State lost the exhibition 40-7.
The team's exploits of their trip to Winnipeg were detailed in the Daily Pioneer. Of note, the team attended a hockey exhibition between the United States Hockey League's St. Paul Saints and the NHL's New York Rangers ... in Winnipeg. Who would've thought?
The Battle for the Axe between BSU and MSU Moorhead is Division II football's second-oldest traveling trophy. As the story goes, Bemidji's homecoming committee wanted a trophy to boost the Beaver-Dragon rivalry, so chairman Ron Smith decided to put a Battle Axe that he got from New Guinea up for grabs.
But Bemidji sports writers weren't concerned about the new tradition when it first appeared on Oct. 22, 1948. It's probably because the Beavers lost to the Dragons 13-6 at homecoming. It would take a few years for the Battle Axe to catch on in the public consciousness, but now it's one of the most important games on the BSU schedule.
After WWII, the program and its schedule started to look more familiar to the present day. But with all the success the Beavers have seen over the years, it's important (and fun) to look back at the early days of the program to see how the strong tradition of football was built.