More than two decades after the first baseball game at New Jersey’s Elysian Fields, a faceoff between townies and soldiers was the first recorded ball game in Clark County. In mid-May 1867, two clubs met on the green: Vancouver’s Occidental Base Ball Club and Fort Vancouver soldiers of the Sherman Base Ball Club. They likely sported uniforms, but historians can only speculate what they may have looked like.
The Shermans crushed the Occidentals 45 to 5. The Enterprise newspaper reported it as a “championship,” which seems odd since the season was barely beginning, so perhaps it was a sportswriter’s hyperbole. Two weeks later, the Occidentals played the Pioneer Club of Portland in the center of Vancouver. Portlanders crossed the river on the steamship Cascadia.
According to the Herald newspaper, the earlier drubbing didn’t dash the Occidentals’ spirit. The paper’s Vancouver correspondent declared the day beautiful and participants “wanting to secure a happy time and an exciting contest.”
The game was more than three hours long, and the Occidentals lost 79 to 62. The correspondent believed his team would have won. In the second inning, he viewed calls by Ed Backenstos, the umpire, as less than impartial.
At the time, umpires were not independent of early baseball clubs. Instead, they were appointed from among the club members, and bias was possible. An umpire’s honor resided in the accuracy of his rulings, which the opposing team might find suspect.
Although the contest was disputed, both teams maintained the “gentlemanly conduct” the sport required. The Oregonian reported that the Occidental Base Ball Club closed the day “with a dancing party at Metropolis Hall, to which all the world and his wife and the rest of mankind are invited.”
Despite a harmonious evening of “bountiful food,” the Vancouver team agreed afterward that the Pioneer umpire violated some “fundamental rule of the game” and, with good gentlemanly nature, seemed to drop the issue.
The Herald’s Vancouver correspondent doggedly pursued the controversy. He dismissed any possibility of human error and called the umpire’s performance “premeditated bias and fraud.” The words challenged Backenstos’ character, gentlemanliness and umpiring. In the Victorian era, such a personal assault required response.
While the Vancouver reporter’s correspondence only bore the initials B.O.R., the Pioneer Club, likely feeling equally insulted, took up the umpire’s cause in a special session the very evening of his accusations. At the meeting, Theodore Miner, Pioneer Club president, called B.O.R’s account a “gross injustice” to the umpire. The club validated Backenstos’ conduct, then sent its comments to the Herald.
The day after the resolution went public, the Occidentals countered with a meeting. They published their response disavowing that B.O.R. was authorized to make any comments; saying the umpire should not be charged with wrongdoing; and that the recent game merited the Occidentals’ admiration of the Pioneers. All local papers were urged to publish the retort, which was signed by Occidentals who played in the game.
Once B.O.R.’s unauthorized comments were brushed aside, it was “play ball” again for the rest of the 1867 season. By fall rainy weather dampened local enthusiasm for the game, so it slowed for a while.
Martin Middlewood is editor of the Clark County Historical Society Annual. Reach him at ClarkCoHist@gmail.com.
