“More than 200 years ago, Indians throughout the United States played a variety of club and ball games described as ‘Shinny.’ Translation of the various Indian appellations given the game include ‘The Club of the War Gods’ or ‘the yielding stick’ but it was popularly known as ‘Rooster’ amongst the Tashuan tribe where it is said to have first originated and had a shortlived, but well-documented history amongst its people.
Introduced to the Tashwans by a seaman second class by the name “Shanks” McNaught who claimed he was washed ashore after riding a great white whale with his Captain Jonah, after the wreck of the whaler, The Raven out of Turro, Massachusetts. Rooster was more akin to dueling than to the game of golf as we now know it. In the game of Rooster - two contestants compete head-to-head in a match of ‘fool-hardy will and dubious courage.’ Each player armed with a wooden club called a baffer, which has a leather grip at one end, and a bent, gnarled, spoon-like head at the other. If the contestants were to smote each other with these baffing clubs they might have caused considerable damage, but the rules of Rooster strictly forbade striking your opponent directly with the business end of the club. Rather, the rules of the game required the contestants to stand 216 paces distant from each other and to “flayel the baffer, thereby striking the baul at yourn foe in the wee hope of goffin ‘im in the noggin.” “Wee hope,” being the operative words. For the most part, it is said Rooster contests devolved into utter frivolity, as few of the players were capable of striking the baul with any degree of certainty, much less inflicting any damage upon a foe so far afield.
Games of the North American Indians was first published in a U. S. Government document titled Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Smithsonian Institution, 1902-1903, by H.W. Holmes.
