The best man did everything he could to keep it secret. Tom Flanagan also served as the groom’s manager, so he was well aware this was no ordinary wedding. If the public were told where the ceremony was being held, they would show up in droves to celebrate the happy couple. “I’m not going to make the place public,” Flanagan told the newspapers, “because I do not want the church besieged.… A wedding ceremony is a sacred thing.” But somehow, scores of people figured it out anyway. Long before the couple arrived, a crowd began to gather in the cold. It was a dark December night — just a few days after Christmas in 1908 — but of course that didn’t keep them away. Nothing could. They thronged beneath the brick spire of St. John the Evangelist — an old church on Portland Street, where soldiers from Fort York came to pray. The fans hoped to catch a glimpse of the bride and groom, to wish them well on their wedding day.
They finally got what they wanted at seven o’clock. The carriages of the wedding party arrived. The bride wore a white satin dress, with a veil and a long train; the groom was tall and striking in his tuxedo. They entered the church through a shower of confetti.
The wedding wouldn’t go entirely smoothly. It had been a bit controversial to begin with: Toronto’s Anglican archbishop nearly banned his priests from performing the ceremony, worried about the groom’s recent and reluctant conversion from his own Haudenosaunee beliefs. And now, the lovebirds waited impatiently as the best man rushed back to his hotel, a horse-drawn cab galloping through the streets so he could grab the marriage licence he’d forgotten. But in the end, the couple was finally married. They emerged from the church to another shower of confetti and an even bigger crowd.
The public party was held at Massey Hall. The big, red-brick theatre was a little more than a decade old and had rarely seen an occasion as joyful as this one. There were bands, singers, comedians, acrobats, and more than a thousand spectators who streamed through the doors to celebrate the marriage. They cheered and applauded as the newlyweds kissed and then waited for a chance to shake their hands and give them their best. There at the centre of it all was Lauretta Maracle, the petite Kanien’keha:ka bride in her white dress, standing next to her tall husband. Tom Longboat, the greatest runner in the world, had just gotten married.
The marathon was both a very old and a very new event. Its roots stretch all the way back to antiquity. According to ancient scholars, the first marathon was run by a Greek messenger named Philippides, who rushed all the way from the battlefield of Marathon to the city of Athens to report a victory over the invading Persian army. He burst into the assembly, reported the news, and promptly died of exhaustion.
The second marathon was run two thousand years later. When the Olympic Games were resurrected at the end of the 1800s, the organizers were looking for a big, high-profile event to cap things off. Something that would draw spectators and reflect the ancient glory of Greece — a connection between the modern games and the original, ancient ones. They decided on a long-distance race: a gruelling run to commemorate that legendary sprint to Athens.
It was an instant success, becoming one of the most popular sports in the world. And nearly immediately, a runner from Canada established himself as the greatest marathon runner of all.
Tom Longboat, Cogwagee, was born in the territory of the Six Nations as a member of the Onondaga nation, growing up along the Grand River just a generation after Pauline Johnson did. His family lived in poverty, raising a few animals on a small plot of land. That’s how Longboat learned to love running: by chasing down and herding cows.
His first big race came when he was eighteen years old: a long dash around Hamilton Harbour against some of the best runners in the country. The teenaged upstart crushed his competition, nearly setting a new course record even though he’d briefly gotten lost along the way. He quickly followed that with more victories, including the Ward Marathon in Toronto, racing through High Park and along the lakeshore with his trademark long, low strides and his hands held at his hips. With each victory, his future grew brighter.
It wouldn’t be an easy road. The gruelling demands of the marathons were matched by the exhausting burdens of racism. Longboat had been taken from his parents as a child and sent to the Mohawk Institute Residential School on the outskirts of Brantford. It had been open for decades, the first residential school in Canada. There, he was forbidden from speaking the Onondaga language. His hair was cut. His clothes were thrown away. He was forced to wake up at five thirty every morning and work the fields until school began in the afternoon. At night, he was made to pray to the Christian god. The children ate porridge for nearly every meal; so much, they nicknamed their school “The Mush Hole.” Some were beaten and abused. At one point, the students set fire to the building, trying to burn it down. Longboat ran away, was caught and returned, and then ran away again. This time, for good. Years later, when he was asked to give a speech at the school, he refused. “If I had my way,” he explained, “I wouldn’t even send my dog to that place.”
He remembered those years at the residential school as the worst of his life. But the racism would never end. It didn’t seem to matter that he was a world-famous runner and one of the most successful athletes in Canadian history. Even the favourable press he received was full of condescension and racist nicknames. A newspaper in Boston, finding themselves without a photo of him, just ran an image of another Indigenous athlete instead. One of Canada’s most respected sportswriters, Lou Marsh, who sometimes worked with and supported Longboat, also published more than one piece filled with racist drivel about him. “In my time, I’ve interviewed everything from a circus lion to an Eskimo chief, but when it comes to being the original dummy, Tom Longboat is it. Interviewing a Chinese Joss or a mooley cow is pie compared to the take of digging anything out of Heap Big Chief T. Longboat.” And rumours of alcoholism followed him for the rest of his life, despite historians suggesting that there is no real evidence he drank more than anyone else.
Adversity found him on the track, too. At a Christmas Day race in Hamilton, a cart was sent crashing into Longboat and one of his fellow athletes — sabotage from a group who’d bet on another runner. When he ran at the 1908 Olympics in London, he collapsed before the finish line, complaining of a severe headache. There were rumours that Tom Flanagan — his own manager and best man — had poisoned him with strychnine. Some thought it had been an accident, that Flanagan was trying to give Longboat an illicit boost with a small dose of the dangerous stimulant — many runners used a cocktail of strychnine and champagne in an attempt to give themselves an edge. Others thought he’d done it on purpose to win a big bet against his own runner.
But no matter how much adversity he faced, Longboat kept winning races across Europe and North America — including a few at Hanlan’s Point Stadium on the Toronto Islands. When he ran the Boston Marathon, he didn’t just win the race, he smashed the record by five minutes, even though it was snowing and he kept having to dodge eager fans. When he arrived home at Union Station after his big win, he was welcomed by a parade up Bay Street to Old City Hall where the mayor, a band, fireworks, and thousands of fans were waiting for him. It was the biggest reception the city had ever seen.
At the height of his fame, he was compared to Babe Ruth and Man o’ War — an undisputed champion. And Lauretta was there at his side through all those glorious years. When Longboat was lagging during one famous race at Madison Square Garden just a couple of weeks before their wedding day, Flanagan even convinced her to stand right next to the track, waving a handkerchief every time her fiancé passed by. It gave Longboat the strength he needed to surge in front and win the race.
He was still the greatest runner in the world when the Great War came.
Longboat signed up in January 1916. Tom Flanagan had co-founded a new battalion and was convincing his Toronto friends to enlist — many of them from the sporting world. The runner would eventually become one of the biggest names in this “Sportsmen’s Battalion.”
At first, the new outfit was less of a fighting unit than a way of entertaining the troops — with Tom Longboat taking centre stage. But as the war wore on, he found himself in the trenches. He dug ditches and laid wire, and he did what he did best: he ran.
The First World War was fought in a time before radio technology was advanced enough to be used on the front lines. And telephone wires were both difficult to string all the way to the battlefield and easily cut by the enemy. While terrible new machinery was being invented to do the killing, communication was still left to old-fashioned technology: much of it done by carrier pigeon and on foot. As one of the greatest runners the world had ever seen, Tom Longboat was too valuable an asset to waste on entertainment. The army was going to put his legs to use as an instrument of war.
Longboat didn’t talk much about his experiences on the Western Front. When he did, it was usually to crack a joke. But we know he was there at Vimy Ridge and at Passchendaele — two of the most brutal battles of the entire war. His unit was sent up to the front lines for construction projects and repairs. On some nights, they’d be sent out into no man’s land to lay barbed wire. Longboat must have sprinted through the muddy, blood-soaked trenches, dodging sniper fire as shells whizzed by his head. He must have raced through sickly yellow-green clouds of poison gas. As thousands of soldiers were killed all around him, Longboat ran and ran and ran.
More than once it seemed as if he might never make it home. The first time a shell exploded nearby, he thought it was the end. “I thought I’d never see Canada again,” he admitted. Later, a rumour spread that he’d been caught in a hail of artillery fire and buried by the bombardment, spending six days living underground with some other men before they were rescued. In some interviews, Longboat played along, claiming it was the only time he got a decent sleep during the entire war. But more often, he denied the story — while some of the men in his battalion had been buried in the barrage, Longboat wasn’t one of them. Either way, while he suffered from knee and back pain for the rest of his life, he survived the war. Tom Longboat had outrun death itself.
As the war came to an end, he returned to Toronto. After years surrounded by horror, he was finally heading home to be reunited with his dear Lauretta. He could finally resume his old life.
Or, at least, that’s what he hoped. But when he got home to Toronto, he was in for a shock. In the chaos of war, even the army had gotten confused. Somehow someone had believed one of the rumours that spread through the trenches, or they’d checked the wrong box on a form. While Longboat was racing through the poison clouds of Flanders, a notice had been sent to Lauretta. The message regretfully informed her that her husband had been killed. And if she’d somehow managed to keep hope alive, refused to believe the terrible news, convinced herself that her husband had survived and would make it back home someday … that hope can’t have survived the second message. Another regretful notification of his death. Another mistake.
By the time Tom Longboat got home to Toronto, Lauretta had given up. She’d married another man. The life the runner had left behind when he went off to war didn’t exist anymore. He was furious, but there was little he could do. His wife had fallen in love with someone else. Longboat filed for divorce. Lauretta carried on with her new husband.
There were more hard days to come. With his sore knees and his bad back, Longboat’s running career was just about over, and he’d failed to save much of his winnings. After a brief stint as a farmer out West, he got a series of less glamorous jobs in Toronto. The world’s greatest runner worked at a rubber plant, as a truck driver, a street cleaner, and a garbage collector. Some even say he got a job as a custodian at Old City Hall, cleaning the building where he’d once been celebrated as a hero by thousands of proud Torontonians.
But at the very least, Tom Longboat wasn’t alone. He found love once again. Martha Silversmith was from Six Nations, just like him, a Seneca woman whose brother would become famous in his own right: Jay Silverheels played Tonto on The Lone Ranger. Silversmith had been a fan of Longboat’s for years, regularly making the trip to Hamilton or Buffalo to watch him race and cheer him on. Twelve years after his first wedding day, Tom Longboat got married again. And this time, they would be together until the day he really died.