This photo, taken in Bend circa 1910, is believed to be of Bend High's first high school football team. Bend lost to Prineville 26-0 according to the Crook County Journal, but was downed just 16-3 according to The Bend Bulletin.Courtesy of the Des Chutes Historical Museum.

Central Oregon’s love affair with high school football goes back. Way back.

Long before Joel Skotte began terrorizing opposing quarterbacks at Mountain View, before Craig Walker’s Air Bear attack at Bend High, before Crook County shocked the state in 1984, before Culver’s and Sisters’ six-man state title runs in the 1950s, and even before future World War II hero Jim Byers led Bend to Oregon’s first official high school state championship in 1940, there were the boys of Bend and their mismatched sweaters and the “county seaters” of Prineville.

On Thanksgiving Day 1910, three years before Henry Ford started rolling out cars on the assembly line, Crook County High School defeated the visitors from Bend High in the first prep football game ever staged in Central Oregon.

Who the victors were in the area’s first-ever Turkey Bowl was never disputed. The final score, though, was another matter.

The Crook County Journal, the predecessor of today’s Central Oregonian newspaper, had the locals rolling past Bend 26-0 on a field near the Crook County Courthouse. The Bend Bulletin wrote about a much closer game, with Prineville winning 16-3.

“The visitors were swept off their feet by the whirlwind attacks and were bewildered by the varied formations,” reported the Prineville newspaper, which wrote a lengthy play-by-play account of the game. “It was hotly contested from start to finish. Bend though hopelessly defeated contested stubbornly every inch of ground. They are a gritty gentlemanly bunch and have the material for a winning team.”

The only contest of the season for both schools — it was an all-Crook County affair at the time, as the creation of Deschutes County was still six years away — Bend High traveled through Powell Butte and into Prineville by horse and carriage.

Ralph Lucas, an eighth-grader who suited up for Bend, drove the four-horse “bus” that carried Bend’s 13 players, one coach, local druggist and apparent superfan Ralph Poindexter, and all the equipment for the Bend team, which at the time had no nickname. (Bend High did not become the Lava Bears until the late 1920s, but its first football team was described as “the blue and gold” by the Crook County Journal.)

The three-day schedule for the game between future Intermountain Conference rivals included traveling all day Wednesday, a football game followed by a basketball game (which Prineville won too, 27-7 or 25-5, depending on which newspaper you subscribed to) on the Thursday holiday, then hitting the trail back to Bend on Friday.

“The Crook County High School added two more scalps to its trophy wall,” the Crook County Journal vulgarly boasted in its story about the two games.

The players who made up the first football team in Bend High’s brief history — the school’s first graduation was held in 1909 — were asked to provide their own uniforms. Khaki pants were purchased, striped gray socks were found, and every Bend High player contributed money to buy a football, according to Claude Kelley, an eighth-grade end in 1910, during a 1960 interview with The Bulletin.

Each player provided his own sweater to serve as a jersey, some white, some purple and some black. Needing helmets, the team had a local harness maker piece together strips of yellow felt used in horse collars.

“It was most colorful,” recalled Kelley 50 years later.

Conflicting scores

According to the Journal, Crook County scored five touchdowns, which at the time were worth five points, and converted one extra point in a 26-0 win. McCallister — the Journal did not report first names of the Prineville players — led the Crook County offense with two touchdown runs, including the first of the game, and the contest’s lone extra-point kick. Morse and Lister each rushed for scores and O’Neil caught a “forward pass” for a touchdown, a play that just five years earlier was illegal. Crook County dominated possession, the Journal wrote, recording 19 first downs to Bend’s one.

“The Prineville boys outplayed their opponents,” The Bulletin reported on the front page of its Nov. 30, 1910, edition, “their team work being far superior to that of Bend.”

According to The Bulletin’s account of the game, Crook County — the school had yet to adopt its current Cowboy and Cowgirl nicknames — recorded only three touchdowns in a 16-3 victory. Bend actually scored first in The Bulletin’s story and led 3-0 in the first quarter after “forcing the Prineville team back over its own goal line for a touch-back,” for an apparent safety, which in today’s game is worth two points.

“According to Coach (M.S.) Lattin of the Bend team,” reported The Bulletin, which did not send a reporter on what was then an all-day trek to Prineville for the game, “his boys kicked and tackled better than their opponents, but their team work was very inferior.”

Lattin and “Coach Brewster” of Prineville served as the two-man officiating crew for the contest. The Bulletin reported that Bend was “outweighed about eight pounds to the man” and used just two substitutes compared with Prineville’s six.

Sophomore Kenneth Minor started at quarterback for Bend, while seniors Bruce Deyarmond and Lyle Richardson were the team’s left and right backs, respectively, and Max Richards, another senior, lined up at fullback. Bend prepped for the game with a scrimmage against a local pickup team the Sunday before, winning 6-5.

“From the style of game exhibited then,” The Bend Bulletin wrote in what almost certainly was the paper’s first prep sports preview on Nov. 23, 1910, “the boys may be expected to put up a hard struggle tomorrow.”

The start of something special

The 1910 Thanksgiving Day game kicked off football programs for both schools. After playing one another six times in five years, Bend finally defeated Prineville in its seventh meeting, a 28-14 victory in 1914. Kelley, then a senior quarterback, scored three touchdowns for Bend in the home win at Troy Field.

By the late 1920s, Bend High had become one of the better football programs east of the Cascades, putting together a combined record of 93-22-9 between 1927 and 1940. In 1940, the Lava Bears won Oregon’s first sanctioned state championship, a 20-7 road victory over Medford.

Prineville later became a power in the 1950s, winning back-to-back A-2 state championships in 1952 and 1953 behind star running back Mel Gillett.

Bend’s first football players made spot appearances in The Bulletin later in life. Bird Lowell, a grade school reserve on the 1910 team, witnessed the Mexican Revolution firsthand, and his letters to his family during that conflict were printed in The Bulletin. John Sather went on to play in the band at Oregon Agriculture College in Corvallis. Kelley, a lifelong amateur photographer, stayed in Bend, raised a family and worked 30 years for Pacific Power and Light Co. before his death in 1989 at age 96. The Des Chutes Historical Museum hosted a photo exhibit of Kelley’s work in 1991.

Multiple members of Bend’s original football team went into the armed services. Lucas — who drove the four-horse carriage to Prineville for that historic first game — Ivan McGillvary, Lyle Richardson, Max Richardson, Ray Deyarmond and Bruce Deyarmond all served in the military near the end of World War I.

Lattin, on the other hand, took up politics. After ending his coaching career with a 0-1 record, he was elected to several committees and boards around town, including Bend’s City Council. In 1912, he and other councilmen unanimously passed a resolution directing the chief of police to “run out of Bend all women of ill fame who might be found in the city” following the shooting death of Carrie “Gladys” Patterson by her “discarded paramour” Carl Lawson above the Myers & Wilkey’s saloon on Bond Street.

“On the whole it was a most interesting game to watch,” the Crook County Journal reasoned after what was the first of many high school football games to come in the region. “There was plenty doing all the time to keep interest at fever beat in spite of the inclement weather. … It was a clean game throughout, free from unnecessary roughness. Fouls were very few in number and there was no ‘wrangling’ between players and officials.”

Football, the newspaper argued, had a bright future in Central Oregon.

— Reporter: 541-383-0305, beastes@bendbulletin.com