Early 19th century paintings show "shinney", or "shinny", an early form of ice hockey with no standard rules, played in Nova Scotia, Canada.[citation needed] Thus, many of these early games had also absorbed the physically aggressive aspects of what the Mi'kmaq in Nova Scotia called dehuntshigwa'es (lacrosse). Games of shinney are also known to have been played on the St. Lawrence River at Montreal and Quebec City and in Kingston[9] and Ottawa in Ontario. The number of players on these games was often large. To this day, shinny (or shinney) (derived from Shinty) is a popular Canadian[10] term for an informal type of hockey, either on ice or as street hockey.
In 1825, Sir John Franklin wrote that "The game of hockey played on the ice was the morning sport" while on Great Bear Lake during one of his Arctic expeditions. In 1843 a British Army officer in Kingston, Ontario, in Upper Canada, wrote "Began to skate this year, improved quickly and had great fun at hockey on the ice."[9] An article in the Boston Evening Gazette, in 1859, made reference to an early game of hockey on ice occurring in Halifax in that year.[11]
Thomas Chandler Haliburton, in The Attache: Second Series, published in 1844, reminisced about boys from King's College School in Windsor, Nova Scotia, playing "hurly on the long pond on the ice" when he was a student there, no later than 1810.[8][11] Based on Haliburton's writings, there have been claims that modern ice hockey originated in Windsor, Nova Scotia, by King's College students and was named after an individual, as in “Colonel Hockey's game.”[12] Others claim that the origins of ice hockey come from games played in the area of Dartmouth and Halifax in Nova Scotia.