Baseball Saskatchewan
Indian Head Museum telling story of all Black baseball team The Rockets
The Indian Head Rockets are being inducted into the Saskatchewan Baseball Hall of Fame and the town’s museum is creating an exhibit in 2022.
By Alec Salloum – Regina Leader Post
In the 1950s Indian Head was the scene of a 30,000-strong event that saw some of the best players from America’s all Black baseball leagues playing for glory and a weighty cash prize.
The Indian Head Rockets — a team composed of members from the Negro League’s Jacksonville Eagles — would play in baseball tournaments held in town and around Western Canada. In 2022 the team will be inducted into Saskatchewan’s Baseball Hall of Fame.
In anticipation, and amid renovations undertaken during COVID, the Indian Head Museum has started construction on a new exhibit to honour the team and the tournament hosted in their community more than a half a century ago.
“It was sort of a dream of our mayor at the time, Jimmy Robison,” Robyn Jensen, president of the Indian Head Museum, said in a recent interview.
“He wanted to bring high-quality baseball to the small town and he did.”
Robison ran two tournaments in ’48, and ’49, which were billed as “Western Canada’s greatest baseball tournament” by one of the six radio stations that covered the event.
Teams were brought in from all over North America, with 22 teams converging on Indian Head for the tournament, many of the players coming from America to play in Canada during the summer. The Eagles, then called the Rockets would come in the ’50s to play in Indian Head.
“It was a really fascinating special time for our town,” said Jensen.
In town, many of the roads were not paved. In her research, for the exhibit, Jensen said she came across articles and mention of people getting stuck en route to the tournament and ending up in the ditch. As the town exploded with tourists, military cots and billets were used to help with lodging the spectators.
After the colour barrier was broken in Major League Baseball, two of the Rockets alums went on to play MLB teams, becoming the first Black players for the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals, respectively. Tom Alston played with the Rockets in 1950 and 1951 and would go on to play for the Cardinals.
Elijah Jerry “Pumpsie” Greene played ball in Indian Head in 1952 and would go on to play for the Boston Red Sox on July 21, 1959. In 1952 there were 20 African-American players in the MLB and Greene’s debut for the Sox would mark the last team’s adoption of Black players.
“We were kind of like the stepping stone between, from the Negro Leagues. And then for them going up into play in the Major Leagues,” said Jensen.
When fans came to see the teams play in Indian Head they saw world-class talent on display.
The word “Rocket” was stitched in red on the white uniforms, a decision made by the mayor to use the singular word on the uniform while the whole team were the “Rockets,” each player was a Rocket.
At that time the western baseball leagues were played in the summer, comprising of an almost mercenary coterie of baseball players from around America. Some were still in high school, others played in racially segregated leagues like the Negro League or the Cuban League.
The exhibit is still looking to tie up some loose ends, most critically, how the players were treated in the province.
Museum vice-president Janine Moses-Randle said that is an important part of the story. From her work at the museum she said they “could go into a restaurant, you know, go to dances, they were given opportunities up here that they didn’t have back home.”
In an interview with the Saskatoon StarPhoenix in 2012, former Rockets player Nat Bates, then 80-years-old, spoke about how they were treated.
“The most offensive thing to us was when people there called us darkies. That hurt. It was nothing disrespectful, they just didn’t know. After we were there for a while, when we could relate to the community and they understood us, we started to laugh about it.”
Moses-Randle said they don’t want to paper over the experiences of the players but by and large there seemed to be an acceptance and openness from the community. In that same interview from 2012, Bates said as much.
“Families invited us into their home … Girls asked us to dance.”
At the time, schools were still segregated in America. Brown v. Board of Education happened in 1954, and Jim Crow laws were in force until 1965.
“This was a chance to kind of come up here and do what they love,” said Moses-Randle.
The exhibit is set to open in the summer of 2022 and the team is set to be inducted into the Saskatchewan Baseball Hall of Fame in the new year.