Name-a-Day Calendar, December 17: Canisius Golden Griffins
Page 41 of 365
Chosen in: 1933
Chosen by: Student Charles A. Brady in a roundabout way
Canisius College first officially played an intercollegiate sport (baseball) in 1903. They didn’t adopt a mascot until three decades later, but to understand the future, we have to go back in time.
By 1679, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, had spent over a decade exploring what is now the eastern United States after leaving his native France. He had turned his attention to sailing the Great Lakes in search of a Northwest Passage to Asia because nobody quite understood the geography of the world yet. For this purpose, he built a new ship which would become the first large vessel ever to sail the Great Lakes. It took off from Cayuga Island, just north of Buffalo on the Niagara River, and traversed Lakes Erie, St. Clair,1 Huron, and Michigan, before landing on either Washington Island or Rock Island in the very northeast corner of what is now Wisconsin.
La Salle and his crew disembarked the ship to trade furs with the local Potawatomi people on the island, then La Salle stayed to explore the rest of Lake Michigan via canoe and sent the furs and six crew members back on the ship. Nobody ever saw the ship again. It’s assumed to have wrecked in a storm but its remains have never been explicitly discovered.2
That ship’s name was Le Griffon and after student Charles A. Brady retold this story in a 1932 edition of Canisius Monthly, that name became a hit on campus. The staff of the student newspaper quickly added a griffin to its masthead and the college itself officially adopted the griffin as its mascot the next year.
Brady would graduate in 1933, get a master of arts in English from Harvard two years later, and immediately return to Canisius to teach English, which he would continue until 1977. He was named to the Canisius Sports Hall of Fame in 1987 for his dominance in tennis over half a century earlier as a student-athlete, but one could easily argue that his roundabout selection of the school’s unique mascot is even more worthy of such an honor. Brady died in 1995, widely beloved in Western New York.
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This voyage is actually what gave Lake St. Clair its name. The ship entered the lake on August 12, the feast day of Saint Clare of Assisi, and named the lake in her honor.
Several archaeologists, scientists, and divers have claimed to find the ship, but these have all either gone unconfirmed or seen substantial evidence tying them to different shipwrecks.