The Kenora Thistles, officially the Thistles Hockey Club, were a Canadian ice hockey team based in Kenora, Ontario. Founded in 1894, they were originally known as the Rat Portage Thistles. The team competed for the Stanley Cup, the ice hockey championship of Canada, five times between 1903 and 1907. The Thistles won the Cup in January 1907 and defended it once before losing it that March in a challenge series. Composed almost entirely of local players, the team comes from the least populated city to have won the Stanley Cup. Nine players—four of them homegrown—have been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, and the Stanley Cup champion team was inducted into the Northwestern Ontario Sports Hall of Fame. Though Kenora is in Ontario, the Thistles competed in Manitoba-based leagues throughout their existence, owing to the city's proximity to that province. The team joined the Manitoba Hockey Association (MHA) in 1902, winning the league championship in three of their six seasons. They were idealized "as a team of hometown boys who used to play shinny together on the streets of Rat Portage". The Thistles were unable to cope with the advent of professionalism in ice hockey during the early 1900s. This combined with an economic downturn in 1907, and being unable to sustain their success, the team disbanded in 1908. The name "Thistles" has been used since for several senior, minor, and junior Kenora teams. Early years (1894–1902) Town development In 1836 the Hudson's Bay Company established a factory (trading post) north of the current city of Kenora. They named it Rat Portage, a translation of the Ojibwe-language name for the region: Waszush Onigum, which literally means "the road to the country of the muskrat". Around 1850 gold was discovered in the region, and the Canadian Pacific Railway reached it in 1877. A sawmill was established in 1880. The town was incorporated in 1882, originally within the province of Manitoba. Located near the Manitoba–Ontario provincial border, the region was contested by both provinces until the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ruled in favour of Ontario in 1884. Its closer proximity to Winnipeg, away, and the rest of Manitoba, meant Rat Portage had closer ties with the west than with the rest of Ontario, where the closest city was Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), away. With the railroad connecting Rat Portage to Central and Eastern Canada, the town grew quickly,