Each fall for more than a century now, the thoughts of countless young men have turned to the controlled mayhem called football. It may not be the national game, but it has been around nearly as long as baseball, and for many there has been no contest between the two: football wins, knees down.

Among its most indefatigable fans was the artist, Frederic Remington—unsurprisingly, for he played for Yale in 1879 and 1880, when “Old Eli” was the nearly undisputed giant of American football (before the Princeton-Yale game of 1879, it is said, he dipped his jersey in blood from a local slaughterhouse so that it would look “more businesslike”). In a very real sense, Remington also was present at the creation of modern football, for one of his teammates in those years was the redoubtable Walter Camp, who is largely credited for the invention of the scrimmage, the four-down system, the field’s present gridiron pattern, the quarterback, the “All-America Team,” and the reduction in players from fifteen to eleven. In 1888 Camp became general athletic director and head advisory football coach at Yale.

Two years later, already an established illustrator, Remington returned for the Thanksgiving Day contest between Yale and Princeton and painted the sprightly scene at the right, showing one of the many Yale touchdowns that day (Yale, 32; Princeton, zip). On Thanksgiving Day, 1893, he was back again, this time on assignment from Harpers Weekly to illustrate the game against Williams College. With him this time was Richard Harding Davis, managing editor and roving reporter for the magazine. Davis’s subsequent story, portions of which follow, demonstrates that while the modern game of football was then in its embryonic stages, a lot remains the same—including confusions and contusions.

Oh—the score? Yale, 82; Williams, zip. So what else was new? —T.H.W.

“Very few people who watch football as it is played to-day have the least idea of how much is being done before them. They only see the result. … All they see on the day of a great game is two lines of men breaking away suddenly and making for a bunch of three or four, who run shoulder to shoulder until one of them goes down, and there is a confused mass of legs, and the lines are formed once more, and the same thing happens again. The spectator does not see the opening being made in the line through which the man with the ball is eventually to go, nor the quarter reach it back to the man who passes it on to another, nor the interference of two more and the guarding of still another. It merely looks to him like a general stampede without judgment, and certainly without preconceived action. He hardly believes you when you tell him that to bring the ball these three yards five men