In describing a couple o' three years after the event the formation of a footballing body a young man wrote the following,

"A number of them being together one night it was resolved to attempt the introduction of association football. Rugby was then played with considerable vigour though not extensively, but the same feeling of dissatisfaction with it which led in England to the formation of the association prevailed here. This was supplemented here by the popular disfavour with which the Rugby game was regarded, on account of its roughness. These young men to whom I have referred were all members of the Carlton Cricket Club and they formed the Carlton Football Club, the first association club in Canada, and I believe on the continent."

Carlton is, of course, still to this day a cricket club in Edinburgh, one founded in 1863 with some allusions of grandeur. The "them" was "a number Glasgow young men" possibly with fewer such allusions. The place was Ontario, the year was 1876. The object of the exercise was to found an association, the President of which would be the Duke of Argyll, just as he was the president of the equivalent association back home, i.e. the SFA, home, of course being Scotland. The rules of play the new association would be the same as those of that equivalent and therefore for the moment slightly different from those across the Border and I do not mean in the USA. Final harmonisation with England would be achieved in 1882. The association itself was the first iteration of The Dominion of Canada Football Association, the first outwith the UK. The year of writing was 1879.  And the young scribe was David Brown, David Kerr Brown, who would have a sadly short but profound impact on the sport he clearly loved in the country that would briefly become his new home.     

David Brown had been born in 1854 in Dalry in Ayrshire.  At six he was living there on Garnock St., at sixteen at Townend but at some point after that, indeed after the irreversible arrival of football in Scotland in 1882/3, perhaps at twenty-one so in later 1875, he crossed the water. And so strong was the implantation of the round-ball game in the young man even after perhaps just two years exposure to the contagion that not only was he writing about and its Scottish-ness even in Canada that by 1878 attempts were being discussed to bring a Scottish representative team to the Dominion and by 1880 Brown might well have been involved. That year a game is even said to have been played "between the Scottish team which is to visit the Canada in a few months and the celebrated Darwen club in Lancashire".

In the end the tour did not happen, said to have been postposed because of the death of the then SFA Secretary, William Dick. Instead the tour that did take place was in the opposite direction and not for another eight years, by which time David Brown's time as a player and/or organisor, indeed his life, had been cut short. At just twenty-nine he died in Rat Porterage, the old name for Kenora close to the Ontario-Manitoba border, possibly after a three month struggle with injuries received in a railway accident. It is not clear. And he is buried in Kenora's Lake of the Wood's Cemetery.