Indiana and Utah
The story from the Scottish perspective of football in Indiana is simple. Already in 1894 a team from Indianapolis travelled the hundred miles or so to Cincinnati to play a football game. That team was the Indianapolis Caledonians. But, despite the early start, the game in the city does not seem to have taken hold, only really emerging seventy years later in the 1960s.
However, perhaps surprisingly the story in Utah is far more interesting.
In Salt Lake City the first "soccer" club is said to have already been formed in 1882. By the beginning of the 20th Century a rivalry had built up between Salt Lake City FC, reported to be a mainly Scottish club, and the team from the mining-town of Eureka eighty miles to the south and on the one-hand said to be English but on the other Welsh and Cornish. Indeed, when the Daynes Cup, modelled literally on the FA Cup, was introduced in 1906, whilst Salt Lake beat Eureka to take the first title, the following season the miners' team was able to reverse the result and for two more years the cup was swapped back and forth until Eureka dropped away, Salt Lake remaining in place, and a new team emerged, unsurprisingly the Caledonians.
But in the meantime, probably already in 1906, there had been an interesting turn of events and a wee story to tell. Salt Lake had been able to recruit a footballing "expert", a man with "soccer" medals to his name. He was Alex "Sandy" McWhirter and he had arrived in the city with his younger brothers, Gordon and William. In 1907 they were staying on Main and on that same street had opened a Bakers and Confectioners. And that was because the family were bakers to trade. Indeed, their uncle, also Alexander, owned and ran in Maybole in Ayrshire the baker's, shop (pictured right) where the boys had also previously worked. Indeed they might have been brought up by Alexander after their father had died in 1880, their mother pregnant and dying the following year in childbirth.
However, by the turn of the century the boys had together clearly looked to fresher fields in the USA, Salt Lake City the destination. Yet by 1909 the business seems to have failed. William then appears, still a baker (and cook), to have found his way to British Columbia in Canada, Gordon too remaining in the trade, moving to Seattle with his Maybole-born wife and children and then to California. And Alex might have gone to Portland, but then to New York working as a contractor, to have married, raised a family and lost his wife in America but with possibly a return to the UK, albeit perhaps temporarily. A widowed Alexander McWhirter, born in Maybole, of about the right age, is in 1921 recorded as the director of a trading company in London.
