Page 5 of the Lethbridge Herald for November 4, 1927, carries a short dispatch from Blackie, a farm village southeast of Calgary, written the day before. For decades that column of type was treated as the first time the words trick or treat appeared in print, and it still gets cited that way. It isn’t the oldest any more. Red Deer printed the phrase two years earlier, and a paper in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, had the plural form in 1917.
The Blackie item reads like any village report of its day. Halloween had passed without real damage, the correspondent wrote, though a few residents lost their tempers hunting for wagon wheels, gates and barrels that had been hauled out to decorate the front street. Then comes the sentence that made the village famous among word historians. The young pranksters had gone to back doors and front, “demanding edible plunder by the word ‘trick or treat’,” and the households paid up and sent them off happy.
Look at what the writer didn’t do. Nobody explains the phrase or puts it forward as something new. A small-town correspondent set it down as if readers in Lethbridge would already know it, which suggests children on the prairies had been saying it for a while before anyone thought it worth printing.
Key facts
- The Lethbridge Herald printed a Blackie dispatch using the phrase trick or treat on page 5, column 2, of its November 4, 1927 issue, according to the newspaper citations compiled by etymologist Barry Popik.
- The Calgary Daily Herald printed a High River dispatch describing children demanding trick or treat on page 22 of its November 3, 1927 issue, one day before the Blackie item, according to Merriam-Webster’s citation files.
- The Red Deer News used the phrase trick or treat on page 7, column 2, of its November 4, 1925 issue, in a report headed Hallowe’en in Red Deer, according to Barry Popik’s citations.
- The Sault Daily Star of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, printed the plural form tricks or treats on page 2 of its November 1, 1917 issue, according to Barry Popik’s citations.
- The Glenbow Library and Archives at the University of Calgary holds a May 1919 photograph titled Snow at Blackie, Alberta, catalogued as CU1108490 and listed as public domain.
The phrase was already moving west before Blackie printed it
The older finds turned up one at a time, as digitized newspapers became searchable. Barry Popik’s running list of citations puts the Sault Ste. Marie report at November 1, 1917, with local gangs of youngsters calling out tricks or treats. By the early 1920s the words were showing up on the prairies in shuffled order. Edmonton had treat or tricks in 1922. Merriam-Webster’s history of the phrase points to a Red Deer report from November 1924 noting that pranks had been played on the school and Memorial Hall with no treat or trick offered first.
The Red Deer News item of November 4, 1925, is the one that pushed Blackie down the list. It reported children who used the threat, already described as an old one, and got plenty of candy for it. Merriam-Webster’s files don’t show the phrase in an American paper until 1928, in Bay City, Michigan. On the evidence so far, the custom’s name was printed in Canada first and crossed the border later.
Blackie still belongs in the early record
Losing the title of first doesn’t make the Blackie dispatch less useful. It’s one of two southern Alberta dispatches from the same week, the other from High River and printed in Calgary a day earlier, and together they show the phrase in ordinary use across southern Alberta by 1927. That’s the same decade Medicine Hat farmers paid a rainmaker by the inch, and only a few years after towns such as Champion hauled their buildings to the railway. Village correspondents wrote down whatever happened, and sometimes that included a phrase the rest of the continent would later pick up.
Every one of these finds came from someone reading small-town pages, many of them after the papers themselves had folded. Alberta’s press of the period survives unevenly, and Bob Edwards’ Eye Opener left no complete set at all. Pages that were never kept, or never scanned, can’t be searched. If an older Alberta example exists, it’s most likely sitting in a weekly nobody has read since the year it was printed.
The Blackie of 1919 can still be seen in the Glenbow files
The village the 1927 correspondent described is easier to picture than most. The Glenbow archive at the University of Calgary keeps a photograph, Snow at Blackie, Alberta, taken in May 1919 by an unknown photographer and filed with the Vulcan and District Historical Society collection. It shows buildings and grain elevators under a late spring snow, the kind of row that once lined towns across the district, as Vulcan’s own elevator row did before it thinned to one.
On the right side of the frame there’s a sign advertising garden and house plants, put up for a season that hadn’t quite arrived. The photograph is public domain and anyone can open it online, a few clicks from the catalogue number CU1108490.
