Wildcat football isn't exactly famous for its wild, violent antics on the field. Typically, a game day in Evanston doesn't feature out-of-control fans, on-field fights, or mobs setting trash fires and punching cops in the town square. One normally must travel to the welcoming arms of Columbus, Ohio, for that sort of action.

But there have been rare spots in NU's history when football games did spawn this type of recklessness. In 1925, Northwestern’s old wooden stadium was marked for demolition, so the team played a late-season game against Michigan at Soldier Field. After the ‘Cats upset Michigan, students and fans returned to Evanston and attempted to burn down the defunct Northwestern Field in celebration. When firefighters tried to stop the mob, the fans grabbed axes and tried to cut the firefighters’ water hoses.

However, the craziest riot at a Northwestern game came earlier, in 1897, when the Purple hosted the Physicians & Surgeons team at Sheppard Field on campus. What happened at halftime became the stuff of legend.

The Doctors sought revenge the following season. On Saturday, October 30, 1897—the anniversary of the first game with P&S—NU hosted the team again at Sheppard Field. Van Doozer—now NU’s head coach—also served as a linesman official (as did Fletcher, the P&S player from 1896 who had scored). The pregame involved significant fanfare, and the P&S team decorated its sideline with large red and yellow banners and—in a nod to their profession and to the game being played on Halloween Eve—piled actual femurs and other bones as decorations near its player benches, alongside the red and yellow pennants.

1899 drawing of a P&S player

The game kicked off in the late afternoon and quickly became a violent affair. The teams battled viciously through the first half, until Northwestern scored a touchdown. When the teams stopped for the halftime intermission, a recent NU graduate and former player named Samuel Gloss led about 100 fans onto the field, celebrating the fact that NU had held the Doctors scoreless. The group marched across the field, taunting the P&S team. The Doctors took offense, jumping over the rope that separated the players’ benches from the field, and physically attacked the marching fans. The fans responded in kind, and the fight escalated into a full-scale brawl. About two dozen police officers descended on the group and were themselves attacked by both the NU fans and the P&S players. Several fans grabbed some of the nearby decorative bones and began assaulting the officers with shin and rib bones, some still sporting festive red and yellow streamers. One policeman received a brutal head wound from a femur; another suffered an eye injury when a fan threw sand into his face. The 500 P&S fans in the stands—many of them physicians—joined in the riot before players from both sides began to calm the situation.

 
Play resumed after several P&S players and police officers were carted off the field to have their injuries tended. NU and the Doctors played a scoreless second half, and the Purple came away with a 6-0 win.

While the NU fans instigated the fight and overwhelmed the field, it should be noted that most of these fans were alumni and Evanston townies. There were few students at the game, and this infuriated the team. At a school-wide chapel meeting two days later, NU player Clarence Thorne blasted the student body for its apathy, shouting, “You all are a set of blockheads! And you have no more college spirit than a lot of schoolboys. Someone is needed in this university to go to the room of each student with a club and teach him what is due to the men who are trying to uphold Northwestern’s reputation on the athletic field!”

One wonders if Thorne would have made his point more clearly if he had continued to wield a leg bone during the speech.