Intramural football, in a primitive form, was all that existed in American colleges up to 1869. Traces of it are found at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Dartmouth, Rutgers, Brown, and Amherst. The first intercollegiate football game in this country was played by Princeton and Rutgers teams at New Brunswick, New Jersey, November 6, 1869, and by 1876 the present form of game was definitely established. The general practice of track and field athletics can be traced back to three influences—the example of students at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the “Caledonian Games” of Scotch immigrants organized into clubs for the purpose of keeping up interest in their native language and customs, and the contests arranged as appendages of the rowing events at Saratoga in 1874, 1875, and 1876. A letter from George Rives, a graduate of Columbia University who was present at the annual meets of the two English universities in 1868, led to the formation of an athletic association at Columbia, and to its first meet, in June of 1869. The first of the Caledonian Clubs was organized in Boston March 19, 1853, and its earliest games were held later in the same year. The New York Caledonian Club dates from 1856, and its first meet was on St. George’s Cricket Grounds, Hoboken, in October of 1857. Similar clubs were formed in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Montreal, and other cities. The annual games of these organizations were especially popular in the ten or fifteen years following the Civil War, and they may be considered the precursors of our modern amateur athletic clubs. George Goldie, long a member of the New York Caledonian Club, at one time director of its gymnasium, and twice a winner of the championship medal at national Caledonian meets, was director of the Princeton gymnasium from 1869 to 1885, and under the inspiration of his presence the Princeton Athletic Club was organized in the spring of 1873. The club had its first field day on June 21 of that year. Yale students held a field meet May 4, 1872. In the fall of 1873 the University of Pennsylvania Athletic Association was formed, and the Harvard Athletic Association a year later. Among the colleges which competed in five events at Saratoga in 1874 were Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Wesleyan, Williams, and Yale. Amherst, University of Pennsylvania, and Union were added in 1875, and Dartmouth in 1876. Although an intercollegiate athletic association was organized in this last year (1876), the present widespread interest in track and field athletics was not reached until the following decade. Nineteen colleges were represented at the Mott Haven (New York) games in 1886. The New York State Intercollegiate Athletic Association, made up of seven colleges, was already in existence (1885), and delegates from seven other colleges formed the New England Intercollegiate Athletic Association on November 23, 1886.[260] [Illustration: FIG. 77.—Dudley Allen Sargent (1849-).]