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Montreal Shamrocks were founded in 1895, after an amalgamation with the Crystals Hockey Club of Montreal. The Crystals took their name from the rink they played in. The Shamrocks, after a rough start, rose to be the pre-eminent senior amateur hockey club in North America by the turn of the twentieth century, winning the Stanley Cup in 1899 and 1900. Following the retirement of its stars, including Hall of Famers Harry Trihey and Arthur Farrell, the Shamrocks faded from prominence and never again had a winning season. They were eventually done in around 1910 by the growth of professionalisation in hockey. Unable to compete financially, and with the myriad splits and feuding in élite-level hockey (which lead to the formation, disbandment, and formation of new leagues), the Shamrocks folded.

The Hockey Club grew out of the wildly successful Montreal Shamrock Lacrosse Club, both clubs were affiliated with the Shamrock Amateur Athletic Association of Montreal. While the Lacrosse Club was a predominately working-class team, based largely in the Irish Catholic industrial working class neighbourhood of Griffintown, the Hockey Club reflected a more bourgeois background, more in keeping with the image the Shamrock Amateur Athletic Association wished to convey to the wider community of Montreal, as Irish Catholics attempted to integrate into the mainstream of the city's body politic in the late 19th century. Many of the players on the Stanley Cup-winning teams of 1899 and 1900 went on to study at McGill University, and entered into the city's bourgeois professional ranks as doctors, lawyers, and businessmen.

Trihey, the captain of the Cup-winning teams, became a prominent Montreal lawyer and, during World War I, was commissioned by the Government of Canada to raise the Irish Canadian Rangers, a venture that ended with Trihey resigning his commission and returning to Montreal in 1916 after the British High Command reversed its earlier promise to Trihey to send the Rangers into battle as a unit, deciding instead to plug them into the front line as reinforcements. Trihey also had problems recruiting in Quebec and Ireland following the GPO Rising in Dublin at Easter 1916.

• List of Stanley Cup champions

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