Golf in the United States has its roots in a unique sporting migration more than a century ago. Malt whisky might still be Scotland’s most successful export, but the Royal and Ancient game also grew into a major influence as a result of the exhortation, ‘Go West, young man’.

Millions of people from the British Isles crossed the Atlantic to make a fresh start in North America during the late 19th century. But there’s no doubt the Scottish influx, in particular, had an indelible influence on the growth of golf in a country that went on to produce so many of the world’s finest players, courses and championships.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Canada was in the vanguard of golf’s arrival in North America with the formation of Royal Montreal in 1873 and Quebec Golf Club two years later, followed by a course in Toronto in 1876.

The U.S. love affair with golf, however, remained non-existent until February 1888 when John Reid, a steel merchant from the town of Dunfermline in the Kingdom of Fife on the east coast of Scotland, laid out three holes on a 30-acre cow pasture in Yonkers, New York. Thus was born the country’s first course—Saint Andrew’s Golf Club. Like fellow émigré Andrew Carnegie, who also hailed from Dunfermline and made his fortune in the same industry, Reid, although not a golfer of note, was smitten with the game having played it since childhood.

Carnegie, the world’s richest man at the time, was one of the club’s early members before returning to live in the county of Sutherland in the Scottish Highlands where he bought Skibo Castle and acted as patron to Dornoch Golf Club.

In 1894, Saint Andrew’s and four other new courses—The Country Club at Brookline near Boston, Shinnecock Hills on Long Island, Newport Golf Club on Rhode Island and Chicago Golf Club—formed the United States Golf Association for the purpose of administering the rules and creating the U.S. Open.

The modern jewel that is Shinnecock Hills, host to three U.S. Opens in recent times, was built in 1891 with the aid of 150 Native Americans from a plantation adjoining Great Peconic Bay. They worked under the direction of Willie Dunn, a native of the town of Musselburgh, a few miles south of Edinburgh where several of the early [British] Opens were staged. Famously, Dunn was recruited by William K. Vanderbilt and two wealthy associates when they tracked him down to a project he was overseeing near Biarritz in southwest France.

Next door to Shinnecock Hills is the National Golf Links, created shortly afterwards by Canadian-born Charles Blair Macdonald, who studied in his youth at the University of St Andrews, also in the Kingdom of Fife, and had previously put his learning to good effect by ushering Chicago Golf Club into existence. Coincidentally, Philadelphia insurance broker Hugh Wilson, with no previous design experience, also made a pilgrimage to Scotland to learn what he needed to know to complete the incomparable layout of this year’s U.S. Open venue, Merion.

Reid and Dunn were but two of hundreds of British golfers who flooded into the New World during the last decade of the 19th century. Three Scots—James Foulis (1896), Fred Herd (1898) and Willie Smith (1899)—along with two Englishmen—Horace Rawlins (1895) and Joe Lloyd (1897)—won the initial five U.S. Opens before Willie Anderson, from North Berwick near Musselburgh, claimed four of the first six to be played in the opening decade of the 20th century.

By then, more than a thousand clubs had opened in the U.S. with five brothers from Carnoustie near Dundee, also on the east coast of Scotland, having done as much as anyone to lay the foundations that transformed golf from a niche pastime into a sport of genuine stature.

Needless to say, Alex, Willie, George, Jimmy, and Macdonald Smith, who sailed to America around the turn of the century, were all formidable players. During that period, at least 300 sons of eastern Scotland, unable to earn much more than a pittance from the game at home, moved to America to take up the comparatively lucrative positions that were opening up in abundance for professionals and greenskeepers.

Despite his brother Willie’s earlier triumph, Alex, the eldest of the Smith clan, was regarded as the top player in the American game, and following several near misses he finally won the U.S. Open in 1906, a victory he repeated four years later. After that, the brothers continued to compete for major honors though Willie later moved to Mexico to become that country’s first professional golfer.

By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, home-grown American talent was inevitably emerging. But the Scots were far from finished. Aberdeen’s Willie Macfarlane outlasted the great Bobby Jones to win the 1925 U.S. Open at Worcester Country Club, Massachusetts, while another Scottish immigrant who made his mark, admittedly as a naturalized American citizen, was Tommy Armour. The winner of the first [British] Open to be played at Carnoustie, in 1931, he was blinded in one eye during World War I but still managed to perform at the pinnacle of the game.

With due deference to Martin Laird, three times a PGA Tour winner in recent seasons, Armour, who also won the 1927 U.S. Open and the 1930 PGA Championship, was probably the last in a lengthy roll call of Scottish-born golfers capable of beating the leading American players on a regular basis in their own back yard.

Ironically, the shift in power towards U.S. players during the game’s formative years was largely due to the expert tuition they received from Scottish pros.

In 1913, young American amateur Francis Ouimet recorded a sensational win in the U.S. Open at The Country Club, an achievement immortalized in Mark Frost’s wonderful narrative, The Greatest Game Ever Played. Afterwards, Ouimet, who never turned professional, preferring to work instead as an executive in the sports goods business, put his success down to the guidance of Montrose-born Charles Burgess.

Jones, arguably the finest golfer of his generation, was also taught by a Scot, Stewart ‘Kiltie’ Maiden, while Alex Smith was partially responsible for the prowess that enabled Gene Sarazen and Walter Hagen to win 18 major titles between them.

Not only did the Scots influence the way the game was played in America, they also had a massive role to play in shaping its courses.

Arguably, it is the Scottish triumvirate of Tom Bendelow, Donald Ross and Dr. Alister MacKenzie—every bit as potent in their field of expertise as the leading players of the time, Harry Vardon, James Braid and J.H. Taylor, to whom the game in the U.S. owes its deepest debt.

Bendelow, from Aberdeen, crafted more than 800 courses across the U.S. and Canada between his arrival in New York in 1892 and his death in Chicago in 1936. First employed in New York as a newspaper compositor, Bendelow acquired a reputation for producing low-cost courses, thanks to his flat fee of $25 for visiting and ‘marking out’ a plot of land. True to his origins, he initially concentrated on pioneering municipal golf centers, but later he turned his attention to more ambitious projects, notably his layout during the early 1920s of Medinah No.3, scene of three U.S. Opens, two PGA Championships and last year’s Ryder Cup.

Ross began his career as a greenskeeper at Dornoch (150 miles north of Carnoustie and a short distance from the famed Glenmorangie whisky distillery) before working under ‘Old’ Tom Morris at St Andrews. He was ultimately responsible for the construction of 413 courses in the U.S. before his death in 1948. Apart from Pinehurst No.2, where the U.S. Open will be played in 2014, Ross’s most celebrated designs are Aronimink in Pennsylvania, Seminole in Florida (ironically, so private it never became one of his 48 championship courses), Oak Hill Country Club near Rochester, New York (venue of this year’s PGA Championship) and Oakland Hills Country Club, just outside Detroit.

Then there’s Inverness in Toledo, Ohio, scene of four U.S. Opens; Interlachen in Edina, Minnesota, where the 2002 Solheim Cup took place; East Lake, in Atlanta, Georgia, home club of Bobby Jones and regular host to the Tour Championship at the culmination of the FedExCup Playoffs; Sedgefield Country Club, venue for the Wyndham Championship on the PGA Tour; and Scioto in Columbus, Ohio, where Jack Nicklaus learned to play. Not surprisingly, the Golden Bear says of Ross: “His stamp as an architect was naturalness. He was, and still is, considered the Michelangelo of golf.”

Meanwhile, MacKenzie, born of Scottish parents in the English county of Yorkshire, trained as a doctor and served in the second Boer War (1899-1902) before abandoning his medical career to design courses in the United Kingdom in association with Harry Colt. The first prominent designer who had not been a leading player, he published Golf Architecture in 1920 before emigrating to the U.S. where his two most notable achievements were Cypress Point on the Monterey Peninsula in northern California and Augusta National in Georgia, which he created in tandem with Jones.

The quality of this Tartan trio’s creations, and the requirements of the clientele they served, varied greatly, but there can be little argument that each deserves his position in the course architects’ pantheon.

It is possible that golf would be no bigger in America today than, say, cricket or rugby union had its founding fathers from across the Atlantic not warmed to their task with such intensity and commitment. The result is that today the U.S. is the game’s international epicenter, and the contribution from those early Scottish settlers cannot be understated.

The game would probably have found its way Stateside eventually, as it has done to almost every country in the world, but if its arrival in America had taken place 10 or 20 years later, then who knows whether we would have ever witnessed, and celebrated, the skills of Hogan, Nelson or Snead, let alone the likes of Jones, Hagen and Sarazen?

A visit to the USGA headquarters confirms the legacy of those pioneering Scots—from playing and teaching to course design and maintenance—and the important role they played in establishing the game’s rich heritage.

Golf today is a mighty oak, yet it originated from the humblest of acorns. Indeed, few industries or companies can claim to have grown so significantly in 125 years. And to think it all began with a mere cow pasture in Yonkers!