Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  It was in Hennepin’s interest, as an ambitious author, to make “this prodigious cadence of water” even more stupendous. In his Description de la Louisiane, he created a waterfall three times the true height, boosting it from 170 feet to 500 – a prodigious cadence indeed. In his later revised description of 1697, he added another hundred feet. The book made his reputation in Europe. In Canada it established him as “un grand Menteur,” a great liar, as Pehr Kalm, a Swedish naturalist, discovered half a century later. Hennepin did not confine this embroidery to his description of Niagara Falls. In his writings he did his best to undercut La Salle’s contributions and establish himself as the real explorer of the Mississippi.

  Hennepin’s description of “this prodigious frightful Fall” was enough to send shivers up his readers’ spines. No doubt that was his purpose. It was to him “the most Beautiful and at the same time most Frightful Cascade in the World.” He peppered his descriptions with adjectives designed to awe his readers: “a great and horrible cataract” … “frightful abyss” … “horrible mass of water” … “a sound more terrible than that of thunder.”

  It was these overheated descriptions that stimulated in Europeans the macabre vision of the New World – a wild, weird land of dark, impenetrable forests where painted savages lurked behind every tree and a gargantuan cataract foamed and roared in the unknown interior of the continent. Hennepin also wrote of rattlesnakes squirming beneath the sheet of water, and later travellers followed with tales of eels wriggling among the rocks below, of great eagles soaring above the spray, and, at the end of a gloomy gorge, a vast whirlpool, like the Charybdis of antiquity, waiting to entrap the unwary visitor.

  Thus was established the image of the Falls as a dread and mystic place. It would take the best part of a century to soften that perception.

  3

  “The most awful scene”

  For most of the eighteenth century the Falls remained almost as remote as the moon. A couple of eyewitness accounts in French followed Hennepin’s, but nothing appeared in English until 1751 when a translation of Kalm’s travel diary added to the Falls’ reputation as a fearsome cataract. “You cannot see it without being quite terrified,” he wrote. He described how birds flying over the boiling rapids became so soaked with spray that they plunged to their deaths, of how flocks of waterfowl swimming above the Falls were swept over the precipice, and of how the bodies of bear, deer, and other animals that tried to cross the upper river were found broken to pieces at the bottom of the cascade.

  Kalm retold the tale of two Iroquois trapped on Goat Island – an incident that had occurred a dozen years earlier but was still the talk of the region. The pair had gone deer hunting well above the Falls but, tipsy from brandy, had awakened in their canoe to find it heading for the abyss. Paddling frantically, they managed to reach the island before being swept over, but then realized they were trapped between the two cascades.

  Faced with slow starvation, they built a rope ladder from basswood bark, tied one end to a tree, and dropped the other down the 170 feet of the Goat Island cliff and into the torrent below. They climbed down the rock face and into the water, intending to swim ashore, but could make no headway against the great eddy caused by the collision of waters from the two cataracts. Each time they tried to escape, the fury of the stream below the Falls hurled them back. At last, badly bruised and scratched, they were forced to haul themselves back up to their island prison.

  After several days they managed to attract the attention of some of their comrades on shore, who hastened to the fort at the river’s mouth to seek help. The commandant ordered long pikestaffs tipped with iron to be made. Armed with these, two Indians volunteered to attempt a crossing to the northeastern (American) side of the island to try to rescue the starving pair. “They took leave of their friends as if they were going to their death,” and then, steadying themselves precariously with a pole in each hand, they managed to make the agonizing journey through the rocks and shallows to the island – something never before or since attempted. The victims, who had been without food for nine days (except, perhaps, for berries and wild grasses) were thus successfully guided to safety.

  It took considerable daring and a stout heart to hazard the descent from the lip of the gorge to the slippery tangle of rocks and roots at the river’s edge. Hennepin, who had worked his way down the cliff beside the Horseshoe Falls, claimed that the opposite cliff was so steep no one could negotiate it. But one man did.

  He was a romantic and adventurous French diplomat, Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur, who visited the Falls with a companion named Hunter in July of 1785. By this time, as a result of the Conquest of 1759, the region was no longer in French hands. The western side was English; the eastern side had just been ceded to the United States following the American War of Independence. Crèvecoeur himself had been arrested by the Americans as a spy in 1783 but had easily established his neutrality (he was a friend of George Washington) and served as consul of France in New York. Now this well-travelled and literate visitor had decided to attempt the perilous descent of the sheer cliff on the American side of the gorge. He and Hunter tied a stout rope to a tree about fifty feet below the crest of the American Falls. Clinging to it and finding footholds in the crevices in the rock, they descended some 150 feet to the bottom, “not without having experienced the greatest bodily fatigue, but also some fearful apprehensions.”

  Now, nothing would do but that they tackle the Canadian shore. They rode south to the American Fort Schlosser, and there the captain in charge had them ferried across the broad river on a military bateau, accompanied by six soldiers. It was not an easy passage. The current was so swift they were forced to row furiously upriver, close to the shore, for two miles. The experience, in Crèvecoeur’s words, was “extremely awful.” Just ahead of the bateau he could see the leaping crests of the rapids and, beyond them, the spray of the Falls. A broken oar, he realized, could easily have caused their deaths because once they hit the white water, they would inevitably have perished. Then, “with incredible labour,” they managed to reach the mouth of Chippawa Creek.

  Many of the large farms on the Canadian side were owned by Loyalists, men who had maintained allegiance to the King in the recent revolution and had been driven from their homes to take up residence on lands supplied them by the British government. One of these, John Burch, entertained the pair at his plantation. Crèvecoeur found the conversation “pleasing and instructive,” adjectives that would scarcely have been applied had he been an American patriot.

  Following Burch’s directions, the two proceeded to another cultivated farm owned by a fellow-Loyalist, Francis Ellsworth, who agreed to act as their guide. Ellsworth took them along the edge of the gorge for more than a mile downstream from Table Rock, where a break in the cliffside allowed them to descend. Gazing down this precipice, Hunter hesitated. Crèvecoeur thought it better that he give up, but finally his companion announced that he did not want to be left behind, and so the three men started down, clinging to trees and shrubs.

  They rested briefly in the shade of a large tree on the bark of which were carved the names of others who had gone before. They added their own and then continued their downward scramble until they found their way blocked by an enormous boulder, thirty feet high. An Indian ladder – nothing more than two tree trunks notched by tomahawks – led over it.

  From this point the zigzagging route grew more difficult, causing them at times to crawl on all fours, “passing through holes in rocks, which would scarce admit our bodies” or creeping beneath the roots of great trees through hollows made by Indian fishermen.

  After an hour of struggle they reached a shelf of rocks that had, apparently, tumbled from the heights the previous spring, loosened by the expansion and thawing of the winter’s ice. Some of these boulders weighed several tons, and Crèvecoeur recalled, not without a shudder, stories of earlier travellers who had been lamed or even killed when they fell.

  The trio was now
about a mile and a half from the foot of the Horseshoe. The entire route was strewn with broken rocks, forming an uncertain pathway that often gave way beneath their feet, increasing the danger of tumbling into the roaring river only a few feet away. “The only way to save ourselves was by laying [sic] down, by which we frequently were hurt. The pending rocks above us added much to the horrors of our situation, for knowing those under our feet had fallen at different periods, we could not divest ourselves of apprehension.…” They came upon two small cataracts, long since vanished, that undoubtedly were the basis for the single slender fall that the Hennepin engraving had shown a century before. Exhausted and sweating from their exertions, they sat down to catch their breath and remove their outer clothing. Then, in boots and trousers, they set off on the next leg of their journey, which Crèvecoeur called “the most hazardous expedition I was ever engaged in.”

  Working their way up and over several high and craggy boulders, they reached the base of the first of the small falls. Passing beneath it, Crèvecoeur was reminded of a violent storm of hail beating upon his head. When they reached the second fall, he felt he could go no farther. Ellsworth, who had gone ahead, retraced his steps to shepherd the two through. Crawling on hands and knees, “expecting each moment to sink under the weight of water,” they finally made it out into the open air. Hunter by this time was exhausted, and Crèvecoeur again regretted having brought him. Nevertheless, they gathered their energies and plodded on to the base of the Horseshoe.

  “Here I may say with propriety that the most awful scene was now before me that we had yet seen.” It is possible that the three men were the first humans to hazard a trip behind the waterfall; the Indian fishermen who frequented the area would hardly have bothered to indulge in what to them would have seemed a useless adventure. Into the dark opening between the sheet of falling water and the dripping face of the Escarpment the trio made their way “by slow and cautious steps.” They managed to stumble forward for fifteen or twenty yards, gasping in an atmosphere so sultry “that we might be said to be in a fumigating bath.” At that point they retreated hastily, relieved to feel once more the welcome rays of the sun, “whose beams seem to shine with peculiar lustre, from the pleasure and gaiety it diffused over our trembling senses.” For Crèvecoeur it was a religious experience as well as a frightening one. Here, he thought, “was one of the great efforts of Providence, shewing the omnipotence of a supreme being.”

  The three men, now dripping wet and exhausted, were obliged to work their way back until, six hours after they had begun their descent, they again reached the summit of the gorge – “and who can speak the pleasure we received from our safe return.” That evening, after having eaten “voraciously” at Ellsworth’s home, the travellers rode on horseback through the woods that lined the banks and then across ploughed fields to the Niagara’s mouth, where they boarded a ferry to take them to Fort Niagara on the American side, from which they had set out some days before on what was clearly the adventure of a lifetime. Crèvecoeur did not, however, share his adventure with the public (it did not see print for another hundred years). So it was that the European world was deprived of a graphic picture of the terrors lurking at the foot of the cataract until the turn of the century, when the Falls became more accessible.

  By that time, western New York was undergoing a revolution in transportation. The “turnpike mania,” as it has been called, had reached its zenith. At last it was possible to travel much of the way by stage along gravelled toll roads through the new settlements that were springing up along the old Indian trails. The first tourists were about to reach Niagara.

  One of these was the lean, dark, and distinguished Speaker of the Massachusetts legislature, Timothy Bigelow, an inquisitive and witty politician. Bigelow had never been out of New England. Now, in the summer of 1805, with four friends, he determined to see something of the new land to the west and travel overland to the Falls of Niagara. The party left Boston on July 8 and arrived at its destination seventeen days later.

  They travelled by wagon or, on sidetrips, to points of interest by more comfortable carriage. They put up at taverns, boarding houses, and, in the larger towns, hotels. They crossed their own settled state and picked up the western turnpike at Albany, New York, travelling 206 miles through Utica to the road’s terminus at Canandaigua. Events were moving swiftly in western New York. Already surveyors’ stakes were being driven to extend the toll road all the way to Niagara.

  As they moved on west, settlement grew sparser. Some of the new towns, such as Batavia – “a considerable village” – were no more than three years old. Indeed, there was no community with a population of more than six thousand in all of northern New York State. The orchards were newly planted, the stumps of the original forest still disfiguring the cleared land. Bigelow noted “the astonishing rapidity with which this country is settled.” At Tonawanda Creek en route to Buffalo, the woods were alive with settlers whose “axes were resounding, and the trees literally falling about us as we passed.”

  Many of the rivers were unbridged; in other cases, the bridge floors were mere poles, threatening to collapse. On occasion the travellers had to leave their ferry and wade through mud to reach the shore. But, as they rattled across the state, Bigelow felt the buzz of raw new industry – sawmills and gristmills, salt works, silkworm farms, carding machines, cider presses.

  From Buffalo, the party drove three miles to Black Rock on the Niagara where they waited an hour for a ferryman. They were appalled by the “wretched machine” that took them across the river – “the most formidable ferry, perhaps, in the world.” Horses, driver, wagon, goods, and travellers were all crammed aboard this “crazy flat-bottomed boat” with rotting sides, presided over by “a drunken Irishman, who commanded an Indian and a negro wench, who seemed to be much the ablest hand of the three.”

  Having reached the far shore without mishap, they spent the night in a boarding house at Chippawa, a circumstance that “required an effort of patience,” for the sight of the distant spray had made them eager to see the Falls. Early the following morning, they set off with a guide who took them to the vast overhang of Table Rock, so close to the crest of the Falls that it seemed as if they could almost dangle a foot into the racing waters. Then, ignoring the insubstantial Indian ladders, they rode for half a mile downstream to the Simcoe ladder, built in 1795 for Elizabeth Posthuma Gwillim Simcoe, the wife of the Governor of Upper Canada, who had ventured down it that year in full skirts.

  Clinging to it and looking at the projecting ledge above him, Bigelow felt as if he were suspended in mid-air. Another visitor who arrived just before the Bigelow party took one look at the flimsy contrivance and declined to descend. But Bigelow and the others braved the staircase. It proved almost as treacherous as the notched logs that Crèvecoeur had negotiated. The ladder was constructed of log rungs, tied in place with grapevines. Placed sideways to the bank, it was fastened by pieces of iron hoops to twin stumps on the overhang at the top and to a large rock at the bottom.

  Once down the ladder, crouching and crawling over the corduroy of boulders, stumps, and slippery shale, the party reached the base of the Horseshoe and ventured behind the sheet. There they experienced, as others had, the tempest that roared out of the cave within – a blast of wind so violent that it sucked the very breath from their bodies. This raging whirlwind was created by the tumbling waters striking the rocks below with such force that the collision seemed to compress the very air around it. Blinded by the power of the spray, the visitors found themselves treading over a crumbling mass of shale, which, agitated by the water, moved alarmingly beneath their feet and was not improved by the eels squirming between the rocks.

  Here Bigelow feared for his life. “A false step or sudden precipice, which we might not be able to discern, would have plunged us where nothing could have saved us from instant destruction.” He concluded that even if the ground had been firm, the blast roaring out of the cavern was so strong that, had they
gone farther, they would have suffocated.

  Nothing that followed equalled that experience. The party lingered briefly at the little village of Clifton, then followed the portage road to the mouth of the river, took passage across the lake, moved on to Montreal, and returned home by way of Vermont, having covered 1,355 miles in forty-two days.

  The feeling of impotence in the face of indomitable forces that Bigelow had felt – the blind fear of the thundering waters – was commonly reported by Niagaraphiles well into the eighteenth century. To Pehr Kalm in 1750, the sight had been “enough to make the hair stand on end.” In 1805, the poet and ornithologist Alexander Wilson, viewing the Falls from Table Rock, wrote of their “awful grandeur” that “seized, at once, all power of speech away, and filled our souls with terror and dismay.”

  Terror, yes, but not unmixed with other emotions. The spectacle of tons of water thundering into a boiling abyss sent delicious thrills down the spines of the spectators not unlike the titillation produced by the telling of a ghost story or, in modern times, by a well-crafted horror film. Writers and dramatists have always known that one way to capture an audience is to frighten it out of its wits. The revelation of Niagara Falls as a place of horror dovetailed neatly with the appearance of the Gothic romance in literature. Horace Walpole’s seminal novel, The Castle of Otranto, was published in 1764, and Mrs. Radcliffe’s chilling The Mysteries of Udolpho appeared in 1794 – one year before the French writer the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, having descended one of the swaying Indian ladders, concluded that “everything seems calculated to strike with terror.”