Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  It makes an intriguing picture: the very proper Englishwoman, gritting her teeth and doing her duty, dismayed to find she must disrobe to the skin in the Table Rock Hotel and don an oiled calico hood, a loose overgarment (it reminded her of a carter’s frock), blue worsted stockings, and a pair of oversized rubber boots. Embarrassed by this odd but serviceable costume, she ran the gauntlet of a group of loiterers and then waded through a sea of mud to the spiral staircase that led down the cliff and under Table Rock. She would have much preferred to sit on the rock and drink in the scenery.

  In the abyss below, behind the falling water, she experienced the deafening gusts of wind and blinding showers others had described before her. She wanted to retreat, she tried to scream, but her voice was lost in the thunder of the cataract. Her guide, again to her dismay, was a black man, and now as he extended his hand to steady her, she took it – not quite free of the childhood fancy that “the black comes off.” She was not used to black people and could not escape the feeling that she was being led to destruction by the darkest of imps.

  On the narrow and slippery ledge, no more than a foot wide, behind the curtain of water with the gulf boiling seventy feet below and the gusts of wind acting as a bar to progress, she grasped his hand. The ledge narrowed. She could hardly stand with her feet abreast. She pleaded with her guide to stop, but he could only guess what she wanted to say. “It’s worse going back,” he shrieked in her ear. She made a desperate attempt to move. Four steps took her to the end of the ledge. With the breath sucked out of her lungs, she could barely stand upright in the face of the gusts. This was Termination Rock, as far as any human being had been able to go; and so, with the guide’s help, she turned about and they retraced their steps.

  And yet, in spite of all the dangers and all the embarrassments, the shrill importunings of the guides and the nervousness of the Lawrences, she felt emotionally fulfilled. The spectacle before her, half obscured by the lashing spray, left an indelible impression. It was as if she were standing in a magnificent shrine formed by the natural curve of the Falls and the overhanging shelf of the precipice. With her, as with others, the experience was transcendental. “The temple,” she wrote, “seems a fit and awful shrine for Him who ‘rides on the wings of mighty winds.’ ” Completely shut out from man’s puny works, “the mind naturally rises in adoring contemplation of Him whose voice is heard in the ‘thunder of waters.” ’

  Staunchly refusing the traditional hot brandy that was offered to those who had undergone the experience, she took such a severe chill that she came down with what was then called “the ague.” She didn’t regret her adventure, nor did she boast of it. But she still hadn’t seen what she had come to see.

  Now she was stubbornly determined to have a good, long look at the Horseshoe. Fending off the hack drivers and “refusing to be victimised by burning springs, museums, prisoned eagles, and mangy buffaloes,” she made her way down to the ferry landing, scrambled onto a rock farther out in the water, and there in undistracted solitude she sat, oblivious to everything but the cataract itself.

  When at last she arose, the sun had long since set. A young moon shining on the cascading waters made them appear to be composed of drifting snow. She realized with a start that she had been gazing on the vista for almost four hours. The scene that had once disappointed now exalted her.

  In one way it was very much as she had expected, yet it was also totally different. She was not the first nor would she be the last of those newcomers who, having read too many accounts of the Falls, found them less than advertised but, as the days went by and the cataract worked its slow magic, changed their attitudes and became worshippers at the shrine.

  Her clothes saturated with the mist, Isabella Bird finally tore herself from the hypnotic spectacle, made her way up the cliff, and then at midnight took an omnibus to the railway station near the suspension bridge. There, with the manmade scream of the locomotive drowning out the natural thunder of Niagara, she boarded the train and slept all the way to Hamilton.

  2

  Frankenstein’s monster

  In the bridge-building years of Ellet and Roebling, the arriving tourists pouring off the new trains at Niagara could not fail to notice a bearded, hawk-faced young artist standing at his easel, painting, painting, painting. Wherever they went – to Goat Island or to the gorge, to the half-finished railway bridge or to the Clifton House – there he was in his cap and high boots, pursuing an astonishing goal.

  His name was Godfrey Frankenstein and his plan was to produce the most stupendous moving panorama of Niagara ever attempted. The concept fitted the times, for this was a yeasty period. Europe was coming out of its revolutionary ferment. The potato famine was driving hundreds of thousands of Irish peasants to North America. The eyes of the British world were focused on the remarkable Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. Commodore Perry reached Japan and opened a new window on the East. It was the age of the new – the Morse telegraph and the Singer sewing machine, not to mention the Colt revolver – and Godfrey Frankenstein intended to be part of it.

  By 1844, when he first visited Niagara, more than seventy painters had produced hundreds of oils, watercolours, drawings, and engravings of the Falls. To many – and Frankenstein was one – the spectacle was too vast, too theatrical to be squeezed into the narrow confines of the normal canvas. A succession of ingenious artists had already tried their hands at long strip paintings, ambitious panoramas, cycloramas (on a curved backdrop), and three-dimensional dioramas. Mere paint and canvas were not enough, as some of the entrepreneurial artists who preceded Frankenstein had realized. Back in 1728, an ingenious Frenchman had created a new kind of entertainment for his London audience. Known as the Eido Fuksian, it was a scenic tableau entitled The Cataract of Niagara Falls in North America. An animated peepshow, it was the wonder of the age. Through the use of sound, artificial light, and moving stage scenery it achieved effects that at the time seemed almost magical.

  Such imaginative fancies were to the nineteenth century what the wide-screen and 3-D motion pictures were to the twentieth. One panorama of Niagara Falls covered five thousand square feet of canvas. Another “unequalled Diorama” in Philadelphia took four years to build and represented “the Rapids and falling sheets of water in actual motion.” In London in 1823, stage designers used ten thousand gallons of water to represent the Falls as backdrop for a play. In New York, five years later, William Dunlap’s farce, A Trip to Niagara, was played down stage before a gigantic moving panorama. In 1851, two ingenious Philadelphia photographers constructed a mechanical marvel that they called A Physiorama of the Falls of Niagara. It contained twenty separate scenes.

  But it remained for Frankenstein, a German immigrant, to produce, in 1853, the most spectacular and successful moving panorama of all. Frankenstein came from a family of painters that included his father and his four siblings. They moved from Darmstadt, Germany, in 1831 when young Godfrey was eleven years old and already something of a prodigy. At twelve he was apprenticed to a sign painter. At thirteen he left that job and started his own sign-painting business. At nineteen he opened a portrait studio in Cincinnati and two years later became the first president of that city’s Academy of Fine Arts. He was just twenty-four when on his first visit to Niagara he decided to devote himself to landscape painting.

  To suggest that Niagara was an obsession with him is an understatement. Year after year he was lured back to the Falls. He painted the twin waterfalls by day and he painted them by night. He painted them in the furnace of summer and in the blasts of winter-his easel in a snow bank, icicles dripping from his beard, the freezing spray often congealing on his canvas.

  His work was meticulous; every rock, every broken stump, every pebble appeared in the finished paintings, for Frankenstein was intent on producing the most definitive multiple portrait of Niagara ever recorded. He painted the Falls from every conceivable angle: from Prospect Point and Table Rock, from the level of the river and from the heights abo
ve, in the moonlight, at dawn, high noon, and sunset. He painted the gorge; he painted the rapids; he painted the Whirlpool from every vantage point. In all, over a period of nine years, he made two hundred studies.

  For the last five years of this sojourn, with the help of his two brothers he had been planning an ambitious moving panorama. He selected between eighty and one hundred paintings for the final work – an arduous and exhausting task. Because the end product would stand at least eight feet high and the canvas rolls on which the scenes were painted would each be at least a thousand feet long, he would have to copy and paint an enlarged version of every small sketch on the finished panorama.

  He worked like a modern screen director and film editor, creating what was, in effect, a story board for his masterpiece. The paintings were arranged to convey the most dramatic impact: a long view of the subject would be followed by a close-up, a moonlit site with a sunny vista. By juxtaposing scenes painted in 1844 with similar views in 1853, he showed the changes, geological and manmade, that had occurred over nine years.

  By these devices Frankenstein’s audiences were treated to a short but graphic lesson in the geology of Niagara. Even in a brief nine-year period old landmarks vanished or were transformed. A rock slide in 1847 had caused a huge boulder, four hundred feet square, to topple from Goat Island near the Biddle Stairs, taking with it the seats set out for tourists and the trees that shaded them. That same year most of Gull Island, a gravel bar in the rapids above Horseshoe Falls, named for the roosting birds, was swept away in high water. Three years later almost all of the Table Rock overhang, twelve thousand square feet in size and one hundred feet thick, tumbled into the water with a crash heard for miles. A coachman who had been washing his buggy on Table Rock escaped with his horses, but his vehicle hurtled into the vortex below. In 1852, a great triangular mass of rock, earth, and gravel dropped off Goat Island and over the edge near the Terrapin Tower. A few days later some of the Terrapin Rocks themselves – fifteen thousand cubic feet of dolostone – met the same fate.

  No wonder that people flocked by the thousands to the Broadway Amusement Center in New York in 1853 to sit in the dark and goggle at the unfolding spectacle. There on the stage was a huge picture frame within which Frankenstein’s carefully arranged scenes moved slowly past on mechanical rollers, controlled by unseen hands. Each of the three rolls, when full, was three feet thick. Like a modern film documentary, the panorama was accompanied by music and by a live commentary by Frankenstein himself. He charged fifty cents admission – no more than his due, for his investment in time and money was in the neighbourhood of fifty thousand dollars.

  What the audiences got was a guided tour of the Falls, beginning with an establishing portrait of the two cataracts viewed from a window in the Clifton House. Scenes of repose were followed by wilder spectacles of raging waters and spray – a contrast that never failed to bring applause. As one reviewer exclaimed, “We see Niagara above the falls and far below.… We have it sideways and lengthways: we look down upon it, we look up at it: we are before it, behind it, in it … into its spray on the deck of the Maid of the Mist; tempting its rapids among the eddies above; skimming its whirlpool far below.…”

  As a climax, Frankenstein had used a sequence of winter landscapes, showing the effects of ice and frozen spray on the trees, with the Falls themselves trapped in a mantle of white. At these novel and unexpected scenes the audience invariably clapped in tribute.

  The artist was nothing if not inventive – as much a journalist as he was a painter, quick to capitalize on at least one Niagara tragedy. Shortly after the opening of his panorama in July 1853, a man named Joseph Avery had been discovered clinging to a log wedged tightly between some rocks in the shallow rapids just above the brink of the American Falls. His boat had overturned. Two companions had been swept over the cataract and dashed to pieces on the rocks below. There followed a nine-teen-hour suspense story, reported in consecutive editions of the newspapers. Watched by crowds lining both sides of the river, Avery’s would-be rescuers hammered together a raft of crossed timbers with a hogshead in the centre, secured by thick ropes. They floated it out on a line through the turbulence, where it too was jammed into the rocks. Avery managed to reach it and free it. As his rescuers tugged and pulled he climbed on board, but the effort was in vain. Once more the raft was caught, and this time Avery could not budge it.

  Several more attempts were made to reach him. One man went part way out in a boat and asked Avery to tie a rope around his body so that he could be drawn in to shore, but by now Avery was too exhausted to make the effort.

  At last a proper lifeboat arrived from Buffalo. Avery, still on the raft, prepared to leap into it. As the lifeboat reached his perch, it struck the raft, and a cry of exultation rose from the spectators. But moments after the collision Avery was seen struggling for his life in the water. He struck out boldly for Goat Island, but his strength failed; as the onlookers watched in horror, he was borne back slowly and then more rapidly into the fiercest part of the current. On the lip of the Falls, he rose to the surface, flung his hands high, uttered a piercing shriek, and was borne over the crest to his death.

  After this sensational story unfolded in several editions of the New York Times, Frankenstein added paintings of the scene to his panorama, giving it the effect of a modern newsreel. Then in September, when all that was left of Table Rock toppled into the stream, Frankenstein capitalized on that, too. The rubble had temporarily blocked the entrance to the cavern below the Horseshoe Falls. The artist lost no time in announcing that the only views left of that dark passage behind the curtain were to be found in his panorama. “Table Rock Fallen!” one of his advertisements read. “Passage behind the Great Sheet of Water blocked up! In the Panorama the Passage is still open and the visitors are taken behind the fall as heretofore.”

  The exhibition played to large crowds in New York until November and then moved on to other cities on the eastern seaboard, heralded as “the most beautiful and truthful Panoramic painting in the world.” For the next four years it drew critical plaudits and large audiences everywhere it was shown. Only in 1857 did attendance begin to fall off as another phenomenon of art burst upon the world. That was the year that Frederic Church, one of the best-known landscape artists of his day, first exhibited his remarkable single canvas of the Falls. One canvas against many! It seems, in retrospect, an unequal contest, especially as Church’s picture didn’t even move.

  Or did it? Those who stand beneath it today in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington and stare long enough into the green depths of the water Church created – real water, boiling, coursing, sparkling, churning, skipping in runnels over the ragged ledges in the foreground, bubbling in eddies at the viewer’s feet, foaming in one triumphant splurge over the stark lip of the Escarpment, tumbling whitely on the far edge of the horseshoe, may be pardoned if they sense and even see the movement. That, after all, was Frederic Church’s genius.

  3

  Mr. Church’s masterpiece

  When Church made his first sketching trip to the Falls in late March 1856, he was in his thirtieth year, tall, handsome, and boyish looking. A talented landscapist, he was facing what many of his contemporaries believed to be an impossible task. Even his mentor, Thomas Cole, then the outstanding landscape painter in North America, had tried and failed to capture either the reality or the essence of the prodigious cataract.

  Frankenstein had attempted it in a series of nearly one hundred paintings. Church’s bold purpose was to set down on a single canvas everything about the Falls – their raging spirit, their geological significance, their very soul – and to do it with such meticulous accuracy that every curl of foam, every droplet of spray, every slippery rock, and every racing rivulet would seem even more realistic than the stereoscopic views that the new art of photography was making available in the homes of the continent.

  Church was a sixth-generation Connecticut Yankee, the son of a well-to-do Hartford businessman who so
mewhat grudgingly allowed him to follow his natural bent for drawing. He was Cole’s only pupil, a member of the Hudson River school of landscape painting, which Cole had helped found. To these high-minded artists, roaming the New York and New England countryside and wandering farther and farther afield in search of subject matter, landscape painting had a loftier purpose than the mere depiction of outdoor views. It must seek to unveil the hidden spirituality in nature, “to speak a language strong, moral and imaginative.”

  The American landscapists did not see nature as pictorially passive, like the Alps, but kinetic, wild, vital, imbued with energy and power, like the Falls – like America itself. No crumbling ruins for them, no decaying trees; their purpose was to paint life, not death. Alexander von Humboldt, the great geographer-meteorologist, himself a major influence on Church, had charged the landscape artists to paint the heroic, and it was heroic art that expansionist America craved. “Niagara Falls, the mighty portal of the Golden West,” in Cole’s colourful description, stood as the new symbol of Manifest Destiny. In that phrase, scarcely a decade old, was bound up all America’s yearnings, her faith in the future, her unbounded optimism, her unswerving belief in herself. This was the credo that Church himself espoused as a landscape artist.

  He was very much a product of his time, a time when science, nature, and religion were, for many, inextricably bound together. Nature was a mirror to reflect God’s image, science a method to reveal God’s truth. Church, “a Nineteenth Century type of the Puritan,” to quote Charles Dudley Warner’s unfinished biography, believed in the moral purpose of landscape painting. He would certainly have agreed with his contemporary Samuel Osgood that landscape painting was “a Godlike calling,” and with the cleric E.L. Magoon that Niagara Falls was “the most magnificent leaf in the ‘mystic volume’ in the Book of Nature.”