The Goat Island “ramble,” as Olmsted called it, took some time. Indeed, it was several hours before the three men actually came within sight of the Falls, for the island seduced and held them, and they lingered among its rustic attractions. To them, this tangled, natural garden was living testimony to What Might Have Been and also to What Might Be Again. It was the only spot within sound of the Falls that had been preserved almost exactly as the first explorers had known it.
Meeting the following day in Dorsheimer’s room at the Cataract House and joined by Olmsted’s partner – a brilliant young English landscape architect, Calvert Vaux – the three men agreed that the Niagara gorge must be freed of all the unsightly trappings of civilization and restored to its original wild beauty. No manicured lawns for them, no formal gardens or clipped hedges; this was not Europe. Niagara must be restored so that the visitor, standing on the rim of the gorge, would see the Falls as Father Hennepin had seen them, framed by an unruly jungle of native trees, shrubs, and clinging vines.
There was an unseen presence in the room that day, for Frederic Church was there in spirit. He had returned to Niagara in 1867 to paint and found himself surrounded by crowds of rubbernecks, one of whom went so far as to disparage his work. “Pshaw!” he sneered. “You ought to see Church’s Niagara.”
“I painted it,” the artist replied, a remark, it is said, that “almost hurled the critic into the abyss.”
Church and Olmsted were distantly related, and both, with Richardson, were members of the Century Club in New York. Within those polished walls Church pushed forward his concept of a public park at Niagara. Olmsted, with his experience in California, agreed. Now, in Dorsheimer’s room, he and the others planned a campaign to convince press, public, and politicians that the Falls’ environment must be preserved.
The campaign moved slowly and quietly for the next decade. It took time for the public to arrive at the conclusion that a small minority had reached – that Niagara was in deep trouble. In 1871 Henry James fired a warning shot in the Nation, a magazine that Olmsted had helped found. The fate of Goat Island especially concerned him. He had been told that the Porter family had been offered “a big price” for the privilege of building a hotel on the property. How long would they hold out? he wondered. Why shouldn’t the government buy up the precious acres, as had happened with Yosemite? “It is the opinion of a sentimental tourist that no price would be too great to pay,” the novelist declared. The following year, a two-volume work, Picturesque America, added to the growing outcry when it described the Falls as “a superb diamond set in lead.”
Olmsted, meanwhile, had gone temporarily blind – a hysterical reaction brought about by the breakup of his partnership with Vaux. He still sat on the board of Central Park, but a series of acrimonious disputes with Andrew Green, the comptroller, led to another mental and physical breakdown and his eventual retirement from the park commission. The campaign to preserve Niagara remained dormant until, in 1878, Frederic Church jumped into the breach.
Through a well-connected journalist, the painter made an approach to the Governor General of Canada, Lord Dufferin, who had visited the Falls that summer and had been appalled at what he saw. In spite of the political restrictions placed on him by his vice-regal role, the handsome and elegant nobleman thought of himself as an activist – a little too active, sometimes, for the Canadian government, which in the matter of building a railway to the Pacific tended to see him as an interfering busybody.
But Dufferin liked to interfere. His ego demanded it. In the transcripts of his speeches, which he sent to the press in advance, he was in the habit of adding bracketed comments – “(Applause) … (Laughter)” – so that no one would miss the point. A former member of Gladstone’s ministry, he chafed in a position where as the Queen’s representative he could reign but could not rule. Now he saw an opportunity to advance a cause that genuinely concerned him, one to which, without ruffling any political feathers, he could make a contribution.
In Toronto that September, in a speech to the Society of Artists, he made the first public announcement that a joint park with the United States was being contemplated at Niagara. He had already met with Governor Lucius Robinson of New York and suggested that the state should combine with the province of Ontario to buy up lands and buildings around the Falls and form a small international public park, “not indeed decorative or in any way sophisticated by the penny arts of the landscape gardener, but carefully preserved in the picturesque condition, in which it was originally laid out by the hand of nature.” Dufferin’s proposal corresponded with Olmsted’s view. The landscape architect may have been irked by the slur on his profession, but he had no wish to see the “penny arts” – formal gardens, carefully pruned shrubs – intrude on the natural beauty of the wild forest.
Governor Robinson agreed with his vice-regal guest, especially about the need for an international approach. As he put it, “the sublime exhibition of natural powers there witnessed is the property of the whole world.” Dufferin had already been to see the Ontario government, and Robinson recommended to the state legislature that if Ontario appointed a commission, New York should follow suit. He added a practical note: the proposals, he pointed out, would undoubtedly increase tourist traffic at the Falls.
The legislature at once instructed the Commissioners of State Survey to report on the feasibility of the governor’s request. James T. Gardner, the head of the commission, together with Olmsted, would examine the region and draw up a plan of improvement. With commendable dispatch, it was completed and presented to the legislature in March 1880.
The separate statements by the two men presented a devastating indictment of the disfigurement of the Falls’ environment. “The Falls themselves,” Gardner wrote, “man cannot touch; but he is fast destroying their beautiful frame of foliage, and throwing around them an artificial setting of manufactories and bazaars that arouses in the intelligent visitor deep feelings of regret and even of resentment.”
The cancer was spreading. Two more mills and a brewery had just been built near the bank half a mile below the cataract to “warn us of what is coming.” And Goat Island, the jewel of Niagara, was already endangered. A partition suit was in progress, and would-be purchasers were planning, among other attractions, a race course, a summer hotel, and a rifle range. It was even suggested that a canal be cut through the island’s midriff with factories lining both banks. The prospect was unthinkable. Many of the trees on the island had been there when Father Hennepin arrived. They remained “the only living witnesses of those important scenes in the dramas of European conquest of America.” Would not posterity heap scorn on the present generation for destroying “these living monuments of history” to make way for a race course?
In his accompanying report Olmsted blamed the profit motive for destroying Niagara’s scenery. The idea of profit made the worst desecration acceptable. It was “the public’s verdict of acquittal”; the idea that Niagara was nothing more than a sensational exhibition for rope walkers and brass bands “is so presented to the visitor that he is forced to yield to it.…”
The report made it clear that the state had made a major error early in the century when it decided to sell or lease the land adjacent to the Falls. Now that same land would have to be bought back at considerable cost to the taxpayers. The commission urged that a strip a mile long and between one hundred and eight hundred yards wide be expropriated, the buildings destroyed, and the entire area replanted as close to the original wilderness as possible.
But nobody wanted to pay the cost. Alonzo B. Cornell, who had succeeded Robinson in 1879, was a longtime opponent of the park scheme. Why, he asked, should the taxpayer shoulder the burden of expropriation? Did he really believe that the Falls should be fenced in? “Of course I do,” he declared. “They are a luxury and why should not the public pay to see them?”
In Canada, the Ontario premier, Oliver Mowat, who had in 1873 rejected his own commission’s recommendation for a publ
ic park at Niagara, apparently had a change of heart and unequivocally endorsed the idea, declaring piously that “not in the whole world was there anything more worthy of saving.” Yet the saving of money, in the long run, was more important to Mowat than the saving of scenery. On September 27, 1879, when he and three of his Cabinet met with the New York commissioners, it seemed that the international park scheme was a fait accompli. But, as in the United States, it foundered on the matter of money.
Mowat wanted the federal government to pay the bill, even suggesting that that had been Lord Dufferin’s intention. In 1880, the Ontario premier pushed a bill through the legislature that gave Ottawa the freedom to buy up private or Crown land for a park. In this way he shrugged off all responsibility for the project. But Ottawa wasn’t buying. If Niagara was to be saved, it soon became clear, there would be two parks, separate and distinct, one on each side of the gorge.
4
Saving Niagara from itself
All through the winter of 1879-80, Frederick Law Olmsted had been working on a memorial to accompany the commission’s report on the need to preserve Niagara. He had the help of Dorsheimer, Church, and, perhaps more important, a new convert to the cause, Charles Eliot Norton, the distinguished Harvard professor. Among them they managed to secure the signatures of some seven hundred leading politicians, jurists, and writers from Canada and the United States. This remarkable memorial, which urged that the Falls be placed “under the joint guardianship of the two governments” (New York State and Canada), was delivered simultaneously to the governor of New York, the obdurate Cornell, and Lord Dufferin’s successor, Lord Lome.
It has been rightly said that no similar petition was ever graced by the signatures of so many illustrious and distinguished persons: the vice-president of the United States, members of the Canadian Parliament, Supreme Court justices, university presidents, high-ranking military men, eminent churchmen, Cabinet ministers, and a bevy of literary luminaries that included Francis Parkman, Charles A. Dana, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin.
The governor of New York could – and did – ignore this extraordinary appeal; scarcely anybody on the list was a voter. But with the Governor General pressing him, Sir John A. Macdonald, always sensitive to public opinion, could not. After all, the memorial contained the signatures of some of the most powerful businessmen in Canada. These included a Massey, a Molson, and a Redpath. There was also the principal of McGill University. In June 1880, the prime minister set up a special commission to look into the park proposal. It would be chaired by one of his closest Cabinet colleagues, Sir Alexander Campbell.
Once again, the question of cost frustrated the park proposal. Campbell reported that it would require $375,000 to expropriate the land needed. Even translated into today’s dollars, the sum seems picayune, considering the rewards. But regional jealousy – that continuing Canadian bugbear – thwarted the scheme. The Maritime members of Macdonald’s Cabinet, with the support of several from Quebec, were firmly opposed. Why, they asked, should Ontario hog all the money? They argued that few tourists from the three impoverished provinces on the chill Atlantic shore would ever see the Falls. If New York State was being asked to pay the full cost, why not Ontario? Why ask the taxpayers of Halifax or Saint John to subsidize a tourist attraction a thousand miles away?
Macdonald compromised and offered to negotiate with Ontario on the basis of joint financing. Oliver Mowat turned him down, and that was that.
In New York, the indefatigable Olmsted refused to give up the battle. In Norton he had a valiant colleague, a man who seemed to know everybody. It was he who had secured many of the signatures on the famous memorial.
Norton was an esthete. Physically fragile – he suffered from long bouts of insomnia – with a high, domed forehead and long, delicate features, he resembled a medieval monk. His was an attractive personality. On first meeting him, Ruskin had remarked on “the bright eyes, the melodious voice, the perfect manner.” To Norton, as to Olmsted, the campaign to preserve the Falls was only a step towards a larger vision: a full-scale attempt to awaken America to its natural heritage. He was alarmed – despondent, indeed – over the rapid spread of nineteenth-century industrialism and depressed by what his country was doing to its landscape.
“The growth of wealth, and the selfish individualism which accompanies it (and corrupts many who are not rich), seems to weaken all properly social motives and efforts,” he wrote. “Men in cities and towns feel much less relation with their neighbours than of old; there is less civic patriotism, less sense of a spiritual and moral community. This is due in part to other causes, but mainly to the selfishness of the individualism in a well-to-do democracy.” Like so many others, then and now, Norton was looking back to a golden age – the “pure and innocent” America, when, at the beginning of the century, his native New England was not begrimed by industrial smoke and the banks of the Niagara gorge were still unsullied.
The phrase “public relations,” with all its connotations, had yet to come into use. Indeed, it is difficult to think of Olmsted, and particularly of Norton, as P.R. men. But that is what they were in their fight to preserve the Falls. Unable to move the politicians, they set out like twentieth-century activists to persuade the public by capturing the press.
The Niagara Falls Gazette, which represented the commercial interests on the American side, was already mounting a campaign against them. So were the proprietors of the largest pulp mill, who owned seven hundred feet of waterfront. But Olmsted and Norton had better connections. Norton had also helped to found the Nation, the most important weekly in the country. Dorsheimer had left Buffalo to become editor of the New York Star. Both men had close friends on the Boston and New York papers, and Norton knew intimately every major literary figure in America.
In the summer of 1881, they got themselves a hired gun in the person of Henry Norman, a young Englishman who had recently graduated from Harvard and had impressive literary connections. Norman was sent off to the Falls to write a series of letters to the press – not the terse, two-paragraph epistles that appear in modern newspapers, but full-fledged essays, the length of magazine articles. One, in the September 1 issue of the Nation, was unsigned, making it appear that the editors themselves had composed it.
Norman heaped satire on his adversaries. Some people, he wrote, balked at paying twenty-five cents in taxes to destroy a lot of good buildings and replace them with trees “for the sake of a few persons whose nerves are so delicate that the sight of a tremendous body of water rushing over a precipice is spoilt for them by a pulp-mill standing on the bank.” But then, what else was to be expected when the governor himself, after listening to a report on the destruction of the Falls’ environment, had replied, laconically, “Well, the water goes over just the same, doesn’t it?”
The following year, Norton brought in an old friend and skilled propagandist, Jonathan Baxter Harrison, a Unitarian minister turned journalist. His articles, printed in the New York and Boston press, were widely distributed in pamphlet form. When a group of prominent citizens, including both Norton and Olmsted, formed the Niagara Falls Association, Harrison was named its secretary.
A thread of elitism ran through Harrison’s propaganda. The “better class of visitors,” he wrote, were being kept away from the Falls by the presence of excursionists. Like Norton, he was appalled by the avaricious element in the American temperament. There was little regard for beauty in the national character, he wrote. “The masses in our well-to-do democracy feel no discomfort from hideous ugliness and vulgarity in the objects and scenery around them at home.”
But Harrison also put his finger on the real problem. It was not “vandalism and soulless greed” that was imperilling the region but science, “or the changed methods and conditions of life which the modern development of science has produced.” Improvements in manufacturing appliances, the rapidly increasi
ng hunger for waterpower to run the burgeoning mills, the changes in mechanical transportation – these highly laudable examples of Yankee ingenuity would soon disfigure Niagara’s beauty. The very “progress” that was driving America forward to her manifest destiny was also destroying her heritage. It was a warning that would be heard again and again in the years to come.
None of this high-minded prose seemed to have any effect on the New York legislature. Norton had decided as early as the summer of 1882 that the battle was lost. Nonetheless, he gamely carried on, “not so much to save the Falls, as to save our own souls. Were we to see the Falls destroyed without making an effort to save them – the sin would be ours.”
By 1883, however, the tide was turning. Harrison had embarked on a lecture tour and the Niagara Falls Association was mailing thousands of letters to known supporters, urging them to bombard their state legislator with appeals to pass new laws to protect the Falls. Equally important, Alonzo Cornell was out of office and the former mayor of Buffalo, Grover Cleveland, was governor. Cleveland was a close ally of Dorsheimer and an admirer of Olmsted. On March 14, 1883, the legislature passed a bill, which Cleveland signed, providing for the expropriation of property at the Falls and a board of five commissioners (headed by Dorsheimer) to manage the new park or “reservation,” as it was officially called.
Three months later, as if to emphasize the schizophrenic nature of Niagara’s appeal – a haven for lovers of the idyllic, a focus for thrill seekers and daredevils – the world-renowned British swimmer Captain Matthew Webb arrived at the Clifton House. A former merchant marine officer, Webb declared that he intended to conquer the rapids of the gorge below the suspension bridge. These rapids, in the words of the Suspension Bridge Journal, “are not like surf or storm waves. They strike a blow like a sledgehammer and their power is akin to a cyclone.”
Niagara Page 17
