But Webb was perfectly confident that he could plunge into this fury and emerge unscathed. He was, after all, the conqueror of the English Channel – the first human being to cross from Dover to Cap Griz Nez, a feat he accomplished in twenty-nine hours and forty-five minutes. As a result, he had become a national hero, showered with honours and hard cash, a prisoner of his own success who felt it necessary to top himself over and over again – remaining for sixty hours in a tank at the Royal Aquarium, executing “a Dive for Life” from a high platform into the ocean, imitating porpoises and seals – to the cheers of the crowd. Now he was prepared to attack what he called “the angriest bit of water in the world.”
Webb had already examined the Whirlpool and rapids. He was told that he would be tempting suicide but remained confident. “I think I am strong enough and skilled enough to go through alive,” he declared. The speed of the river at the rapids was just under forty miles an hour, the depth of the water, ninety-five feet. He planned to leap into the river, wearing only a brief pair of silk trunks, from a small boat just above the suspension bridge and float into the rapids, expecting the “fearful speed of the water” to carry him through. When the going got rough he would dive below the surface and stay there until he was forced to come up for breath.
“When I strike the Whirlpool, I will strike out with all my strength and try to keep away from the suck hole in the centre.… My life will depend upon my muscles and my breath, with a little touch of science behind them.”
Webb expected that it would take up to three hours to free himself from the quarter-mile-long Whirlpool. He would then try to land on the Canadian side but if that proved impossible would let the river carry him down to Lewiston.
Nobody believed he could or would do it. Certainly he seemed to understand the seriousness of what he was proposing. Two journalists who interviewed him on July 24, 1883, a few hours before his swim, remarked that “he appeared like a man entering upon an enterprise of the gravest possible concern to himself. The lines of the face were sternly drawn, an occasional drop of perspiration would gather on his brow, and his words, though appropriate and slowly spoken, had an earnestness that was almost solemn.”
At four that afternoon, Webb started down the Clifton House hill to the ferry landing, where the ferryman, John McCloy, was waiting for him in a small fishing scow. At 4:15, the watchers on the suspension bridge heard an announcement that the boat was in sight. At 4:20, Captain Webb was seen to stand up in the boat and dive into the river, swimming easily downstream with long, steady strokes. At 4:33, he passed under the bridge and entered the rapids. As he struck the furious wall of water he seemed to stand upright for an instant on top of the highest crest, then dove into the engulfing waves. Now he was lost to sight, but moments later he reappeared farther down the stream. Two or three times he was seen to ride the tops of the waves. Those on the bridge felt confident that he had got through. At 4:35, he reached the last of the rapids before entering the Whirlpool. He sank from sight and was never seen alive again.
Webb’s body was found four days later, between Lewiston and Youngstown. There was a three-inch gash in his head, which suggested at first that he had been knocked out and drowned. This was not the case. An autopsy revealed that a wave had struck him with such force that it had paralysed his nerve centres, weakened his muscles, and destroyed his respiration. Niagara, in short, rendered him helpless.
The Saturday Review of London called the whole affair “a common scandal … perhaps the most shocking example which has yet been given of the criminal folly developed by a vulgar love of shows and emotions” – a backhanded attack, perhaps, on the circus atmosphere that Olmsted, Norton, and the others were trying to eliminate.
And yet it required two more years of constant pressure and lobbying to get a final bill of appropriation through the New York State legislature. Again the politicians balked at the cost of buying the land, and the local press echoed their opinion. As the editor of the Poughkeepsie Eagle wrote, “we regard this Niagara Falls scheme as one of the most unnecessary and unjustifiable raids upon the State Treasury ever attempted.” When the bill was finally passed, Norton wrote enthusiastically to Olmsted: “I congratulate you, prime mover! I hail you as the Saviour of Niagara!”
Concerned at the apparent cost of expropriation – a cost that was highly exaggerated – the new commission kept the proposed reservation to 412 acres, of which 300 were under water. Nonetheless, all the sites from which the Falls were visible would eventually be on public property. The commission now had to deal with twenty-five property owners, some of whom had cared so little for the view of the cataract that they had screened it off with barns, outbuildings, and plantings of shrubbery. They began to ask extraordinary sums for their portion of the river front. The commission took a tough view of that: they “have no title to the rushing waters; they do not own the pillars of spray that rise from the foot of the cataract; … they do not even own the bed of the river … [these] are not subject to human proprietorship; they are the gift of God to the human race.”
The owners demanded a total of four million dollars; they got a little less than a million and a half. Of that sum, the Porters would receive $525,000 in compensation for Goat Island. Meanwhile, fences would have to be torn down, gatehouses closed, signs removed, and some hundred and fifty structures demolished. Ponds would have to be drained, banks graded, trees replanted, old roads repaired and new ones built, and viewpoints opened up. Much of the work was delayed by disputes and appeals. Some of it was still being carried out at the century’s end. But the reservation became a reality when it was dedicated sixteen years after Olmsted and his friends had taken that first ramble on Goat Island. In the words of Charles Dow, who became commissioner of the reservation in 1898, “it is doubtful whether any measure ever aroused an equal number of public men in all fields of endeavor.”
An entirely new principle was evoked in the establishment of the Niagara reservation. This was the first time in history that a state of the Union had used public money to expropriate property for purely esthetic purposes. It was without precedent in the United States, which explains the difficulties encountered by the preservationists. It seems obvious in hindsight; it seemed radical – even insane – at the time.
The preservationists had been careful about nomenclature. This was a “reservation,” not a “park” – for park connoted geometrical flower beds, cast-iron benches, statuary, and trimmed grass. What Olmsted and the others had always wanted was an approximation as close as possible to the original environment.
At midnight on July 15, 1885, the gates were thrown open to the public. The last quarters had just been collected at Prospect Point. Goat Island remained open all night. Unprecedented crowds swarmed over the islands, crowded the walls that fringed the cliffside, clambered down to the foot of the cataract, and picnicked on the greensward.
Everything was free. The New York Times reported that many who had lived all their lives within twenty miles of the Falls were now seeing them for the first time. Thirty thousand strangers poured into the villages of Niagara Falls and Suspension Bridge, where the hurdy-gurdy shows that had sprung up beyond the limits of the new reservation did a brisk business.
That afternoon, President Dorsheimer formally presented the reservation to the state of New York. “From this hour,” he said, “Niagara is free.” And so, in a very real sense, it was.
5
Casimir Gzowski to the rescue
Canada was two years behind the United States. In 1880, Oliver Mowat, having refused a federal offer to split the cost of establishing a national park, began to toy with the idea of encouraging a private corporation to take on the task. At that, a number of prominent businessmen, politicians, and speculators jumped joyfully into the fray, solemnly avowing their intention of preserving and beautifying the Falls, while foreseeing a harvest in fees.
The moving spirit was William Oliver Buchanan, a one-time bridge engineer and failed real-estate specula
tor who saw the private park scheme as a method of warding off personal bankruptcy. Although Buchanan wrote enthusiastically about restoring the Falls’ “pristine beauty” and placing “proper restrictions against abuses” while “avoiding as much as possible the artistic and artificial,” what he really wanted was the right to build a toll road at the water’s edge from the Falls to the Whirlpool, staircases to the top of the gorge, picnic and games grounds, together with hotels and refreshment booths. His Niagara Falls Reclamation Company foundered when Mowat refused, on principle, to guarantee its bonds.
Nonetheless, Buchanan got a letter of conditional encouragement from the premier and tried again, this time with the help of one of the country’s most powerful politicians, the prime minister’s friend Sir Alexander Campbell, who had headed the original federal commission. Their Niagara Falls Restoration and Improvement Company again failed to get legislative support and for the same reason: they hadn’t been able to raise the money. But that did not stop them from trying again. Undeterred, Buchanan secured the active support of both Campbell and Nicol Kingsmill, a canny Toronto lawyer who was a counsel for the Michigan Central Railroad.
Meanwhile, in the summer of 1883, an English syndicate entered the lists with the dubious assistance of Saul Davis, who hoped to sell his property at a profit. The Niagara Falls Hotel, Park, and Museum Company would, so Davis claimed, “beautify, improve, and establish a system of business that will be a credit to the place” – strange words coming from the man who had almost single-handedly brought the greatest discredit to the Falls. Mowat didn’t even bother to respond and the proposal died.
Buchanan, Campbell, and Kingsmill were back in 1883 with a new prospectus for their restoration company. They wanted to expropriate a three-mile strip along the river, 159 acres in size. Again the object was clothed in high-minded phrases, “demanding the removal of the prevailing disfigurements and extortions which have brought the beautiful neighbourhood into world wide disrepute.”
These entrepreneurs were really after a franchise to build a miniature electric railway along the Niagara River itself from the Horseshoe Falls to the Whirlpool and a street railway on the bank above. They would also operate an elevator, a steamboat service, restaurants, kiosks, and playgrounds. But it was the railways that would bring in the profit. For the railway era was in full swing in Canada, and both Buchanan and Kingsmill were railway men. The new Pacific railway was already snaking across the western plains, following an orgy of railway building that had changed the face of eastern Canada over the previous quarter-century.
The phrase “conflict of interest” was all but unknown in Canada during the railway era. Railway men, politicians, and promoters were linked together in a loose partnership that crossed party lines. Campbell was a leading Tory, but several of his political opponents were members of Buchanan’s syndicate. That was unremarkable. Thomas Keefer, himself a railway engineer (his half-brother, Samuel, had built one of Niagara’s suspension bridges), had once said that when the Speaker’s bell rang for a division in the Ontario legislature, the majority of members were to be found in the apartments of an influential railway contractor, where the champagne flowed like sarsaparilla.
By the late fall of 1884, when Campbell and Kingsmill presented their plan to an enthusiastic Cabinet, it looked as if it were an accomplished fact. But then, in February 1885, a rival railway syndicate elbowed its way in. The Niagara Falls Railway Company wanted a franchise to build a double-track line from the Falls to Queenston to link up with the Canada Southern Railway. There would be the usual hotels and restaurants, but the railway was the key. Moreover, two of Mowat’s most powerful backbench supporters were behind the scheme, perfectly confident that the premier would abandon the rival plan to which he had just lent his approval.
Mowat was in a dilemma. Another proponent of the new railway scheme was the notorious James T. Brundage, an American who operated a nine-acre park at the Whirlpool and controlled an army of hack drivers at the Falls. Having finally quelled the bitter Davis-Barnett feud, the province scarcely needed a new one, but Mowat could not alienate his own political backers.
The ratepayers of Niagara Falls, Ontario (the name “Clifton” had been officially discarded in 1881), along with those of neighbouring municipalities came to his rescue. Up in arms over the railway proposal, they mounted a mass meeting that denounced, in the words of the local council, a plan that would “hand visitors from every clime over to the tender mercies of a well-protected and poorly guarded monopoly.” Besieged by politicians and business cronies on both sides, Mowat wriggled out of a final decision by pushing through a new Act for the Preservation of the Natural Scenery about Niagara Falls. The concept of a publicly owned park was far from his mind; the premier was still thinking in terms of private enterprise. A commission of three would select the land for the park, assess the cost, and then choose a private firm to expropriate and operate it under government direction.
The chairman of the commission, another railway man who had the ear of the government, was to be the remarkable Polish émigré Colonel Casimir Stanislaus Gzowski. A commanding figure at seventy-two with a leonine shock of white hair and a vast moustache to match, Gzowski had made a fortune as a railway engineer, contractor, and promoter. He moved in the highest circles, was an honorary aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria, and resided in a handsome Italianate villa known as the Hill, surrounded by a six-acre deer park, on Toronto’s Bathurst Street.
He had earned a right to the luxury and social position he enjoyed and the esteem that he certainly craved. At the age of twenty, unable to speak English, he had been dumped penniless on the shores of the United States after two years in an Austrian internment camp. From that unlikely beginning he had managed to fulfil the North American dream – the struggling immigrant with the romantic past who tugs stubbornly on his bootstraps and climbs ever higher.
Gzowski’s father was born into the minor Polish nobility and, after Poland was partitioned, became a career officer in the Russian imperial guard. He found an engineering post for his seventeen-year-old son with the Imperial Corps of Engineers. But young Casimir was also a Polish patriot who chose to oppose Russia when his people rebelled in 1830. Wounded, and imprisoned for a time in Austria, he was finally shipped off to America.
He taught music, fencing, and languages to support himself but with his engineering experience in Russia soon found himself working on canals and bridges. Sent to Canada to secure a contract on the Weiland Canal, he got a better job through his father’s European connection with the new Governor General, Sir Charles Bagot. His rise was extraordinary. When he formed his own contracting firm, his partners were some of the best-known politicians and railway men in the country.
A patron of the arts, a subscriber to worthy causes, a senator of the University of Toronto, he was now above the political hurly-burly. To Oliver Mowat, the partisan Liberal, Gzowski, a prominent Tory, was the perfect choice to head the new commission and extricate him from the dilemma caused by the two rival railway syndicates.
When the Gzowski Commission presented its first report on September 1, 1885, its recommendations were unexpected and, without doubt, unpalatable to the premier. Gzowski totally rejected the idea of a privately run park and opted for a government reserve of 118 acres, to be open to the public free of charge. No hotels, refreshment booths, or other places of business would be allowed to operate within its boundaries. All but three of the current buildings would be torn down. The road along the cliff was to be moved back and the ground within the park limits to “be laid out and planted, not as a showy garden or fancy grounds, but as nearly as possible as they would be in their natural condition.” In short, Gzowski’s recommendations were very similar to those made by the Americans.
Premier Mowat had not expected this. For six months he shilly-shallied until Gzowski’s commission produced a second and final report warning that any further delay would cause “general regret and disappointment.” The park would cost half a
million dollars, but the report made it clear that the taxpayers wouldn’t have to put up a cent. Admission would be free, but the park would be able to pay for itself by small fees – no more than thirty cents a person – from those who wished to hire guides.
Because of the influx of visitors, the commission was certain that the park would quickly free itself of bonded debt. The annual count of arrivals had already jumped from 118,000 in 1882 to 303,400 in the first nine months of 1885, thanks to the opening of the free reservation across the river. Government ownership, then, was “the only policy worthy of being adopted.”
Mowat was forced at last into a reluctant decision. In March 1887, the Queen Victoria Niagara Falls Parks Act was passed, and the province of Ontario had its first publicly owned park, to be operated by Casimir Gzowski and his fellow commissioners as trustees for the government. On Queen Victoria’s birthday on May 24, 1888, the park was opened to the public, who streamed through the handsome gate, named, not without irony, for Oliver Mowat. A reporter for the Toronto Evening Telegram described what he saw during a press preview: “To the visitor who has not seen the Falls for four or five years, the change in the scene would be most striking. Here along the river bank but two short summers ago, stretching in a solid row of attached buildings, were established numerous fancy goods and relic bazaars, regular gulling establishments, where exorbitant prices were charged for insignificant articles to unsuspecting foreigners and other visitors who were bent on carrying away some memento of their trip to America’s greatest natural wonder. But the voice of the fakir is heard no more, the photographer has folded his tent and departed, the very storehouses, which held their wares, have vanished, and in their place, green in the garb of springtime, stretch the broad acres of the new park, tastefully laid off into walks and drives and planted at intervals with young trees, which will ere long shoot out their spreading foliage and afford a grateful shelter to the sweltering picnicker or tired tourist who can hardly satisfy himself that he has not yet seen enough of the rugged grandeur of this charming spot on which nature has lavished her chosen gifts.”
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