Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  There, in the ornate lobby, he was regaled with tales of derring-do in Niagara’s waters that fired his imagination. It must have seemed to him that the community was crowded with would-be heroes, intent on making a name for themselves by plunging into the rapids, or riding the crest of the waves in a barrel, or even tempting the cataract itself. For some of these, a single deed of daredeviltry was not enough; they had to keep topping their previous feats – or at least pretending to do so. That very month, two of the most famous stunters, Carlisle Graham and Steve Brodie, had faked plunges over the Horseshoe Falls.

  Everybody was talking about Graham’s fall from grace. A weedy cooper from Philadelphia, he had, since 1886, made four successful trips in his own barrel through the same Whirlpool Rapids that had once doomed Captain Webb, the channel swimmer. They called Graham the Hero of Niagara, a title he felt he had to live up to. In late August, after testing the cataract with an empty barrel, he announced that he would go over himself. On September 1, he claimed to have done just that – a feat no human being had ever accomplished. Graham was quickly exposed as a fraud, and when Brodie, the man who claimed to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, made a similar boast a few days later, his flimsy tale was easily disposed of and he left town hurriedly.

  Then, a few days before Midleigh checked in at the Clifton House, a twenty-year-old youth from Youngstown, New York, performed a genuine feat of daring that outdid all of Graham’s heroics. Walter G. Campbell decided to take a borrowed rowboat through the Whirlpool Rapids and into the vortex itself. The year before, a Syracuse undertaker, Robert William Flack, had been battered to death while attempting the same feat in his specially built boat, the Phantom. Although Campbell was hurled from his craft by a monstrous wave, he managed to swim the rest of the way, right through the white water that had killed Captain Webb and into the Whirlpool itself. He made it to safety at the upper end on the Canadian side and emerged, exhausted but game. “Tell the people that I have accomplished the greatest feat on record,” he said as he reached shore. “OUR OWN, OUR NOBLE HERO,” the Suspension Bridge Journal’s headline called him.

  None of this was lost on Arthur Midleigh, who had come to America seeking adventure, had failed to find it, and now saw it staring him in the face on the lip of the Niagara gorge.

  Midleigh was determined to accomplish some exploit that no one else had attempted. When he learned that nobody had dared to row from shore to shore in the rapids above the Falls, he knew he had found what he was seeking – something to brag about when he returned to England. His trip to North America would not be a dead loss after all.

  He had hired a guide to take him around the area – a young man from St. Catharines named Alonzo Gardner, who earned a slim livelihood steering visitors to hotels or showing them the best vantage points from which to view the Falls. Gardner had brought his new wife, Suzanne, a sloe-eyed French-Canadian girl, with him to Niagara. Now, with the tourist season over, the newlyweds faced a long and unprofitable winter.

  Midleigh and Gardner stood on the edge of the upper rapids and surveyed the spectacle below – the shallow, frenzied river coursing over the ledges of shale and swirling around the submerged rocks whose coarse snouts, erupting from the foam, hinted at the dangers below.

  Midleigh was not fazed by the speed of the current. Why, he boasted to Gardner, he had held his own in a punt in a stream running twice as fast. Like many upper-class Englishmen, he was proud of his athletic abilities. “If I can find a fellow with a decent amount of skill in rowing, I am going to cross,” he said, for he knew he would need two men on the oars.

  Gardner did his best to dissuade him, but Midleigh paid no attention. Soon word got around that another adventure seeker was planning a daring escapade, and Midleigh began to be approached by well-wishers on the street and in the Clifton House.

  He suggested that Gardner join him in the venture, but the new husband had no intention of risking his life. When Midleigh offered fifty pounds to anyone who would help him row across the river, several volunteers appeared, but Midleigh preferred his guide.

  “Now, Gardner,” he said, “you need the money. I’d vastly rather have you, and I’ll make it up to you, mind you, a hundred pounds if you’ll say the word.”

  This was a tempting offer. Gardner talked it over with his black-haired wife, who had no real idea of the dangers involved. In 1889, a hundred pounds – five hundred Canadian dollars – represented a small fortune. With that they could buy a house in St. Catharines. Suzanne told her husband to do what he saw fit. So, reluctantly, he accepted Midleigh’s offer.

  In spite of the lateness of the season, crowds turned up on both sides of the river when the pair appeared, ready to set off from the American shore. Gardner gave his trembling wife one last kiss; then they pushed off in their frail craft to the cheers of the onlookers, a British Ensign fluttering from the bow, a Stars and Stripes at the stern.

  When they set off they were about 700 yards upstream from Goat Island. Midleigh figured that the boat would be swept downriver about a quarter of a mile during the crossing. That would allow them to land safely on the Canadian side about 250 yards upstream from the crest of the Horseshoe.

  He had not reckoned accurately the speed of the current, which increased as they reached the middle of the rapids on the American side. Now Midleigh realized that no tide he had ever experienced had come close to the fury of the deceptive river. He tried to retreat to the American shore, then changed his mind. The crowd was shouting to him to make for Goat Island. Gardner pointed to it. Midleigh tried to turn the boat about, and at first it looked as if he might make it.

  On the American shore, Suzanne had fainted. The crowd, seeing the boat turn into the tip of the island, cried out that the pair was safe. When she recovered, she uttered a prayer of thanks.

  What the onlookers could not see was that as the boat turned toward the island, it was being driven into the overpowering current on the Canadian side. Its tired occupants could no longer control it. As it surged toward the cataract, it struck a protruding rock. Midleigh and Gardner leaped out onto the rock while their craft, partially filled with water, lurched into the current and was swept over the cataract.

  Their plight was not immediately apparent to the crowd on the American shore, for it was masked by Goat Island. But it was not long before Suzanne Gardner learned that her husband and the Englishman were marooned on a rock sixty feet from the island and some 250 feet from the brink of the Falls.

  It was impossible to shout to the pair, for the roar of the Falls drowned out all other sounds. Nobody seemed to know what to do, and as darkness fell and lights were brought out, the watchers on Goat Island decided to wait until morning.

  At first light somebody suggested that a stick of wood might easily follow the same course as the boat. Some of the onlookers tied a cord to a pine board and sent it into the current from the island’s upper tip. To their relief, it followed the same course. Midleigh and Gardner waved back to show they’d retrieved it.

  Now the would-be rescuers had a method of communication. They hauled the board back and sent it out again with some food and a message: “Be of good cheer. We will bring a boat over and fasten it to a hawser.” By the time a boat could be found, however, darkness had again fallen. All rescue attempts were abandoned until the following morning. All night long Suzanne Gardner waited on the Goat Island shore, never taking her eyes off the stranded pair.

  The next morning the banks of the river were black with spectators. More food went out, and the two men devoured it gratefully. Now a rescue boat was also sent out, unoccupied, for no one would risk the trip. It too followed the current directly to the rock. But as the two men prepared to leap into it, the hawser tightened; the craft was dashed against the rock and broke into pieces.

  The rescue party of volunteers decided on a different solution. Instead of a boat, they would send out a piece of heavy timber. “Cling to that, one at a time,” the note said, “and we will take you off.
”

  It took some time to find a suitably stout beam, and it took more time to fasten the hawser in such a way that it would not slip off. Indeed, the entire rescue operation seems to have proceeded at a glacial pace. Finally, one end of the hawser was fastened to the bank, and the makeshift life raft was dispatched.

  Once again the current took the piece of wood out to the rock. Midleigh and Gardner shook hands, and then Midleigh jumped into the water and clutched at the timber so forcefully that it rolled out of his grasp. It quickly righted itself, but Midleigh was gone. For an instant his head was spotted above the angry water farther down the river. Then he vanished as the crowd on the shore groaned. Gardner dropped to his knees in prayer. Suzanne, her mind deranged by her vain and sleepless vigil, was taken off to hospital.

  Another night passed with Alonzo Gardner alone on the rock, his predicament now the subject of intense excitement, curiosity, and pity. With the news of Midleigh’s death, the railroads added excursion trains. By ten the next morning, some twenty thousand people were on hand to watch the drama unfold.

  In order to prevent a second disaster, the rescue party decided to send out a harness made from belts and straps taken from a hotel fire escape. These were floated out to the exhausted guide, together with a hook with which to fasten the makeshift harness to the timber. An accompanying note told him that his parents had arrived, and Gardner, who had been searching the crowd vainly for Suzanne, recognized them and waved. At that, his mother dropped to her knees while his father wept and groaned aloud. Members of the crowd closest to the pair began to sob in sympathy.

  Gardner retrieved the harness and put it on carefully. With the hook in his right hand he propped himself up with his left, crouching as the beam swirled toward him, prepared to spring onto it as soon as it reached his perch. He let the timber pass by, intending to slip the hook over the rope at its head. Just as he tried to do so, the hawser tightened and the timber began to leap and twist in the rapids, like a fish on a line.

  Before Gardner could hook onto the rope, the timber had gone too far. Fifty men tried to haul it back upstream while it cavorted like a thing bewitched, lashing first the water and then the rock. Then, as a howl of anguish rose from the shore, the timber struck Gardner and knocked him off the rock and into the rapids.

  His head could be seen briefly rising above the water, then submerging again. At the brink of the chasm the upper half of his body rose for an instant with the arms uplifted. Then he was gone.

  His body and Midleigh’s were found two days later farther down the gorge.

  There is an eerily Victorian postscript to this unhappy tale, almost too melodramatic to be true. But it was reported that Suzanne Gardner, her mind unhinged by the experience, escaped twice from the institution in which she was held and was found each time standing on Tower Rock overlooking the rapids, gazing into the mists of the waters that had engulfed her bridegroom.

  2

  The ice bridge

  The urge to win attention by performing some audacious feat was not confined to upper-class Englishmen with time on their hands, such as the unfortunate Arthur Midleigh. At Niagara Falls it was almost endemic, especially in the summer, when the Whirlpool’s challenge seemed too much to resist, but also on those chill winter days when the odd phenomenon known as the ice bridge formed in the waters below the cataract. There were certain years when the ice stretched from shore to shore in a wild, rumpled mass. When the bridge was pronounced solid – when all the small chunks of ice hurled over the Falls had congealed into a craggy expanse of hummocks and clefts – men and women risked their lives in a race to be the first to cross. Watchers overhead on the newly completed Upper Steel Arch Bridge would gather by the thousands to follow these wild scrambles, whose winners achieved sweet celebrity for at least five minutes.

  Ice bridges did not form every year: a special set of circumstances was required. The great ice bridge of 1899 was the most massive in human memory, and the longest lasting. It formed and reformed over a two-month period, appearing first on January 9, breaking up on the eleventh, reforming again on the sixteenth, breaking up again on the twenty-second, and then reforming for a record stay.

  The winter of 1899 was particularly cold; for days the thermometer stayed below zero. Shifting winds blew clouds of spray over the rocks, trees, and shrubs until they seemed to be sheathed in alabaster. Weeks of freezing weather had caused large sheets of ice to form on the surface of Lake Erie. A thaw followed, and as the ice began to rot, a high wind from the west sprang up, breaking the ice into fragments. These chunks were swept into the entrance of the Niagara River, where the current bore them downstream. At the same time, more ice formed on the reefs and bars, narrowing the river’s channel.

  Trainloads of spectators lined the banks to watch the awesome spectacle of a river of ice racing relentlessly toward the Falls. As it was forced among the rocks of the upper rapids, it broke into smaller, uneven pieces, and these were hurled over the brink hour after hour in a mighty frozen cascade.

  Great jagged blocks of ice squeezed through this narrow gap and with such force that their edges were worn as smooth as if sliced by a monstrous knife. At first the water foaming out of the Niagara Falls Power Company’s tunnel farther downstream broke up the mass. Then, as the weather grew colder and more ice piled up, all the blocks were wedged together into a solid ice bridge, “as pretty as any that graced the gorge.” Out onto this craggy expanse, where the hummocks rose as high as thirty feet and fissures radiated off in every direction, Harry Applegate ventured on the morning January 10. He was the first of several to make his way from the American shore to the Canadian and to get his name in next day’s newspapers.

  Over the next ten days the ice bridge twice broke up and reformed. In spite of the obvious dangers, several more people succeeded in making the crossing and gaining a few moments of fame. By January 20, seasoned veterans of earlier ice bridges declared this one safe, and small groups of thrill seekers headed out over the treacherous surface.

  The river below the Falls was fifteen hundred feet across and almost two hundred feet deep. Just behind was the full force of the cataract. Yet so strong was this frozen bridge that hundreds were able to cross from shore to shore. Even horses had occasionally made the trip on ice bridges formed in previous years. Those who crossed took its measure before venturing out onto the broken expanse, noting the fissures and crevasses to be avoided and the great hummocks to be climbed or circumvented. Although they realized that the longer they remained on the ice, the greater was the danger, they were often forced to take a roundabout course to achieve their goal. Sooner or later, they knew, the unwieldy mass would move again. The route was uneven. The hummocks denied any sure footing. People stumbled, never knowing where the tumble might take them. At times the route ran up the slippery slopes of a great mound, at others down between the walls of a deep crevasse.

  With the winter season at its height, thousands crowded into the two Niagara communities to witness the spectacle. The first shanty appeared on the ice on January 20, and others soon followed. If the ice held there would be curio shops, Indian tepees, photographers’ shacks, makeshift saloons, and even buildings identified as “hotels.” Since this was an international no-man’s-land, liquor could be dispensed freely, if not cheaply.

  Old-timers who remembered previous ice bridges looked forward to the informal winter carnival – the crowds on the ice, singing and laughing, paying top prices for coffee and sandwiches, the cliffs echoing with their shouts. Men planted flags on hillocks to record that they’d been the first to clamber to the top. Others explored crevasses to estimate the thickness of the ice. Some of these were thirty to forty feet deep, suggesting that the ice itself, most of which was submerged, was more than one hundred feet thick.

  On Sunday, January 22, a young travelling salesman from Buffalo, Charles Misner, headed off for Niagara Falls with his friend Bessie Hall of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a student at Slocum’s School of Shorthand in B
uffalo. Misner was eager to cross the ice bridge but Miss Hall hung back. Indeed, the sight was fearsome. High winds in Erie had again broken up the huge floes that covered the lake, driving them down the Niagara and over the Falls, damming the lower gorge and causing the water to rise. Squeezed by the pressure of the water, the ice had formed into towering hummocks in the centre of the river. It took all of Misner’s powers of persuasion to convince his pretty companion that the ice bridge was safe.

  It wasn’t. Even the great Upper Steel Arch Bridge, built the previous summer (known later as the Falls View or Honeymoon Bridge) – the greatest metal arch in the world – was threatened. The ice piled up against the supporting pillars to a height of eighty feet, crashing into the steel work and rending the metal. Already gangs of men were preparing to blast the frozen monster away with dynamite.

  Misner and his companion picked their way gingerly over the ice. Two hundred yards out from the Maid of the Mist landing, they found a boulder of ice and sat down to enjoy the scenery. Half an hour passed. Misner noticed that many of the others on the ice had returned to shore. But he felt perfectly safe, and when Miss Hall remarked that she could hear a singing noise under her feet, he told her it was only her imagination.

  At last, feeling that they had seen all that could be seen, they started back toward the American shore. They had not gone far when, by gestures, a crowd on the bank indicated that they could not reach the boat dock: the ice had broken away from the shore, leaving a stretch of water too wide to cross. To get to land, they would have to work their way down to the Steel Arch Bridge.

  Misner now felt the first stirrings of disquiet. He said nothing to his companion, who was herself showing alarm. The farther they went, the more anxious they grew. A crowd had gathered on the banks and on the bridge above. The couple began to hear sounds as of something falling.

  They were now hurrying as fast as possible. Ahead lay a large fissure in the ice, three feet across. Misner tried to bridge it by filling it with chunks of ice in order to help Miss Hall over. He could see black water a hundred feet below and knew that one unsure step would mean death for both. He prepared himself to jump across the gap when he heard a loud report like that of a cannon, followed by grinding and crashing. The great ice bridge had torn loose from its foundations and was starting to move downstream toward the Whirlpool. It was 4:10 p.m.