Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  Beck had exceeded his estimates in another way. Instead of producing the original 100,000 horsepower that he had forecast to Whitney in 1914, or the 300,000 horsepower agreed to in 1917, the new plant would produce 550,000 horsepower.

  Beck tried to stall Drury off as he had successfully obstructed his predecessors. In October 1921, the premier and his cabinet met with the Hydro chairman to get some explanation of the soaring expenses. Beck promised he’d have it in a week. But two months went by with Beck pleading pressure of business. He finally replied with feeble excuses, blaming “conditions which could not have been foreseen” and “results which could not have been anticipated.”

  It was time for that old Canadian standby – a royal commission that would head off a politically embarrassing confrontation between the tough-minded Drury and the resolute Beck. Thus, when the big project finally opened with much fanfare on December 29, 1921, “a pall seemed to hang overhead,” in the words of W.R. Plewman, who was there.

  The royal commission, under the chairmanship of W.R. Gregory, produced its report in March 1924, and it was devastating. It came down very hard on the Hydro chairman, who, it said bluntly, “has shown an absolute lack of frankness.” He had recognized no obligation to keep the government informed about costs or expenditures. His estimates had been “inadequate or unsound” and it was clear that he knew it. He had often “been arbitrary and inconsiderate in his dealings with his colleagues and with the government.”

  “It seems inconceivable that the Commission should have regarded cost so lightly and that the financing of this great work could have been carried on by it in such a loose way,” the report said. No government, it declared, “should accept with confidence estimates prepared by a promoter of a scheme.” Beck had hoodwinked a successions of premiers, but the premiers themselves were also to blame. They had let Hydro become a law unto itself. The Ontario government, dazzled by Beck’s charisma, had never kept in touch with the work through an independent representative. Beck got money “almost for the asking” not only from the government “but by diverting millions which it [Hydro] held in trust for other purposes.”

  The Gregory Commission could not, however, ignore the “inestimable” value to the province of the Queenston-Chippawa plant, no matter what the cost. Some other figures turned out to be wrong – but on the right side. The canal, designed to carry 15,000 cubic feet of water a second, was capable of 18,000, and perhaps more. Beck had planned to develop 500,000 horsepower, but the plant, which had an efficiency of 90 percent, was capable of developing 550,000. That indicated “a fineness of design seldom, if ever, attained in a work of this character. It is, in short, a magnificent piece of engineering.”

  That would serve as Beck’s epitaph. By finagling and dissembling, by vague promises and outright lies, the bull headed Hydro chairman had got his way. Would his dream have come true if the government had known early in the game what the final cost would be? Sir Adam Beck clearly didn’t think so. He died in 1925, his name linked forever with the campaign for public power in Canada. When the Tennessee Valley Authority was brought into being in 1933, Ontario Hydro served as a model. Franklin Roosevelt, when he was governor of New York, had been a close student of Beck’s project.

  There were other monuments in addition to the one on University Avenue, Toronto. In 1950, Beck’s enormous power-plant was renamed Sir Adam Beck Generating Station No. 1. Two more stations would follow, also carrying Beck’s name. History may not have forgotten the autocrat’s financial legerdemain, but the public has long since forgiven him his flaws. He got the job done, and that, in the long run, is all that seems to matter.

  Chapter Ten

  1

  The riverman’s return

  2

  The Richest Man in Canada

  3

  The end of the Honeymoon

  4

  Young Red’s last ride

  1

  The riverman’s return

  Red Hill came back from the Great War at the beginning of August, 1918, some said to die. A sniper with the 75th Battalion – the “Jolly 75th” as it was known – he had been wounded twice. Worse, his lungs had been permanently damaged in the abortive gas attack on March 1, 1917, a few weeks before the battle of Vimy Ridge. When the wind blew the Canadians’ gas back into their own lines, causing fearful havoc, Hill was one of the victims. The army doctors finally sent him home to recuperate. “I just hope it’s not too damp where you live,” one told him, ignorant of Niagara’s incessant spray. There were those who thought he would be dead before the year was out.

  He was scarcely home before something happened to restore his spirits and spur his recovery. It was a call for help, and it won him his third life-saving medal.

  On August 6, a huge steel sand scow, used for dredging the hydraulic canal on the American side of the river above the Falls, broke loose from its tugboat and drifted with increasing speed toward the crest of the Horseshoe. Two deckhands were aboard – Gustav Lofberg, a fifty-one-year-old unmarried Swedish seaman, and James A. Harris of Buffalo, a fifty-three-year-old father of five. As the scow hurtled down the rapids, the two men struggled to open the hatches. “We’re going over! We’re lost!” Harris cried. Fortunately, they managed to get the hatches open, water poured in, and the scow settled until it scraped the ledges of rock just above the brink of the cataract. There, as crowds gathered, it caught and teetered precariously. Bystanders rushed to telephones to call the fire departments of both towns and the life-saving station at Youngstown, New York.

  It was crucial to get a line aboard, and the men on the scow knew it; they began tearing away timbers to build a crude windlass. Firemen sped to the shore with a small life-saving gun, which sent a five-hundred-foot length of rope arching toward the marooned craft. It fell short. They tried again, but the second line also splashed into the water.

  Within half an hour an army truck arrived from Youngstown with a larger gun, which was placed on the roof of the Toronto Power Company’s generating plant below the bank, about 750 feet from the scow. This time the light line reached the scow and was caught by one of the men. A heavier rope was paid out, and then a breeches-buoy was winched across. As it sank into the water under its own weight, the two men struggled with their improvised windlass.

  Then the buoy itself – a sling big enough to carry one man – got caught in the current about halfway to the scow and twisted around the rope until the line was hopelessly fouled. By then it was two o’clock in the morning. A call went out for a volunteer to untangle the lines. Red Hill shouldered his way through the crowd and stepped forward.

  As the watchers on shore held their breath, Hill hauled himself out to the sling, hand over hand, in the glow of powerful searchlights. Hanging by his legs, he tried to untangle the lines, but it was too dark to see properly. He made his way back to the roof of the powerplant, where a large sign, illuminated by the lights, told the marooned men: “WAIT UNTIL DAYLIGHT.”

  At dawn, Hill ventured out again. All five power companies on both sides of the river had used their turbines to keep the water level as low as possible. Hill, floundering in the water on the sagging cable, was close enough to the scow to hear Lofberg, who had once survived a hurricane at sea, tell Harris, “It’s out of our hands. Don’t worry. We only got to die once.”

  At last, Hill managed to untangle the lines, and the buoy reached the scow. The men were hauled to shore one at a time in the basket. Harris went first. “You go ahead, Jim,” said Lofberg. “I’ll stay behind and man the ropes because I know how to handle them better than you.” After he hauled himself to shore, Lofberg, who had never lost his nerve, asked for a plug of chewing tobacco and announced that he was going to go as far back on land as possible and lash himself to a tree. “Then I’ll know I’m safe,” he said. The scow resisted all efforts to dislodge it from the rocks and can be seen to this day, a battered hulk lashed by spray, not far from the old Toronto Power station.

  Red Hill went back to his
old ways, doing odd jobs, bootlegging, plucking corpses from the river for a small fee, and restlessly roaming the lip of the gorge, examining the currents and passing on the Hill tradition and his own knowledge of the river to his eldest son, William “Red,” Jr. The boy promised he would devote his life to the river. “The river will keep you poor,” the father told all his boys, “but in return it will give you a reward greater than money. I can’t put it into words.”

  Drinking beer with old army buddies in the Canadian Corps Association headquarters, Red Hill would often dream up bizarre schemes for making money. At one point he planned a gigantic sweepstakes in which one hundred barrels of different colours would engage in a race over the cataract. None of these projects ever materialized.

  He became known as the guardian of the Niagara. The press called him the Wizard of the River and the Master Hero of Niagara Falls, but he wanted only one title, “riverman,” and he asked that they use it. His phone number, 717, became well known to police and firemen who got into the habit of calling it when a body had to be recovered or a stranded tourist rescued.

  The Niagara was a cruel river. Its sharp rocks battered corpses and stripped them of their clothing. Hill once dragged a body to shore by its necktie – the only article of apparel left. Often the bodies had to be retrieved from difficult places: the bottom of the gorge at the Whirlpool was one. Hill would haul the remains to shore and lash the corpse to Dead Man’s Tree, which had fallen halfway into the water. Then, with the body wrapped in burlap and tied to a pole, he’d carry it four hundred feet up the wall of the gorge, an exertion that could take four hours.

  In July 1920, Hill was hired by a fifty-eight-year-old barber from Bristol, Charles G. Stephens, to help him attempt to rival Annie Taylor and Bobby Leach by tumbling over the Horseshoe in a barrel. The “demon barber,” as the press dubbed him, was no stranger to close calls. After a serious illness at the age of five, he had been given up for dead and was actually placed in a coffin. Before the lid was closed and the death certificate was signed, the doctor decided to make a final examination. He was more than a little taken aback when the small corpse suddenly looked up at him with his eyes very much alive. By the time he reached his teens, Stephens was robust enough to work for a time in Welsh coal mines.

  Later he became a barber, but barbering was too dull for him. And so he proceeded to indulge in a series of stunts on the British music-hall circuit. Crack marksmen shot sugar cubes off his head; knife throwers split apples fastened to his neck. He made a performance of entering lions’ cages, first to kiss one of the beasts, then to thrust his head into a lion’s mouth, and finally to shave one of his customers in the cage while the animals looked on. Now, having successfully leaped off the Firth of Forth bridge, he decided to take on the Falls.

  A mild-looking man, tall and slight, with a bushy moustache and greying hair, he ignored the pleas of his wife, Annie, and their eleven children to give up the scheme. He was in it for the money, he admitted. Once he had conquered the cataract he could take his barrel back to the music halls and show a motion picture of his feat. He had already hired a camera crew to produce the film.

  Stephens’s barrel weighed six hundred pounds and was built of two-inch-thick Russian oak held together by steel hoops. It was padded with cushions of duck feathers made by Hill’s wife, Beatrice, and ballasted by an anvil. A harness would keep Stephens reasonably steady, and an oxygen tank and mask would keep him from suffocating.

  There is some argument as to whether Hill tried to dissuade Stephens or encouraged him. Certainly he helped him launch the barrel. Bobby Leach was one who expressed serious doubts. He took one look at the contraption and announced that the Englishman would never survive the trip over the Falls. The barrel, he said, wasn’t sturdy enough – an assessment backed up by Richard Carter, captain of the Maid of the Mist.

  In order to circumvent the authorities, who were trying in a half-hearted way to prevent further barrel adventures, Stephens checked into a hotel in Hamilton under an assumed name. He spent the early morning reading his Bible, enjoyed a brief breakfast, and then set out for the Falls. He had written out two cables; the appropriate one would be sent to his wife when the adventure was over and included a message for his manager. The first read: “FEAT ACCOMPLISHED. TELL DAN,” the Other: “PROFESSOR STEPHENS LOST IN THE ATTEMPT.”

  At 8:30 on the morning of July 11, 1920, at Snyder’s Point, three miles above the Falls, Stephens prepared to enter the barrel, which had been painted with zebra stripes for easy identification. He took off his jacket and his red plush vest with its two rows of medals – some won in the Great War, others given for feats of daring – and handed them to Hill with four hundred pounds sterling for safekeeping.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be back to get it in a short time.”

  “Good luck, Charlie,” Hill said. “I’ll be waiting down below for you with a doctor and an undertaker.”

  As the barrel was towed out into the current, apparently a hoop snapped off. In spite of this, Hill cut the barrel loose, then raced back down the river bank to see it tumble over the Falls and vanish into the foam. By this time the word was out, and crowds were streaming down to both banks to witness the barrel’s recovery. They waited in vain. At noon all hopes had faded, for Stephens’s three-hour supply of oxygen would have been used up by then. Suddenly a black object appeared in the foam and drifted toward shore. “There he is!” somebody shouted. But it was only a broken stave. During the rest of the afternoon more fragments were washed ashore. Obviously, the river had reduced the barrel to kindling.

  All night long Hill and others searched for Stephens’s body. They found only an arm, torn off at the shoulder, still attached to the safety harness. It was identified by a tattoo showing two hands clasped around a floral garland with the inscription “Forget me not, Annie.” Stephens must have tied the ballasting anvil to his feet. When the bottom was torn out of the barrel by the force of the water, he had been wrenched from his harness and sucked into the maelstrom.

  Instead of scaring off future thrill seekers, Stephens’s tragedy seemed to stimulate them. Within a month authorities in both cities logged inquiries from nineteen people asking permission to ride a barrel over the Falls. No sensible civic father was going to give anybody permission to plunge over the Horseshoe in a barrel, or in anything else. On the other hand, the daredevils brought in business. The police made a show of banning any such performance, but the truth was that anybody who really wanted to pull it off could do so with only a modicum of secrecy.

  Jean Lussier, a thirty-five-year-old salesman, circus stunt-man, and racing-car driver from Springfield, Massachusetts, had no trouble evading the authorities when he decided to hurl himself over the brink in a rubber ball of his own invention. Eight feet in diameter, the ball consisted of a light steel framework covered with canvas and lined with thirty-two inner tubes inflated to a pressure of thirty-five pounds. A 150-pound weight would serve as ballast. After two Akron rubber companies had declined to build the contraption, Lussier eventually put it together himself in his garage.

  At two in the afternoon of July 4, 1928 – the biggest tourist day of the year – Lussier, wearing a blue-and-white bathing suit, took up a seated position in the ball. He secured himself in a harness, taped a small aperture shut, and was towed from the American shore into the middle of the stream.

  At 3:20 the big orange ball was cut loose. At 4:25 it plunged over the crest of the Horseshoe. As it went over, it bounced into the air like a child’s toy, tearing away the ballast so that Lussier found himself dropping head first into the waters below.

  As the ball bobbed down the river, Red Hill commandeered a rescue boat and strained at the oars to reach it before it was pummelled to destruction in the Whirlpool Rapids. Hill managed to tie a rope through one of the wire loops on the outer skin. Then he began an exhausting journey, fighting the current, toward the safety of the shore.

  It wasn’t easy. The ball weighed close
to nine hundred pounds because water continued to leak into it. Even if Lussier were saved from the rapids, he might easily drown as the level rose inside his odd craft. Heavy and unwieldy, the ball swung back and forth, forcing Hill to seesaw his way toward the bank. When at last he reached it, the ball had to be ripped open with knives. Lussier, badly bruised and bloody from gashes suffered in his dramatic dive, was slightly stunned from the impact but alive. The plunge, he said, was “like a big ski jump.” A vast mob surrounded him, cheering, laughing, and praising his pluck.

  Like so many others, Lussier expected to get rich from his adventure. He didn’t. He toured with his ball and for small fees displayed it at the Niagara Falls Museum, Thomas Barnett’s original enterprise. As a sideline he cut small pieces from the inner tubes and sold them to tourists at fifty cents apiece. His profits did not end when the inner tubes that had gone over the Falls were all chopped up. As he later remarked, “I must have cut up and sold 450 … when I’d run short I’d go over to the Falls garage and they’d give me any discarded tubes too badly patched for use.”

  Lussier became a fixture in Niagara Falls, New York, where he worked as a machinist, recounting his story to those who would listen and announcing, from time to time, new stunts. These included a projected plunge over the American Falls, something that had never been attempted because of the mountain of rocks at the base. It didn’t come off. Lussier died in 1971, forty-three years after his feat.

  In 1930, two years after Lussier’s plunge, Red Hill tried his best to persuade another daredevil to abandon his plans to attempt the journey over the Falls in a one-ton barrel. It is hard to believe that George Stathakis was entirely sane. A forty-six-year-old Greek short-order cook and a self-styled mystic and philosopher, Stathakis needed money with which to launch a literary career. He had written several philosophical texts in his native tongue and even paid to have one, The Mysterious Veil of Humanity through the Ages, translated into English. In this rambling, incoherent tract, Stathakis claimed to have lived for a thousand years, to have visited the North Pole, and to have seen Niagara Falls long before it had receded to its current site.