Niagara: A History of the Falls (17 page)

In reality, the chances of Blondin toppling off the rope were about a thousand to one. Previous funambulists had used the horizontal slack wire or had mounted a tightrope fastened diagonally from a height to an attachment tied to the ground. But Blondin had made the horizontal tightrope his own. To him, rope dancing was as natural as breathing.

He had been walking the tightrope since the age of five, when a travelling company of acrobats pitched their tent near the home of his father, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars. Watching a youth in a blue tunic and spangles performing on the slack rope, he determined to attempt a similar feat. He fastened a strong cord between two chairs but, when he tried to walk across, took a tumble that reduced him to tears. Undaunted, he got a stronger cord, stretched it between two gateposts, and using his father’s fishing rod as a balancing pole tried again and fell again, spraining a wrist. He did not give up, and when eventually he succeeded, his proud parents were far-sighted enough to enrol him in an acrobatic school at Lyon. Within six months he announced that he was prepared to make a professional debut and did so – hailed by the local press as “the little wonder.”

Orphaned at nine and on his own, he soon became famous as a rope dancer. No feat was too perilous for him to attempt. An ambitious perfectionist, he practised each new spectacle until he could perform it with his eyes closed. He was a prodigy without a rival – hard-muscled, impassive, utterly secure in his chosen profession.

In 1851, at the age of twenty-seven, he joined the Ravel troupe of French equestrian and acrobatic performers on their tour of North America. By this time there was no acrobatic performance at which he did not excel. He danced across a tightrope as easily as he strolled down a country lane. As his manager, Harry Colcord, discovered, no human force could detach him from it. Colcord tried, at Blondin’s suggestion: shoved, heaved, pushed, without success; his man stayed on the rope.

It was this that persuaded Colcord to climb on Blondin’s back during the fifth exhibition on August 17, and to hazard the long trip across the gorge. Colcord later described Blondin as “like a piece of marble, every muscle … tense and rigid.” He said (or perhaps was made to say) that the experience was so nerve shattering that for years afterward he would start up in the dark of the night, “shaking and sweating and screaming to Blondin to save him from Niagara.” One suspects here the fine hand of the journalist. If Colcord was so terrified, why did he agree to repeat the original feat – not once, but twice?

Both men were showmen. Like a trapeze artist who pretends to lose his balance, Blondin was forever toying with the crowd. There was the shocking tale of gamblers who, it was said, tried to fray one of the guys to cause his death, on which they had wagered considerable sums. Blondin eventually denied that story, though he waited until the headlines died. No one, apparently, asked how any man but he could have crawled out on that slender cable to the point where he could tamper with the rope.

The press was astonished when Captain John Travis, a crack pistol shot, was persuaded to attempt to put a hole through Blondin’s hat from the heaving deck of the
Maid of the Mist
. At Travis’s signal, Blondin, teetering on the rope, raised his hat and Travis fired. Blondin lowered the hat to the vessel’s deck, and the crowd gasped when they saw a neat hole in the brim. “What makes the feat more wonderful is the fact that the steamer’s motion in the rapids was very unsteady,” the gullible Niagara Falls
Gazette
remarked. What was really wonderful was that the paper swallowed the hoax whole. Travis, who thought up the stunt with Blondin’s cheerful collaboration, fired a blank. The funambulist punctured the hat himself and received a fee for his part in the fraud.

As the summer wore on Blondin continued to top himself at more than one “farewell” performance. He did handstands on the rope; he hung from it by a leg and an arm; he crossed blindfold in a heavy sack made of blankets; he lay down at full length with his balancing pole lashed to the rope; he performed a back somersault; he clung to the rope and hauled himself along it, hand over hand; dressed as a monkey, he pushed a wheelbarrow across; and he balanced on a chair above the roaring waters. When these feats palled, he crossed at night in the glare of locomotive headlights until he was lost to view in the gloom and only the vibrations of the rope told those on shore he was still aloft. He reached the opposite shore and then returned in a blaze of fireworks.

The crowds, wild with enthusiasm, continued to increase. On August 17, it was reported that forty thousand or more were on hand to watch him carry his manager on his back. Whatever the number, the press of the mob was enough to threaten his life. As the 140-pound Blondin toiled up the long incline carrying the 145-pound Colcord plus his 38-pound pole, Colcord saw on the far bank “a great sea of staring faces, fixed and intense with interest, alarm, fear. Some people shaded their eyes, as if yet dreading to see us fall; some held their arms extended as if to grasp us and keep us from falling; some excited men had tears streaming down their cheeks. A band was trying to play, but the wrought-up musicians could evoke only discordant notes.”

Colcord realized then that this was the most dangerous moment of the performance.

“Look out, Blondin,” Colcord said. “Here comes our danger, those people are likely to rush us on our landing and crowd us over the bank.”

“What will I do?” Blondin asked.

“Make a rush and drive right through them.”

Tired as he was, the rope dancer realized he had to push right through the surging throng. Calling on one last reserve of energy, Blondin followed his manager’s advice and was saved.

He knew that he must continue to outdo his previous performances. A week later, having crossed from the American side in shackles, he hoisted a small stove on his back, walked to the middle of the rope, produced kitchen utensils, condiments, and eggs, lit a fire, and proceeded to cook and fold two omelets, which he lowered on a cord to the
Maid of the Mist
.

The passengers who jammed the vessel were in a frenzy as they tried to seize pieces of the omelets. Some tied fragments in their handkerchiefs to keep as souvenirs. Others crammed the results of Blondin’s cooking into their mouths as if hoping that some of his mystique might cling to them. One is reminded of those aborigines who ate the hearts of their more heroic adversaries in the hope of gaining a modicum of their strength.

After his September 8 performance, in which he sat at a table balanced on the tightrope and enjoyed a light repast of champagne and cake, Blondin ended his Niagara season with the announcement that he would return the following year. By that time rope dancing would be the rage, and when spring came, the great funambulist would find himself locked in a contest with a younger but equally adroit rival who would match him feat for feat.

That in no way tarnished his fame or his immortality. More than a dozen daredevils would follow the Prince of Manila to Niagara to equal his performance. But Charles Blondin would always remain supreme. It is his name, and his alone, that springs to mind when somebody evokes the image of a man on a tightrope. Blondin carried the aura of Niagara with him all his life. And when he died, at the age of seventy-three, it was at his English home named, of course, Niagara. There is, after all, no substitute for being first.

2
Farini the Great

Standing in the crowd with his sweetheart in the early summer of 1860, watching Blondin on his tightrope, was a twenty-two-year-old Canadian, William Leonard Hunt. As Blondin made his way across the rope, Hunt turned to the girl and hinted that he could duplicate the funambulist’s feats. At that, he later recounted, she and her friends “laughed incredulously and began to think they were under the charge of a maniac.”

Hunt was no maniac. He meant exactly what he said. That night he went back to Lockport where he was working for a storekeeper and gave his notice. “To the horror of everyone” he announced that he would match Blondin, performance for performance. To everyone’s astonishment, he did just that.

Deaf to the protests of his friends, he made preparations “as calmly and as gaily as though I were going to a fair.” That led to a breakup with his sweetheart, who could not understand what he candidly admitted was a thirst for glory. But, as he later said, she was not the only one who found his actions incomprehensible. And there would be other sweethearts.

As a youth in Port Hope, Ontario, he had always been in trouble. “I courted peril because I loved it,” he was to write. “The thoughts of it fired my very soul with ardour; because it was what others were afraid to face.” To the adults of the town, he was incorrigible. Once, when playing hookey from Sunday school, he helped rescue a friend who had fallen through the ice, but that, apparently, wasn’t enough. “That boy, that dreadful boy,” the townspeople said. “A judgment has fallen upon him at last for breaking the Sabbath.…”

This was the era of the travelling circus, with its clown band, its wild animals, its wire walkers, strong men, and trapeze artists. Young Willie was captivated. In spite of his straitlaced father’s stricture on witnessing immoral acts, he managed to sneak into the big top and by the age of twelve was emulating the performers themselves. He was wiry and supple and began to train with weights to build up his muscles. He presented his own circus, complete with trapeze acts by himself and his friends; angry parents put a stop to it, and the Port Hope council further discouraged local talent three years later by banning all unlicensed circuses.

His parents got him a job with a local doctor, hoping that would straighten him out and he would go on to medical school. But medicine was not for him. He was totally seduced by the glamour of show business. He built up his strength so that he could lift seven hundred pounds. He strung a rope from the roof of the family barn to the ground and practised aerial feats. A series of tumbles into the manure pile in no way disheartened him. Within two years he had mastered the art. He had an uncanny sense of balance. He learned to stand on his head on the rope, to hang by his heels, to sit on a teetering chair hooked to the rope. He also ran a dancing school and learned to wrestle.

In the summer of 1859, with Hunt’s father off on an extended visit to his native England, the editor of the Port Hope
Guide
offered the young man one hundred dollars to perform at a local fair. Hunt demanded five hundred dollars and was promised it – on the condition that he stand on his head above the Ganaraska River. He borrowed a rope from a cousin’s schooner, strung it from two buildings on opposite sides of the river, walked slowly across, and returned, to everybody’s breathless admiration, without his balancing pole.

Six days later, after delivering a lecture on physical culture (his medical training an unexpected asset), he performed a strong-man routine in the city hall. The climax was a tug-of-war in which he took on a dozen men single-handed, and won. He changed his name to the more exotic Signor Guillermo Antonio Farini, which he kept for the rest of his life.

On the last day of the fair, eight thousand turned out to watch him carry a man across the Ganaraska on his back – a performance cancelled at the last moment by a terrified mayor. In its stead, Hunt/Farini performed somersaults on the rope, stood on his head, and walked blindfold across the river.

His father returned from England and found that the medical student was now better known as a circus performer. “You delight in having disgraced your family by becoming a low, common mountebank,” he told him. He’d brought a heap of presents from overseas but refused to give anything to his son. The next day an embittered William left home.

For a while he worked for his uncle’s general store in Minnesota but soon wangled a job with Dan Rice’s floating circus on the Mississippi, first as a ticket taker and later as a rope walker. His adventures that year, as recounted in his unpublished memoirs, are melodramatic in the extreme. Did he actually shoot and kill a huge black man who thrust a gun through the bars of his ticket cage? Did he really fight a duel with bowie knives in a riverside faro den? Or were these accounts no more than the autobiographical embellishments of a man who thought of himself as another Barnum? Certainly he was reunited with his estranged family, possibly because he bought his father a new farm with his earnings.

Meanwhile he had just issued a series of challenges to Blondin, who ignored him as he ignored every upstart who offered to duplicate his feats. Farini was not as elegant a rope dancer as the Frenchman – he himself admitted that – but he was a better businessman. Blondin’s purpose at Niagara was not to make an instant fortune but to create for himself a name and a reputation that would serve as a lifetime annuity. Farini had broader interests that would take him into a variety of adventures, ranging from exotic horticulture to African exploration.