Niagara: A History of the Falls (24 page)

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 increasing 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.”

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.”