Niagara: A History of the Falls (42 page)

The attention of the world, naturally, was focused on the Falls. Many feared that the American Falls was “committing suicide,” to use a newspaper phrase. On Sunday, Goat Island was jammed with spectators, some of whom had travelled a hundred miles to view the great gash that nature had created. The world’s press arrived to speculate that the Falls itself, moving inexorably back toward the site of ancient Lake Tonawanda, would be diminished until it became merely a series of rapids. That, however, was centuries in the future.

That spring, Red Hill himself caught the fever that had gripped earlier daredevils. He had warned Stathakis that his barrel was unsafe, but now the riverman was determined to ride it through the Whirlpool Rapids and on to Queenston. He had performed the feat the previous year in a small steel barrel of his own design; in a burst of braggadocio, he announced he would make the trip again, this time in “the death barrel.” It almost became his tomb.

Hill made the attempt on May 31, after alerting a motion-picture crew. Wearing a rugby football helmet and a life jacket, he climbed into the barrel at the
Maid of the Mist
landing and let the current take him through the rapids and into the Whirlpool. His cumbersome craft could not slip around the vortex as his small barrel had done the previous year. Instead, it was sucked into the centre and there, for the next two hours, it circled slowly. As water leaked into it, Hill grew panicky, and at last he thrust a distress signal – a small Union Jack – through one of the two air holes that had been drilled at one end. To Beatrice Hill, standing on the shore with her baby, Wesley, in her arms, the flag was the first indication that her husband was still alive. Her eldest son, Red, Jr., was beside her. That morning she had noticed that he was wearing his bathing suit under his street clothes.

“That barrel is jinxed,” young Red had told her. “I’m not just going to hang around and let Dad die.” Now it drifted within a hundred yards of the shore, and he heard his father’s muffled voice cry out, “Get a boat and get me out of here before this thing sinks. It’s filling with water.”

But there was no boat available. Somebody borrowed a 250-foot rope from the fire hall, but all attempts to lasso the barrel failed. The craft was sinking deeper and deeper, and Hill’s death now seemed only a matter of time; at most he had half an hour left before he would drown or suffocate.

Young Red was already tearing off his outer clothing, and as the babble of the crowd fell to a hush, he fastened the rope around his waist and plunged into the maelstrom. He fought the current for twenty minutes before the force of the waves hurled him against the barrel. Treading water, he managed to fasten the rope to one of the hooks on the outside before swimming back to shore. At that a mighty roar went up. Beatrice Hill fainted. But the ordeal of Red, Sr., was not over. Twelve men hauling on the rope, struggling against the suction of the current, would have to get the barrel back to shore and open it with little more than ten minutes to spare.

Inch by inch they pulled the barrel to safety. Hill emerged bruised, but alive. “I’m damned glad to be out of there,” he said. Then he turned to his son and shook his hand. “You have more guts than I have,” he told him.

He was determined to continue the journey on to Queenston, but his friends talked him out of that – or thought they had. The following day he quietly returned to the river and completed the trip without mishap. It was his final stunt. The motion-picture cameramen who had promised to film the journey failed to show up, and so there was little profit in it for Hill. “I’m all washed up on this racket,” he said. “I’ve run these rapids three times and all I’ve got to show for it is two barrels and some photographs. There’s no money in it and I’m through.… I’m not giving any more free shows.… Never again will I fight the Niagara.”

2
The Richest Man in Canada

By the time Red Hill finished his stunt, the Richest Man in Canada had become a fixture at the Falls. Niagara thrives on superlatives, and so it seemed proper that the Richest Man in Canada should choose the Greatest Natural Wonder in America as his headquarters.

He was a sombre figure with a weathered face, looking older than his fifty-seven years. His had not been an easy life. He had struggled in poverty for the best part of half a century but was now wealthy beyond imagination. He could have indulged himself anywhere in the world and, indeed, owned several houses, including one in London. But in 1924 he had chosen to make Niagara Falls his main domicile. There he lived in baronial style and dispensed the largess that his new-found wealth made possible.

His name was Harry Oakes, and his saga, which ended with his murder in the Bahamas in 1943 by villains unknown, is the stuff from which melodramas are made. Fiction could not compare with the tale of the young medical student who, on graduating from Bowdoin College in Maine, announced, “I am going to find a gold mine and make my fortune.” After more than fifteen years of unremitting and unrewarding toil, he did just that. In fact, Harry Oakes improved upon his prophecy. He found
two
gold mines, both fabulously rich.

He was the quintessential prospector: the man who treks from camp to camp and country to country whenever a gold strike beckons, undefeated by setbacks, ever optimistic that the end of the rainbow is to be found just beyond the horizon. As a young man he had scrapped his plans to become a doctor when he learned that medical men rarely made more than three thousand dollars a year. When in the winter of 1897-98 the news of the Klondike strike electrified the continent, Oakes headed north. He picked and panned in the Yukon valleys, found nothing, and in 1899 joined the next stampede, drifting in an old boat for seventeen hundred miles downriver to the golden sands of Nome, Alaska. Once again, he failed to fulfil his dream.

He moved on to other goldfields – to Manila in the Philippines, and Western Australia. Again he found nothing. He made a small fortune growing flax, of all things, in New Zealand, and then headed for California. He sought gold in Death Valley but found only rattlesnakes. Flat broke, he ended up in Swastika, a small mining camp not far from Kirkland Lake in Northern Ontario. And there, at last, he struck it rich.

In January 1912, working with three brothers, Tom, George, and Jack Tough, and swathed in five pairs of pants to keep out the minus 52°F weather, Harry Oakes staked a series of claims that became the Tough Oakes Mine. Here was a treasure trove. The ore that came from the first shaft was almost fifty times richer than the average for Ontario.

That wasn’t enough for Oakes. He trudged around the western shore of Kirkland Lake and there, in July of the same year, he staked the claims that became the famous Lake Shore Mine. Far richer than Tough Oakes, it was to become the second-largest gold mine in North American history after the Home-stake in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the one that provided a fortune for William Randolph Hearst.

It took Harry Oakes more than five years of continuous struggle to raise enough capital to create a producing mine. Nobody would buy his shares or even take them instead of cash. The local grocer preferred to give him credit. Toronto’s Bay Street, the mining centre of Canada, wasn’t interested. Sir Henry Pellatt, the lord of Casa Loma, turned him down. To finance Lake Shore, Oakes was forced to sell his share of Tough Oakes for $200,000.

At last a group of Buffalo financiers showed interest. Oakes lost no time in making a deal. He hired a private railway car, brought them to Kirkland Lake, entertained them royally, and scribbled out an agreement on a sheet of brown wrapping paper. It gave them half a million shares of treasury stock at what was soon seen as a rock-bottom price. Original shares in Lake Shore went for 32.5 cents. Before Harry Oakes went to his grave, each was worth more than sixty dollars.

In 1922, the newly wealthy Oakes treated himself to a round-the-world cruise. On shipboard, he encountered a tall, blue-eyed Australian named Eunice Mclntyre. She was twenty-two; he was forty-eight. The contrast went beyond age. She was easy going, gentle, and innocent. He was three inches shorter, thickset, violent, and opinionated. They were married the next year.

He made enemies of some. Others thought him half mad, for he had odd habits – whistling under his breath when people spoke to him or shuffling about in a little dance. He was also subject to sudden fits of temper. He fired every mine manager he ever had and on one occasion, so the story has it, got rid of seven employees in one day because his skis weren’t put where he wanted them. But he fed his men well, even installing a greenhouse at Kirkland Lake so that they could have fresh vegetables. He built a skating rink for the children and gave away toboggans and books at the local school.

This was the man who, back in 1924, was planning a baronial mansion at Niagara Falls – a man rendered uncouth by years of grubbing in the clay, whose table manners were atrocious, who had forgotten how to use a knife and fork, and who often spat grape seeds across the table at formal dinners. He knew what he wanted. One day when he was walking down Bay Street in Toronto, he saw a Canadian Pacific poster showing the mountaintop dream castle of Ludwig, the “mad king” of Bavaria – the same castle that Disney later copied for his first theme park. “Something like that. That is what I want,” said Harry Oakes, and something like that was what he eventually got.

He was anxious to get out of Northern Ontario to escape the con men who were constantly buttonholing him, demanding that he invest in their schemes. He needed a retreat in which to hide. He chose Niagara Falls, Canada, partly because of his successful connection with neighbouring Buffalo and also because he saw Niagara as the gateway to his adopted country. The park along the river appealed to him, and he revelled in a dream in which the entire area would be cleansed of its factories and transformed into one gigantic piece of parkland.

In 1924, after his wife had given birth to their first child, Nancy, he searched the community and settled upon the home of Paul Schoellkopf, president of the Niagara Falls Power Company across the river, whose grandfather, the Buffalo tanner, had founded the family fortune by his purchase of the Porter hydraulic canal. Oakes paid half a million dollars for the property.

The Schoellkopf mansion was not baronial enough for Harry Oakes, in spite of the legend that some of the panelling had come from the rooms that Cardinal Wolsey once occupied at Hampton Court. He had the place remodelled in Tudor style, a job that took four years. In its refurbished form the house contained thirty-five rooms, seventeen bathrooms, and air-conditioning – an almost unheard-of luxury in those days. The grounds held a swimming pool and a five-hole golf course. In the best English tradition, the one-time prospector named it Oak Hall.

By the time the family moved in – the same year that saw Jean Lussier take his rubber ball over the Falls – Harry Oakes had become an influential figure in Niagara. The city benefited from his generosity. He bought a sixteen-acre farm and turned it into the Oakes Park Athletic Field. During the Depression, which hurt him not a bit, he provided jobs for the unemployed by restoring the original portage road from Lake Ontario to its former site; it became Oakes Drive. When the second Clifton House burned down in 1932, he bought the land to keep it out of the hands of developers. Then he bought the Lafayette, on whose lawn Red Hill had pitched his souvenir tent. He gave both properties to the Niagara Parks Commission, which simplified its title in 1927 and now controlled both Queen Victoria Park and others in the region. In return the commission gave him two small lots on Clifton Hill, the road that ran down from the ridge of the same name. Two hotels – the Falls View and the Park – stand on those lots and are still in the family. In 1934, Harry Oakes was named the ninth member of the commission. The Lafayette and Clifton properties, saved from development, became the Oakes Garden Theatre.

He was a man used to getting his own way. Once, playing a round of golf on his private course, Oakes lost his temper because he couldn’t chip out of one of the bunkers. He called in a bulldozer and razed the offending sand pit. On another occasion he became irritated by the smoke pouring out of the Ohio Brass Company’s factory not far from Oak Hall. He solved that by buying the building and shutting the plant down. The company moved elsewhere. The building, now part of the Marine-land amusement complex, remains entirely smokeless.

He had no time for panhandlers of any variety, but, with the Depression at its height, he gave a handout to anyone who wanted to work for it. When an unemployed man knocked on the door, he was handed a shovel and was paid two dollars for half a day’s labour, a fair wage in those hard times. Oakes insisted that all payments be made in two-dollar bills, a curious fancy that created a problem for his foreman, not to mention the stores and banks in the area, which were soon faced with a banknote shortage.

Oakes had tried to escape the importuning visitors clamouring for his attention, but there was no refuge. Strange cars lined his driveway until he installed a gatehouse to keep them out. Fortune seekers scaled the walls of his estate in order to waylay him. The Richest Man in Canada had to sneak out of his own house by a back entrance in order to play golf. Each day a mountain of letters awaited him from all over the world, pleading for financial help.

He was, by most estimates, the greatest single contributor to the Canadian treasury, for he was paying as much as three million dollars a year in income taxes. It was his habit to make handsome donations to both the Liberal and the Conservative parties – 60 percent to the party in power in Ottawa, 40 percent to the Opposition. In 1930, with an election slated for the summer, the Liberals, who then formed the government, asked Oakes for extra money to fight the campaign. He obliged, it is said, on the promise that the new government would make him a senator. But the Liberals lost the election, and the Conservative government of Richard Bedford Bennett got even by taxing him $25,000 for the lands and the parks he had contributed to Niagara.