Niagara: A History of the Falls (5 page)

Now, nothing would do but that they tackle the Canadian shore. They rode south to the American Fort Schlosser, and there the captain in charge had them ferried across the broad river on a military bateau, accompanied by six soldiers. It was not an easy passage. The current was so swift they were forced to row furiously upriver, close to the shore, for two miles. The experience, in Crèvecoeur’s words, was “extremely awful.” Just ahead of the bateau he could see the leaping crests of the rapids and, beyond them, the spray of the Falls. A broken oar, he realized, could easily have caused their deaths because once they hit the white water, they would inevitably have perished. Then, “with incredible labour,” they managed to reach the mouth of Chippawa Creek.

Many of the large farms on the Canadian side were owned by Loyalists, men who had maintained allegiance to the King in the recent revolution and had been driven from their homes to take up residence on lands supplied them by the British government. One of these, John Burch, entertained the pair at his plantation. Crèvecoeur found the conversation “pleasing and instructive,” adjectives that would scarcely have been applied had he been an American patriot.

Following Burch’s directions, the two proceeded to another cultivated farm owned by a fellow-Loyalist, Francis Ellsworth, who agreed to act as their guide. Ellsworth took them along the edge of the gorge for more than a mile downstream from Table Rock, where a break in the cliffside allowed them to descend. Gazing down this precipice, Hunter hesitated. Crèvecoeur thought it better that he give up, but finally his companion announced that he did not want to be left behind, and so the three men started down, clinging to trees and shrubs.

They rested briefly in the shade of a large tree on the bark of which were carved the names of others who had gone before. They added their own and then continued their downward scramble until they found their way blocked by an enormous boulder, thirty feet high. An Indian ladder – nothing more than two tree trunks notched by tomahawks – led over it.

From this point the zigzagging route grew more difficult, causing them at times to crawl on all fours, “passing through holes in rocks, which would scarce admit our bodies” or creeping beneath the roots of great trees through hollows made by Indian fishermen.

After an hour of struggle they reached a shelf of rocks that had, apparently, tumbled from the heights the previous spring, loosened by the expansion and thawing of the winter’s ice. Some of these boulders weighed several tons, and Crèvecoeur recalled, not without a shudder, stories of earlier travellers who had been lamed or even killed when they fell.

The trio was now about a mile and a half from the foot of the Horseshoe. The entire route was strewn with broken rocks, forming an uncertain pathway that often gave way beneath their feet, increasing the danger of tumbling into the roaring river only a few feet away. “The only way to save ourselves was by laying
[sic]
down, by which we frequently were hurt. The pending rocks above us added much to the horrors of our situation, for knowing those under our feet had fallen at different periods, we could not divest ourselves of apprehension.…” They came upon two small cataracts, long since vanished, that undoubtedly were the basis for the single slender fall that the Hennepin engraving had shown a century before. Exhausted and sweating from their exertions, they sat down to catch their breath and remove their outer clothing. Then, in boots and trousers, they set off on the next leg of their journey, which Crèvecoeur called “the most hazardous expedition I was ever engaged in.”

Working their way up and over several high and craggy boulders, they reached the base of the first of the small falls. Passing beneath it, Crèvecoeur was reminded of a violent storm of hail beating upon his head. When they reached the second fall, he felt he could go no farther. Ellsworth, who had gone ahead, retraced his steps to shepherd the two through. Crawling on hands and knees, “expecting each moment to sink under the weight of water,” they finally made it out into the open air. Hunter by this time was exhausted, and Crèvecoeur again regretted having brought him. Nevertheless, they gathered their energies and plodded on to the base of the Horseshoe.

“Here I may say with propriety that the most awful scene was now before me that we had yet seen.” It is possible that the three men were the first humans to hazard a trip behind the waterfall; the Indian fishermen who frequented the area would hardly have bothered to indulge in what to them would have seemed a useless adventure. Into the dark opening between the sheet of falling water and the dripping face of the Escarpment the trio made their way “by slow and cautious steps.” They managed to stumble forward for fifteen or twenty yards, gasping in an atmosphere so sultry “that we might be said to be in a fumigating bath.” At that point they retreated hastily, relieved to feel once more the welcome rays of the sun, “whose beams seem to shine with peculiar lustre, from the pleasure and gaiety it diffused over our trembling senses.” For Crèvecoeur it was a religious experience as well as a frightening one. Here, he thought, “was one of the great efforts of Providence, shewing the omnipotence of a supreme being.”

The three men, now dripping wet and exhausted, were obliged to work their way back until, six hours after they had begun their descent, they again reached the summit of the gorge – “and who can speak the pleasure we received from our safe return.” That evening, after having eaten “voraciously” at Ellsworth’s home, the travellers rode on horseback through the woods that lined the banks and then across ploughed fields to the Niagara’s mouth, where they boarded a ferry to take them to Fort Niagara on the American side, from which they had set out some days before on what was clearly the adventure of a lifetime. Crèvecoeur did not, however, share his adventure with the public (it did not see print for another hundred years). So it was that the European world was deprived of a graphic picture of the terrors lurking at the foot of the cataract until the turn of the century, when the Falls became more accessible.

By that time, western New York was undergoing a revolution in transportation. The “turnpike mania,” as it has been called, had reached its zenith. At last it was possible to travel much of the way by stage along gravelled toll roads through the new settlements that were springing up along the old Indian trails. The first tourists were about to reach Niagara.

One of these was the lean, dark, and distinguished Speaker of the Massachusetts legislature, Timothy Bigelow, an inquisitive and witty politician. Bigelow had never been out of New England. Now, in the summer of 1805, with four friends, he determined to see something of the new land to the west and travel overland to the Falls of Niagara. The party left Boston on July 8 and arrived at its destination seventeen days later.

They travelled by wagon or, on sidetrips, to points of interest by more comfortable carriage. They put up at taverns, boarding houses, and, in the larger towns, hotels. They crossed their own settled state and picked up the western turnpike at Albany, New York, travelling 206 miles through Utica to the road’s terminus at Canandaigua. Events were moving swiftly in western New York. Already surveyors’ stakes were being driven to extend the toll road all the way to Niagara.

As they moved on west, settlement grew sparser. Some of the new towns, such as Batavia – “a considerable village” – were no more than three years old. Indeed, there was no community with a population of more than six thousand in all of northern New York State. The orchards were newly planted, the stumps of the original forest still disfiguring the cleared land. Bigelow noted “the astonishing rapidity with which this country is settled.” At Tonawanda Creek en route to Buffalo, the woods were alive with settlers whose “axes were resounding, and the trees literally falling about us as we passed.”

Many of the rivers were unbridged; in other cases, the bridge floors were mere poles, threatening to collapse. On occasion the travellers had to leave their ferry and wade through mud to reach the shore. But, as they rattled across the state, Bigelow felt the buzz of raw new industry – sawmills and gristmills, salt works, silkworm farms, carding machines, cider presses.

From Buffalo, the party drove three miles to Black Rock on the Niagara where they waited an hour for a ferryman. They were appalled by the “wretched machine” that took them across the river – “the most formidable ferry, perhaps, in the world.” Horses, driver, wagon, goods, and travellers were all crammed aboard this “crazy flat-bottomed boat” with rotting sides, presided over by “a drunken Irishman, who commanded an Indian and a negro wench, who seemed to be much the ablest hand of the three.”

Having reached the far shore without mishap, they spent the night in a boarding house at Chippawa, a circumstance that “required an effort of patience,” for the sight of the distant spray had made them eager to see the Falls. Early the following morning, they set off with a guide who took them to the vast overhang of Table Rock, so close to the crest of the Falls that it seemed as if they could almost dangle a foot into the racing waters. Then, ignoring the insubstantial Indian ladders, they rode for half a mile downstream to the Simcoe ladder, built in 1795 for Elizabeth Posthuma Gwillim Simcoe, the wife of the Governor of Upper Canada, who had ventured down it that year in full skirts.

Clinging to it and looking at the projecting ledge above him, Bigelow felt as if he were suspended in mid-air. Another visitor who arrived just before the Bigelow party took one look at the flimsy contrivance and declined to descend. But Bigelow and the others braved the staircase. It proved almost as treacherous as the notched logs that Crèvecoeur had negotiated. The ladder was constructed of log rungs, tied in place with grapevines. Placed sideways to the bank, it was fastened by pieces of iron hoops to twin stumps on the overhang at the top and to a large rock at the bottom.

Once down the ladder, crouching and crawling over the corduroy of boulders, stumps, and slippery shale, the party reached the base of the Horseshoe and ventured behind the sheet. There they experienced, as others had, the tempest that roared out of the cave within – a blast of wind so violent that it sucked the very breath from their bodies. This raging whirlwind was created by the tumbling waters striking the rocks below with such force that the collision seemed to compress the very air around it. Blinded by the power of the spray, the visitors found themselves treading over a crumbling mass of shale, which, agitated by the water, moved alarmingly beneath their feet and was not improved by the eels squirming between the rocks.

Here Bigelow feared for his life. “A false step or sudden precipice, which we might not be able to discern, would have plunged us where nothing could have saved us from instant destruction.” He concluded that even if the ground had been firm, the blast roaring out of the cavern was so strong that, had they gone farther, they would have suffocated.

Nothing that followed equalled that experience. The party lingered briefly at the little village of Clifton, then followed the portage road to the mouth of the river, took passage across the lake, moved on to Montreal, and returned home by way of Vermont, having covered 1,355 miles in forty-two days.

The feeling of impotence in the face of indomitable forces that Bigelow had felt – the blind fear of the thundering waters – was commonly reported by Niagaraphiles well into the eighteenth century. To Pehr Kalm in 1750, the sight had been “enough to make the hair stand on end.” In 1805, the poet and ornithologist Alexander Wilson, viewing the Falls from Table Rock, wrote of their “awful grandeur” that “seized, at once, all power of speech away, and filled our souls with terror and dismay.”

Terror, yes, but not unmixed with other emotions. The spectacle of tons of water thundering into a boiling abyss sent delicious thrills down the spines of the spectators not unlike the titillation produced by the telling of a ghost story or, in modern times, by a well-crafted horror film. Writers and dramatists have always known that one way to capture an audience is to frighten it out of its wits. The revelation of Niagara Falls as a place of horror dovetailed neatly with the appearance of the Gothic romance in literature. Horace Walpole’s seminal novel,
The Castle of Otranto
, was published in 1764, and Mrs. Radcliffe’s chilling
The Mysteries of Udolpho
appeared in 1794 – one year before the French writer the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, having descended one of the swaying Indian ladders, concluded that “everything seems calculated to strike with terror.”

That was the lure of the Gothic – rapture emerging out of terror – and it undoubtedly influenced those early travellers who described the setting in Gothic terms. Niagara had everything – dark caverns, gloomy gorges, furious waters, overhanging scarps, and a monstrous whirlpool.

Like Mary Shelley’s Gothic monster (
Frankenstein
was published in 1818), Niagara was so overpowering that the most literate of visitors often confessed their inability to describe it. That had been a distinguishing feature of travellers’ accounts since Hennepin’s day. The friar “wish’d an hundred times that somebody had been with us, who could have describ’d the Wonders of this prodigious frightful Fall.” Pehr Kalm acknowledged a similar impotence. “I cannot with words describe how amazing it is!” he wrote. Thomas Moore, the Irish poet and composer, came to the same conclusion at the turn of the century. Moore, a friend of Byron and Shelley and composer of “The Last Rose of Summer,” announced that it was impossible by pen or pencil to convey even a faint idea of the cataract’s power. A new language, he said, would be needed. The great nature painter John James Audubon agreed. He visited the Falls in 1820 at a time when he was embarking on his life’s work of painting birds but gave up an attempt to paint the cataract. He would, he said, look upon those waters “and imprint them, where alone they can be represented – on my mind.”

Unable to do justice to the Falls by straight description, most visitors fell back on a different literary device to convey some idea of their powers. They described the effect of the Falls on
them
. Moore was one of several who confessed that the spectacle moved them to tears. Timothy Dwight wrote in 1804 that the cataract caused in the visitor a “disturbance of his mind.” Dwight was a literate scholar, president of Yale College, and no slouch when it came to descriptive if overheated passages. But he could not or would not describe the Falls. Instead, he described how the traveller
felt
about the Falls: “His bosom swells with emotions never felt; his thoughts labor in a manner never known before.… The struggle within is discovered by the fixedness of his position, the deep solemnity of his aspect, and the intense gaze of his eye. When he moves, his motions appear uncontrived. When he is spoken to, he is silent; or, if he speaks, his answers are short, wandering from the subject, and indicating that absence of mind which is the result of laboring contemplation.”