Niagara: A History of the Falls (23 page)

In the mid-nineteenth century, few North Americans cared about or even thought about the continent’s natural beauty. The emphasis was on “progress,” which meant carving out roadways, draining swamps, clearing forests, and exploiting natural wonders, such as the Falls, for profit. In the inexorable march westward, those who subdued the wilderness were seen as nation-builders. As one observer has noted, more was written between 1830 and 1850 about the coming of the railroads than about the destruction of the scenery.

Few worried about the Falls. After all, no greedy hucksters could steal or plunder them. It occurred to only a few – poets, painters, European travellers, and American intellectuals – that the environs of the cataract were just as important as the cataract itself.

The idea of actually setting aside a tract of untrammelled wilderness in perpetuity for future generations to admire and enjoy was a novel one. There were no wilderness parks in North America in the mid-century. Canada would not have its first, at Banff, until 1887. The United States acted earlier. Yosemite State Park, built on federal land but managed by California, was opened in 1864. Its first commissioner was the remarkable landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who had created Central Park in New York City and would soon launch a crusade to save what was left of the Niagara Falls environment.

That fight, which lasted for fifteen years, was waged by two groups of people, working on both sides of the international border. The long, tiring struggle that started slowly, almost ineffectually, would involve some of the leading figures of the day, including a number of intransigent politicians who had no stomach for the principle of public ownership of natural attractions. It might be said to have had its beginnings on a warm August afternoon in 1869. Anyone rambling under the green canopy of Goat Island could not have failed to notice three men of substance – bulky and bewhiskered – roaming through the groves, engaged in animated conversation. These were the days before the diet craze, when bulk was considered a symbol of power and eminence, and certainly this was a trio of commanding presence.

The first was William Edward Dorsheimer, a Buffalo lawyer and politician, a powerful backroom influence in the liberal wing of the Republican party, and federal district attorney for the northern district of New York State. Facial hair was also the fashion with men of influence, and Dorsheimer, a big man, made up for his receding hairline with a vast moustache that curled across his jaw to marry up with his full sideburns. The second – broad-shouldered, full-chested, and bearded – was an up-and-coming young Brooklyn architect, Henry Hobson Richardson, who had just received a commission to design Dorsheimer’s Buffalo mansion. The third was Frederick Law Olmsted, tall and rugged, with a high dome and a large western-style handlebar moustache that suggested his recent sojourn on the nation’s frontier.

These were all men in the prime of life with much of their careers still ahead of them. Richardson, the youngest, was just thirty. He had secured only a few architectural commissions – Dorsheimer’s was one – but he was already attracting attention. Four years later he would be acknowledged as the leading architect in North America, putting his personal stamp on a neo-classical form to be known forever after as Richardsonian Romanesque. Dorsheimer was thirty-eight, the son of German immigrants. Within five years he would be elected lieutenant-governor of his state. A successor praised his “courage and tact, fascination and audacity, rare skill on the platform, creditable associations and marked literary attainments.” At forty-seven, Olmsted was the oldest of the trio. Most of his adult years had been spent on a personal quest to find himself and to find for himself an occupation that suited his restless nature. At last he had succeeded. Before his death he would be known as the father of American landscape architecture and also the Saviour of Niagara Falls.

An activist who seemed to radiate inexhaustible energy, Olmsted was plagued by inner doubts and subject to various illnesses – digestive problems, sudden headaches, and periods of nervous exhaustion that were at least partly psychosomatic. His career had been an odd mixture of failure and success. He had quit Yale because of a series of fainting spells. He had tried farming and publishing and failed miserably at both. Central Park was his triumph. The design he and his partner submitted was chosen from a field of thirty-three. He was appointed superintendent of the new park and acting secretary of the New York sanitary commission – important posts that he was forced to abandon because, it was said, he couldn’t work under anybody.

Off he went to California to manage a mining estate. That failed too, but by this time Olmsted knew where his future lay. The phrase “landscape architect” had scarcely entered the language, but that was what Olmsted intended to be. Central Park and Yosemite had given him direction. His crusade would be to save the American wilderness. Olmsted saw Niagara as a pilot project for a larger and more ambitious campaign. If he succeeded there, he intended to turn his energies to the protection of the entire Allegheny watershed.

The Goat Island “ramble,” as Olmsted called it, took some time. Indeed, it was several hours before the three men actually came within sight of the Falls, for the island seduced and held them, and they lingered among its rustic attractions. To them, this tangled, natural garden was living testimony to What Might Have Been and also to What Might Be Again. It was the only spot within sound of the Falls that had been preserved almost exactly as the first explorers had known it.

Meeting the following day in Dorsheimer’s room at the Cataract House and joined by Olmsted’s partner – a brilliant young English landscape architect, Calvert Vaux – the three men agreed that the Niagara gorge must be freed of all the unsightly trappings of civilization and restored to its original wild beauty. No manicured lawns for them, no formal gardens or clipped hedges; this was not Europe. Niagara must be restored so that the visitor, standing on the rim of the gorge, would see the Falls as Father Hennepin had seen them, framed by an unruly jungle of native trees, shrubs, and clinging vines.

There was an unseen presence in the room that day, for Frederic Church was there in spirit. He had returned to Niagara in 1867 to paint and found himself surrounded by crowds of rubbernecks, one of whom went so far as to disparage his work. “Pshaw!” he sneered. “You ought to see
Church’s
Niagara.”

“I painted it,” the artist replied, a remark, it is said, that “almost hurled the critic into the abyss.”

Church and Olmsted were distantly related, and both, with Richardson, were members of the Century Club in New York. Within those polished walls Church pushed forward his concept of a public park at Niagara. Olmsted, with his experience in California, agreed. Now, in Dorsheimer’s room, he and the others planned a campaign to convince press, public, and politicians that the Falls’ environment must be preserved.

The campaign moved slowly and quietly for the next decade. It took time for the public to arrive at the conclusion that a small minority had reached – that Niagara was in deep trouble. In 1871 Henry James fired a warning shot in the
Nation
, a magazine that Olmsted had helped found. The fate of Goat Island especially concerned him. He had been told that the Porter family had been offered “a big price” for the privilege of building a hotel on the property. How long would they hold out? he wondered. Why shouldn’t the government buy up the precious acres, as had happened with Yosemite? “It is the opinion of a sentimental tourist that no price would be too great to pay,” the novelist declared. The following year, a two-volume work,
Picturesque America
, added to the growing outcry when it described the Falls as “a superb diamond set in lead.”

Olmsted, meanwhile, had gone temporarily blind – a hysterical reaction brought about by the breakup of his partnership with Vaux. He still sat on the board of Central Park, but a series of acrimonious disputes with Andrew Green, the comptroller, led to another mental and physical breakdown and his eventual retirement from the park commission. The campaign to preserve Niagara remained dormant until, in 1878, Frederic Church jumped into the breach.

Through a well-connected journalist, the painter made an approach to the Governor General of Canada, Lord Dufferin, who had visited the Falls that summer and had been appalled at what he saw. In spite of the political restrictions placed on him by his vice-regal role, the handsome and elegant nobleman thought of himself as an activist – a little
too
active, sometimes, for the Canadian government, which in the matter of building a railway to the Pacific tended to see him as an interfering busybody.

But Dufferin liked to interfere. His ego demanded it. In the transcripts of his speeches, which he sent to the press in advance, he was in the habit of adding bracketed comments –
“(Applause) … (Laughter)” –
so that no one would miss the point. A former member of Gladstone’s ministry, he chafed in a position where as the Queen’s representative he could reign but could not rule. Now he saw an opportunity to advance a cause that genuinely concerned him, one to which, without ruffling any political feathers, he could make a contribution.

In Toronto that September, in a speech to the Society of Artists, he made the first public announcement that a joint park with the United States was being contemplated at Niagara. He had already met with Governor Lucius Robinson of New York and suggested that the state should combine with the province of Ontario to buy up lands and buildings around the Falls and form a small international public park, “not indeed decorative or in any way sophisticated by the penny arts of the landscape gardener, but carefully preserved in the picturesque condition, in which it was originally laid out by the hand of nature.” Dufferin’s proposal corresponded with Olmsted’s view. The landscape architect may have been irked by the slur on his profession, but he had no wish to see the “penny arts” – formal gardens, carefully pruned shrubs – intrude on the natural beauty of the wild forest.

Governor Robinson agreed with his vice-regal guest, especially about the need for an international approach. As he put it, “the sublime exhibition of natural powers there witnessed is the property of the whole world.” Dufferin had already been to see the Ontario government, and Robinson recommended to the state legislature that if Ontario appointed a commission, New York should follow suit. He added a practical note: the proposals, he pointed out, would undoubtedly increase tourist traffic at the Falls.

The legislature at once instructed the Commissioners of State Survey to report on the feasibility of the governor’s request. James T. Gardner, the head of the commission, together with Olmsted, would examine the region and draw up a plan of improvement. With commendable dispatch, it was completed and presented to the legislature in March 1880.

The separate statements by the two men presented a devastating indictment of the disfigurement of the Falls’ environment. “The Falls themselves,” Gardner wrote, “man cannot touch; but he is fast destroying their beautiful frame of foliage, and throwing around them an artificial setting of manufactories and bazaars that arouses in the intelligent visitor deep feelings of regret and even of resentment.”

The cancer was spreading. Two more mills and a brewery had just been built near the bank half a mile below the cataract to “warn us of what is coming.” And Goat Island, the jewel of Niagara, was already endangered. A partition suit was in progress, and would-be purchasers were planning, among other attractions, a race course, a summer hotel, and a rifle range. It was even suggested that a canal be cut through the island’s midriff with factories lining both banks. The prospect was unthinkable. Many of the trees on the island had been there when Father Hennepin arrived. They remained “the only living witnesses of those important scenes in the dramas of European conquest of America.” Would not posterity heap scorn on the present generation for destroying “these living monuments of history” to make way for a race course?

In his accompanying report Olmsted blamed the profit motive for destroying Niagara’s scenery. The idea of profit made the worst desecration acceptable. It was “the public’s verdict of acquittal”; the idea that Niagara was nothing more than a sensational exhibition for rope walkers and brass bands “is so presented to the visitor that he is forced to yield to it.…”

The report made it clear that the state had made a major error early in the century when it decided to sell or lease the land adjacent to the Falls. Now that same land would have to be bought back at considerable cost to the taxpayers. The commission urged that a strip a mile long and between one hundred and eight hundred yards wide be expropriated, the buildings destroyed, and the entire area replanted as close to the original wilderness as possible.

But nobody wanted to pay the cost. Alonzo B. Cornell, who had succeeded Robinson in 1879, was a longtime opponent of the park scheme. Why, he asked, should the taxpayer shoulder the burden of expropriation? Did he really believe that the Falls should be fenced in? “Of course I do,” he declared. “They are a luxury and why should not the public pay to see them?”

In Canada, the Ontario premier, Oliver Mowat, who had in 1873 rejected his own commission’s recommendation for a public park at Niagara, apparently had a change of heart and unequivocally endorsed the idea, declaring piously that “not in the whole world was there anything more worthy of saving.” Yet the saving of money, in the long run, was more important to Mowat than the saving of scenery. On September 27, 1879, when he and three of his Cabinet met with the New York commissioners, it seemed that the international park scheme was a
fait accompli
. But, as in the United States, it foundered on the matter of money.

Mowat wanted the federal government to pay the bill, even suggesting that that had been Lord Dufferin’s intention. In 1880, the Ontario premier pushed a bill through the legislature that gave Ottawa the freedom to buy up private or Crown land for a park. In this way he shrugged off all responsibility for the project. But Ottawa wasn’t buying. If Niagara was to be saved, it soon became clear, there would be two parks, separate and distinct, one on each side of the gorge.