Niagara: A History of the Falls (43 page)

Oakes was devastated when he learned of the tax. He clutched his throat, found it impossible to breathe, and took to his bed, wheezing, choking, and gasping. The doctors told him that he was suffering from a severe bronchial attack, but his biographer, Geoffrey Bocca, has called the bout of asphyxiation almost certainly psychosomatic. “The great man lay between his silk sheets, breathing with the greatest difficulty, surrounded by medicaments, guarded by nurses, and contemplated his future with the deepest gloom.”

Bom an American, Oakes had become a naturalized Canadian. But it was costing $17,500 in taxes every day of his life to live in his adopted country. As he saw it, he was getting nothing in return. The Bahamas beckoned; there, the income tax was unknown. Oakes was convinced that the Bennett government was singling him out for special treatment. He figured out that 25 percent of the gold taken from his mine was going to the public coffers in some form of taxation. He shuddered when his accountant told him that if he were to die suddenly his heirs would owe the government four million dollars.

Oakes didn’t want to leave Canada. He told the government he was prepared to pay in kind rather than in cash – specifically, in Lake Shore mining stock. That, he was told, was impossible.

His biographer records a shattering telephone call from Minister of Mines Wes Gordon, in Ottawa. “I have to tell you, Harry,” Gordon said, “the government is planning to increase taxes on some of the higher producing mines. You know what that means? Yours.”

Once again, Oakes felt a throbbing in his bronchial tubes, but he held his temper. “Does that apply only to mines?”

“I am afraid it does.”

“Damn it, man,” Oakes burst out, “why don’t you tax other industries that are doing well, to the same degree? Why do you always pick on mines?”

“The government feels –”

“Damn the government! Tax the gold mines if you want. That’s your privilege. But don’t tax the gold mines alone. Increase the tax on the automobile factories. They are doing well. Wheat has gone up, so tax the farmers. Herrings have gone up. Tax the fishermen.”

“That’s not the way the government sees it, Harry.”

Oakes’s chronic bronchitis began acting up, as it always did when he was under stress. “All right,” he said, between gasps, “have it your own way. But I am warning you now, Gordon, if you just pick on my mine and a few others that are really paying, I shall quit.”

“What do you mean?” the startled minister asked.

“I mean I shall quit Canada.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“Wouldn’t I. Just wait and see.”

He was as good as his word. The government tried to persuade him to change his mind. He wouldn’t. He had encountered Harold Christie, a prominent Bahamian real-estate man, who proposed the Bahamas to him as a tax-free haven. Oakes now jumped at the suggestion.

In spite of his philanthropies at the Falls, he was not a popular figure. He had, indeed, been called the Most Hated Man in Canada as well as the richest. Now he became the target of a national fury for deserting the adopted country that had provided his fortune. The loss of his tax revenue would mean that ordinary families would have to share more of the burden.

Harry Oakes didn’t care. In 1934 he went off to warmer climes and to an eventual violent death. During the war, Lady Oakes deeded Oak Hall to the government. In 1959 the Niagara Parks Commission bought the estate, which became its headquarters.

3
The end of the Honeymoon

On the afternoon of January 25, 1938, Mrs. Jack Co wie heard a sharp report, like a thunderclap, followed by a rumbling sound that caused her small house to tremble. It sat on the river bank close to the
Maid of the Mist
landing on the Canadian side downstream from the cataract. Mrs. Cowie’s husband was employed as a watchman, guarding the two little tourist boats drawn up for the winter not far away. Now, as she ran for the window, Mrs. Cowie saw that the house was in the path of a moving wall of ice.

As the house shook under the impact of the advancing floes, her year-old baby, Phyllis, started to giggle while five-year-old Herbie began to cry. She scooped up both children and ran from the building, slipping on the ice and gashing an arm in her haste. Herbie’s pet spaniel, Laddie, romped about barking, thinking it all part of a game. But as Mrs. Cowie realized, it was deadly serious.

Jack Cowie ran up, dashed into the house, and doused the coal fire in the stove. Sloshing through ankle-deep water, he rescued the family’s canary before the coal gas forced him out. Then, with the help of a fishing rod, he pulled their bedraggled cat from under the floor of the house. It was later revived with hot water bottles.

The Cowies’ house was a ruin. The ice had pushed it fifty feet up the bank and deposited it in the middle of a roadway. Cowie went back to try to salvage a few items and was almost killed when the building toppled over on its side. He escaped through a window and maintained a vigil all night in a cave, while his wife and children moved in with friends.

The Cowies were minor victims in the worst ice jam in thirty years, and the most costly in history. Shorelines vanished under the irresistible advance of the ice. Both
Maid of the Mist
tourist craft were damaged. Fishermen’s shacks, summer cottages, and boat houses were ripped apart. Docks were torn to pieces. As the ice climbed higher and higher, the piles of broken rock, known as talus, below the American Falls were smothered by a mountain of ice.

This gargantuan ice jam, which stretched downriver to within a few hundred yards of the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge, threatened to wreck the old Ontario Power Company generating station near the foot of the Falls. The ice climbed seventy-five feet up the bank, almost smothering the building, squeezing in through windows and doorways, clogging the elevator shaft, and covering the huge generators. Soon, all that could be seen of the building was its roof line.

But the worst threat of all was to the Upper Steel Arch Bridge, also known as the Falls View Bridge, which the press was now calling the Honeymoon Bridge. As the Cowie family struggled with their own problems, maintenance crews were working until midnight vainly trying to remove some of the mounting ice from the bridge’s abutments. At four o’clock on the morning of the twenty-sixth, they were called back to work, but by seven-thirty they were forced to abandon their task and flee for their lives across the giant ice hummocks to the Prospect Point elevator on the American side.

Kurt Blommstern, the maintenance supervisor, barely made it. One of his colleagues sank through the ice to his waist but was pulled to safety. Soon the elevator itself was jammed with ice, and workmen were forced to reach the bridge abutments by a series of rope ladders dropped over the cliffside.

That morning, Red Hill called the Niagara Falls
Gazette
in New York to announce that there was no hope for the bridge; it was sure to collapse. Shortly after noon, two of the reinforcing girders were torn from the upriver side. Watchers on the shore could hear the rivets snapping as the steel gave way. The east end of the bridge began to settle. A bulge appeared in the floor. Cross-members at the base of the eastern tower were twisted out of shape. The Niagara Falls Power Company opened the intake to the old Edward Dean Adams powerplant on the American side of the river above the Falls. The water forced into the power tunnel gushed out, dislodging some of the ice near the bridge and easing the pressure on both abutments.

In spite of optimistic pronouncements from the International Railway Company, which owned the bridge, most people now believed the structure was doomed. That night a crew of men stationed on the bridge dangled a series of huge twelve-by-twelve timbers, each twenty feet long, over the side of the bridge to workmen below in an attempt to strengthen the downriver side. One employee stood at the bridge entrance, his eyes focused on a disturbing crack, an inch and a half wide, in the floor of the bridge. His orders were to turn a floodlight on the work force if the crack should widen, giving the men time to escape.

At four the following morning all bridge traffic was halted. At 11:30 a.m., the bridge company called its men off the job. By this time it was obvious that nothing could be done to save the bridge. The upright support was off the upstream abutment by seven inches; a second rupture had also occurred in the upper structure. Forrest Winch, the construction foreman for the engineering company, had been measuring the bridge’s movement since nine o’clock. He stayed on the bridge and continued to check the movement with a pocket rule. All day rivets were being sheared off as the buckling continued on the downstream side. Between eleven and one o’clock, the bridge moved an additional seven-eighths of an inch.

After measuring the movement of the rivets on the upstream side, Winch decided to descend into the pit formed by the ice at the base of the bridge and check further. He and a fellow worker, Anthony Morocco, climbed down by way of the roof of Jack Kavanagh’s souvenir store and walked a few feet downstream.

As the structure continued to creak and rivets snapped, Winch felt an overpowering sense of impending disaster. He’d been in the construction business since 1919 and suffered a series of mishaps that taught him to be cautious. Now his caution paid off. Winch heard a sharp
snap
close by – another rivet. A sixth sense made him stop and turn around. He glanced down the length of the bridge, looking for a break, and at that moment, the entire structure started to quiver.

“Look out! She’s going!” he cried to Morocco. They dashed as fast as they could across the slippery ice and were thirty feet from the bridge when it collapsed.

At the same moment (it was just 4:15 p.m.), William Kirkpatrick, a senior student from the University of Buffalo, was adjusting his camera to photograph the bridge. He was walking a little way back from the American entrance to get a better view when he heard a loud crackle, as if from a campfire, and then a low rumble. He turned about and – too stunned to press the button – saw the whole bridge falling straight down onto the ice – the centre first, and then both ends, pulled loose from the banks. A cloud of snow and ice particles rose 130 feet into the air and then settled over the gorge. In no more than five seconds the entire bridge had collapsed. There it lay, joined together by a twisted mass of steel and cable, looking like a great iron serpent.

All but one of the professional news photographers who had rushed to Niagara to photograph the bridge when it broke apart missed that brief moment. On this bitterly cold day they had repaired to a nearby restaurant for a cup of coffee. But Frank O. Seed of Buffalo, more patient than the others, stayed behind and was rewarded with the only photograph of the collapsing structure.

Within ten minutes, ten thousand spectators had arrived to line the banks and gaze down at the shattered mass below. Scores of small boys climbed down the snow-covered hummocks and onto the ice, crawling over the twisted girders and sliding down the hump in the centre of the roadway.

Late that evening, a fifteen-year-old Niagara Falls, Ontario, boy, Malcolm Perry, slipping and sliding over the snow-covered wreckage, shinnied up the superstructure and removed the bronze plaque that for forty years had marked the international boundary. He had brought with him two wrenches, a chisel, and a hammer, and he worked for an hour to remove the fifty-pound souvenir. He put it into a bag, hoisted it onto his back, and with the ice crunching under his feet and the bag striking hard against his knees made it home in time for breakfast with a gift for his father.

Over the weekend, spurred on by network radio broadcasts in both countries, an estimated three hundred thousand people poured into the two cities by train, bus, and car to see the collapsed bridge. Thirty thousand automobiles lined the seven miles of road between Queenston and Niagara Falls, Ontario. Some seven thousand cars crossed the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge; eight thousand pedestrians walked across it to get a better view. The result was a gigantic traffic jam.

The International Railway Company hired a salvage expert, J.L. Baugh, of Rumford, Maine, to try to save some of the steel. Baugh sought out the best man to ensure the safety of the workers engaged in this perilous task. The best man was, of course, Red Hill. Through long experience, Hill could detect any subtle change in the contours of the ice on which the wreckage was lying and sound the alarm when the ice jam was about to break.

The wreckage presented a potential hazard. If it dropped through the rotting ice and into the river, it could become an underwater barrier that would cause even worse jams in future years. On February 5, Baugh attempted to divide it into sections. Two massive charges of dynamite were set off, shattering windows for hundreds of yards. The bridge was cut into four pieces, but Baugh could not salvage the steel. Not only was the work dangerous but the material was also in a dreadful tangle, and the problems involved in sorting it and dragging pieces up the slopes proved insuperable. Nonetheless, some homeowners salvaged enough of the railings to make fences for their lawns.

On February 6, Red Hill, who had been on twenty-four-hour duty for twelve days, was sent to hospital suffering from exhaustion and pneumonia. The wreckage lay on the ice for seventy-five days. Once again the prescient Hill, now recovered, accurately forecast what would happen. At six o’clock on the evening of April 11, he called the Canadian Niagara Falls
Review
to predict that what was left of the bridge would go to its doom by sundown the following day. At 7:30 the next morning, a section on the American side dropped through the ice with a monstrous splash. A crowd gathered at 8:20 to watch half of the centre disappear.

For more than twenty-four hours the rest of the wreckage lay on the ice. Then, as thousands of spectators gasped in wonder, what remained of the bridge began to move slowly down the river on a gigantic ice floe. The watchers followed it, running along the River Road to keep up with the moving floe. At 4:05, almost a mile beyond its original position, the wreck finally sank. With the ice breaking beneath them, the misshapen girders twisted about, making loud cracking noises and sending pieces of the wooden deck flying into the air. Then suddenly, except for a few floating fragments, the entire mass of wreckage was gone, entombed forever in the deepest part of the river.