Niagara: A History of the Falls (6 page)

In the second half of the eighteenth century, travellers to Niagara began to use a new word or, more properly, a renewed word as a kind of shorthand to describe the indescribable. That word was
sublime
. Crèvecoeur had used it in a letter to his nephew in 1785. By the nineteenth century it had become a cliché.

In 1787, Lieutenant John Enys of the 29th Regiment of Foot wrote that it was impossible to give “any adequate Idea of the astonishing Variety which here crowds upon your mind.” He added that “it may well be said to be the real sublime and beautifull conveyed in the Language of Nature infinitely more strong than the united Eloquence of Pitt, Fox and Burke.…” Any educated Englishman would immediately gain an impression of the spectacle from Enys’s reference to the philosopher-statesmen, especially Burke, whose long inquiry into the sublime and the beautiful was published in 1756. When the civil servant and painter George Heriot reported in 1807 that the view from Table Rock was “magnificent and sublime” he was using the word in the Burkean sense, for he linked “a train of sublime sensations” with the terror brought on by fear that the treacherous overhang might crumble beneath his feet.

The Sublime – it had become a noun as well as an adjective – and the Gothic were opposite sides of the same coin, and both fitted the vision of Niagara imprinted on the minds of those who viewed it only through literature. Where the Gothic titillated, the Sublime uplifted. If the Gothic was gloom, the Sublime was grandeur. If the Gothic brought on a sense of foreboding, the Sublime engendered a feeling of awe. Yet both had one thing in common. The Gothic novel and the sublime experience relied on the same basic emotion – terror.

“Terror,” Burke declared, “…  is the ruling principle of the sublime.” His redefining of the word coincided with the European vision of a terrifying phenomenon in the heart of the North American wilderness.

Beauty, in Burke’s view, was separate and distinct from the sublime. To be beautiful, in Burkean terms, was to be small and smooth, to have “a delicate frame without any remarkable appearance of strength.” That certainly did not apply to the fearsome image of the great cataract that the world had been receiving from travellers since Hennepin’s day. A great deal more water would have to plunge over the Escarpment before Niagara became familiar enough, and accessible enough, to be known for its beauty.

Chapter Two

1
Augustus Porter’s sylvan bower
2
William Forsyth’s folly
3
The jumper and the hermit

1
Augustus Porter’s sylvan bower

The exploitation of Niagara Falls began early in the nineteenth century. Sublime the cataract might be to the casual visitor, but shrewder eyes were taking its measure. The potential value of the real estate and the presence of so much raw power had more appeal than the Gothic mysteries of the abyss.

Evidence of this hardheaded approach lay in the name shortly chosen for the new community that grew up on the American side. It would be “Manchester,” a title more suggestive of Blake’s dark Satanic mills than Tennyson’s “flood of matchless might.” Manchester would be a mill town, not a spa.

Manchester, which would shortly become Niagara Falls, New York, was built on the blackened ruins of an earlier log community whose leading citizen was Augustus Porter, a stocky surveyor with a moon face and luminous eyes. Porter had first seen the Falls in 1795 as a member of a surveying party on its way to chart the new American wilderness in Ohio Territory, wrested from the British as a result of the War of Independence. Romantics such as Isaac Weld, a travel writer, might tremble “with reverential fear” at the spectacle, but Porter, the shrewd Yankee, looked deep into the cataract and glimpsed the future.

The Falls straddled the new international border. To the chagrin of many Americans, the larger of the two cataracts lay on the British side, with its smaller counterpart on the eastern side of the line. Here, at the heart of the continent, the great east-west thoroughfare of two nations, lay the finest tourist attraction in the world and, as Porter sensed, the source of unlimited power. Porter could hardly wait until the state of New York put the land along the river up for sale, which it did in 1805 – an unthinking move that later generations would have cause to regret.

Niagara Falls power had been used in a small way ever since 1758, during the French regime, when Daniel-Marie Chabert de Joncaire de Clausonne built a sawmill on the eastern bank just above the Falls. An early pioneer and miller, John Stedman, followed to build a gristmill on the same spot. Stedman kept a herd of goats on the island opposite. The animals all perished in the terrible winter of 1780 but bequeathed to the island the name by which it would always be known – Goat Island. Now, with more land available, Porter lost no time in leaving his home at Canandaigua and moving to Niagara. He bought the Stedman property and built a new gristmill on the site of the old.

This was still wild country. Only a little of the forest had been cleared. Wolves howled outside Porter’s home, making it impossible to keep sheep. Bears roamed the forest. But civilization was approaching in fits and starts. With his brother Peter, Porter opened a transportation business along the river and established a tannery, a blacksmith shop, and a ropewalk on his property. A carding factory went into operation and a log tavern was built. Some dozen homes became the centre of what appeared to be a growing community.

In 1813 – the second year of the War of 1812 – the British and their Indian allies destroyed it all, burning almost every home in Buffalo, Black Rock, and the new community at the Falls. Yet, in spite of the hostilities, Porter didn’t lose sight of his own ambitions. In 1814 he bought two lots along the river that the state surveyor-general had tagged perceptively as “very valuable for water power.” One year after the war ended he also bought Goat Island, which, in 1815 under the Treaty of Ghent, was ceded to the United States. It was a bargain, not only for Porter but also for future generations, because Augustus Porter had the good sense to leave Goat Island alone.

At a time in North America when nature was still seen as the enemy and the despoiling of natural sites was accepted as a form of progress, Augustus Porter was the first conservationist. There were those who urged him to dress up his island, clear away the woods, root out crooked trees, and generally tame the environment. He would have none of it. Somebody wanted him to build a vast tavern overlooking the Horseshoe Falls. Porter replied with an emphatic no. In the words of one British visitor, Captain Basil Hall, “his own good taste revolted at such a combination of the sublime and the ridiculous.”

For most of the century, until Goat Island was taken over by the state as part of a park system, the Porter family stubbornly resisted all attempts to commercialize it. It remained “an enchanted place” in the words of one visitor, “the noblest of nature’s gardens” in the phrase of another. This was no hyperbole. In 1879 the eminent English botanist Sir Joseph Hooker identified on its seventy acres “a greater variety of vegetation within a given space than anywhere in Europe, or east of the Sierras, in America.” That same year, Frederick Law Olmsted, the greatest conservationist of his day, wrote that he had travelled four thousand miles over the most promising parts of the continent “without finding elsewhere the same quality of forest beauty which was once abundant about the falls, and which is still to be observed in those parts of Goat Island where the original growth of trees and shrubs had not been disturbed.…”

Goat Island was unique. Olmsted emphasized that its luxuriant vegetation could not have existed without the spray from the Falls, which constantly moistened the surrounding atmosphere. This created a natural nursery for every kind of indigenous wildflower, shrub, and tree. As such it became almost as famous as the great cataract itself, for which the Porter family assumed a proprietary interest. One of the younger Porter women, travelling in Europe, was accosted by a flirtatious gentleman who, no doubt attempting to break the conversational ice, remarked that he supposed she had seen Niagara Falls. The lady fixed him with a cool stare. “I own them,” she replied.

There was, of course, method in Augustus Porter’s mad insistence on keeping the island green. He was shrewd enough to realize that future visitors who came to worship at Niagara’s shrine would also be in the mood for a stroll through the sylvan pathways of his unspoiled kingdom – and be willing to pay for it. In 1817, he and his brother built a toll bridge to the island, only to have it swept away by ice the following year. Undaunted, they built a second one farther downstream, reckoning correctly that the ice would break up before it reached the bridge. It was no simple task to complete; one workman, thrown into the raging rapids below, almost lost his life. Basil Hall, who thought the rest of the Niagara scenery of little or no interest, called it “one of the most singular pieces of engineering in the world.” Almost seven hundred feet long, it was entered just fifty yards above the crest of the American Falls and soon became the best-travelled walkway in the region.

As the years moved on and the Falls worked their way upstream, as great chunks continued to fall off Table Rock (a six-thousand-foot-square slab in 1818), as the tourists started to filter in and the taverns, mills, and souvenir shops proliferated, the bridge stood as a link between two opposing worlds. As soon as you paid your toll, you left the world of commerce behind. Stepping off the shaky bridge, you entered a different realm – a realm where fringed gentians, wild lobelia, and meadow rue carpeted the forest floor beneath a canopy of hickory, balsam, black walnut, and magnolia; a realm of ostrich, spleenwort, and maidenhair ferns, of grass of parnassus, harebells, and lady’s slippers, of orioles flashing orange in the sunlight, of waxwings and thrushes carolling in the tulip trees.

Porter bought Goat Island and preserved it at an opportune moment. The conventional approach to nature was about to undergo a change, and that change was already making itself felt. In Europe, the poets of the romantic movement were heralding a new attitude in which nature was to be worshipped, not shunned. Wordsworth spoke for this new mood when he wrote of hearing in nature “the still, sad music of humanity” and feeling “a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts.”

Augustus Porter, the hard-nosed New Englander and enlightened capitalist, didn’t have to know his Wordsworth to sense the appeal that Goat Island would have for the wave of sightseers that would descend upon Niagara once the Erie Canal was completed. The Falls were about to become commercialized, and there was little doubt that the new tourists, harried by hackmen and importuned by souvenir hawkers, would sigh with gratitude at being given a chance to take time out and smell the flowers.

2
William Forsyth’s folly

The idea of gouging out a great ditch, four feet deep and 363 miles long, to join the waters of the Great Lakes with those of the Hudson River had been talked about for a century. George Washington, among others, was all for it. But even after the appointment of an Erie Canal commission in 1810, another seven years of war and political wrangling passed before the first ploughs and scrapers went to work.

Long before the canal opened in 1825, the most myopic bystander could glimpse the dimensions of the change it would bring about. A flood of a different kind was about to descend on Niagara’s gorge. The Falls would soon vie with Saratoga Springs as the continent’s premier watering-hole.

Once so remote, the great cataract was about to become familiar, at least to the carriage trade. (The masses would begin to come a generation later with the railways.) The uncomfortable nine-day trip from Albany in bone-rattling wagons was obsolete once the upper classes could rest at their ease in eighty-foot horse-drawn canal boats, coasting through quiet waters at four miles an hour. After they reached Buffalo, hacks and ferries were waiting on both sides of the river to take them to the new Mecca, and the hotels were already going up.

The place to go and the place to be seen was William Forsyth’s three-storey frame Pavilion Hotel on the Canadian side, with its white portico and broad verandahs. Forsyth built it in 1822, advertised it as a luxury establishment “for noblemen and gentlemen of highest rank,” stocked it with “viands from every land” as well as “the best flavoured and most costly wines and liquors,” then sat back to watch the world arrive on his doorstep.

He was a supreme opportunist – shrewd, enterprising, aggressive, but also slightly disreputable. His family had come up to the Niagara area from the United States after the revolution – traitors in American eyes, but Loyalists to the British. His own background was clouded. Acquitted of one felony in 1799, he was later jailed for another. He fought on the British side in the War of 1812, sometimes with distinction, sometimes more dubiously. His commanding officer, Thomas Clark, called him “a man of uncouth behaviour” and again, “a man not generally liked,” but that was after the conflict when the two were involved in a legal wrangle. This, then, was the somewhat murky character of Niagara Falls’ first entrepreneur.

The war was no sooner over than Forsyth built a small inn on his family’s property, an establishment that attracted such visitors as the Duke of Richmond because it was the closest to the Horseshoe Falls. But the Duke was not happy with Forsyth; apparently there was trouble with his account. On the other hand, another governor-in-chief, Lord Dalhousie, quite liked him. The innkeeper, he declared, “tho’ a Yankee & reputed to be uncivil, was quite the reverse to us, obliging & attentive in every way.”

Forsyth set out to monopolize the best view of the Falls for his personal gain. In 1818, he built a covered stairway down the cliff to the foot of the cataract, where visitors could don water-resistant clothing and walk behind the curtain of water. When he completed the Pavilion he came close to achieving his object, for its rear windows looked directly onto a portion of the cascade, and guests had the exclusive use of a pathway that led through a woodlot to the finest vantage point of all. Emerging from the shelter of the trees at Table Rock, they were magically treated to the entire panoply of the cataract, which appeared as suddenly as a lantern-slide thrown on a screen.