Niagara: A History of the Falls (9 page)

And here he was swept by the same sense of letdown that struck so many other travellers seduced by earlier writers – the ones who had confessed it impossible to describe the indescribable. Hawthorne had a vision of the Falls fixed in his head and it didn’t jibe with what he saw. He had come to Niagara “haunted with a vision of foam and fury, and dizzy cliffs, and an ocean tumbling down out of the sky – a scene, in short, which Nature had too much good taste and calm simplicity to realize.”

“My mind,” he wrote, “had struggled to adapt these false conceptions to the reality, and finding the effort vain, a wretched sense of disappointment weighed me down. I climbed the precipice, and threw myself on the earth – feeling that I was unworthy to look on the Great Falls, and careless about beholding them again.”

Gradually, Hawthorne came to the conclusion that “Niagara is indeed a wonder of the world” but that time and thought were needed to comprehend it. He cast aside all previous impressions and devoted himself to hours of contemplation, “suffering the mighty scene to work its own impression.”

As other tourists began to arrive, Hawthorne became amused by the effect the Falls had on them. Most greeted the spectacle laconically. One short and ruddy Englishman peeped over the edge “and evinced his appreciation by a broad grin.” His robust wife was so concerned about the safety of their small boy that she didn’t even glance at the Falls, while the child was far more interested in his stick of candy.

An American turned up with a copy of Basil Hall’s
Travels in North America
and “labored earnestly to adjust Niagara to the captain’s description, departing, at last, without one new idea or sensation of his own.” He was followed by a sketch artist who complained that Goat Island was in the wrong place. “It should have been thrown farther to the right, so as to widen the American falls, and contract those of the Horse-shoe.” Two Michigan travellers appeared to declare that, on the whole, the sight was worth looking at – certainly there was an immense amount of waterpower available – but they would be prepared to go twice as far to contemplate the masonry of the Erie Canal at Lockport.

Finally, a young man in cotton homespun turned up, carrying a staff in his hand and a pack on his shoulders. He stood at the very lip of Table Rock, fixing his eyes on the Horseshoe Falls until “his whole soul seemed to go forth and be transported thither,” at which point the staff dropped from his fingers and tumbled over the brink.

Hawthorne lingered until he was alone. Then, as the sun set, he took the winding road down to the ferry landing on the Canadian side to watch as “the golden sunshine tinged the sheet of the American cascade and painted on its heaving spray the broken semicircle of a rainbow.” His steps were slow. He lingered at every turn, knowing these glimpses would be his last. “The solitude of the old wilderness now reigned over the whole vicinity of the falls. My enjoyment became the more rapturous, because no poet shared it – nor wretch, devoid of poetry, profaned it: but the spot, so famous throughout the world, was all my own!”

The novelist was not alone in his initial experience of the Falls. Two years later, Anna Jameson, the British art critic, feminist, and travel writer, preparing her book
Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada
, reproached herself because, like Hawthorne’s, her first experience had been a letdown. The cataract had thundered in her imagination as long as she could remember. Now she wished she had never seen it, that it had remained “a thing unbeheld – a thing imagined, hoped, and anticipated, – something to live for.” The reality of that first sight had displaced from her mind “an illusion far more magnificent than itself – I have no words for my utter disappointment.”

She, too, blamed herself for failing to respond to Niagara. Surely those early reports she had read – of astonishment, enthusiasm, and rapture – could not be passed off as mere hyperbole! And yet the cataracts of Switzerland had affected her a thousand times more than the immensity of Niagara.

“O I could beat myself!” she wrote. The first impression of a new experience – that sudden sensation of awe, surprise, and delight – was lost and could never be recaptured. “Though I should live a thousand years, long as Niagara itself shall roll, I can never see it again for the first time. Something is gone that cannot be restored.”

On and on she went, in an orgy of verbal flagellation, castigating herself for her obtuseness. “What has come over my soul and senses? -I am no longer Anna – I am metamorphosed – I am translated – I am an ass’s head, a clod, a wooden spoon, a fat weed growing on Lethe’s bank, a stock, a stone, a petrification – for have I not seen Niagara, the wonder of wonders; and felt – no words can tell
what
disappointment!”

She had come up from Queenston that day – January 29, 1836 – when suddenly her companion checked the horses and exclaimed, “The Falls!” Everything she had read had created an image of the cataract – soul-subduing beauty, appalling terror, power, height, velocity, immensity. But now, as she gazed down upon that distant scene – the Falls half-frozen in a white shroud – she fell quite silent, “my very soul sunk within me.” It was not at all what she had expected.

She put up at the Clifton House on the Canadian side, now desolate in winter, its summer verandahs and open balconies hung with icicles and encumbered with snow, its public rooms shabby and chill, its windows broken, its dinner tables dusty. From there she donned crampons, proceeded to Table Rock, and suddenly “could not tear myself away.” Like Hawthorne, she sat on the edge until “a kind of dreamy fascination came over me,” and watched the sun create an iris across the American Falls. She too had been brought up on the travellers’ accounts of terror, awe, and grandeur, and the reality had failed to match that fantasy. Scarcely anything she had read had mentioned beauty, but as an art critic she knew what the emerging school of landscape painters knew. They were teaching the European public to look at nature with fresh eyes.

When she returned that summer, it was not the sublime that she extolled. “The people who have spoken or written of these Falls of Niagara have surely never done justice to their loveliness, their inexpressible, inconceivable beauty,” she wrote. “The feeling of their beauty has become with me a deeper feeling than that of their sublimity.” The scene before her that evening soothed rather than excited.

Her enthusiasm was tempered by a brief note of disharmony, which later visitors would echo more loudly. “The Americans have disfigured their share of the rapids with mills and manufactories, and horrid red brick houses, and other unacceptable, unseasonable sights and signs of sordid industry.” She was pleased that the City of the Falls on the Canadian side had failed to materialize. It would have brought a “range of cotton factories, iron foundries, grist mills, saw mills where now the mighty waters rush along in glee and liberty.” The wooden hotels, museums, and curiosity stalls were bad enough, but had the real-estate scheme succeeded, “there would be moral pollution brought into this majestic scene far more degrading.”

She reserved her most scathing remarks for the new Terrapin Tower, a forty-five-foot, lighthouse-shaped structure, built in 1833 and perched on the turtle-shaped rocks from which it took its name. Those who ventured to the top of the tower, overlooking the eastern rim of the Horseshoe Falls, were treated to a view of that cascade quite as magnificent as the one from Table Rock, but Mrs. Jameson had no sympathy for the “profane wretch” who designed it.

“It stands there so detestably impudent and
mal-à-propos –
it is such a signal yet puny monument of bad taste – so miserably
mesquin
and so presumptuous, that I do hope the violated majesty of nature will take the matter in hand, and overwhelm or cast it down the precipice.…” But the tower stood for forty years, by which time considerably grosser edifices had marred the cataract’s beauty.

It was women and poets who felt most strongly about the commercial profanation of the Falls. Caroline Gilman, the Boston-born author and poet who stayed at the Cataract House on the American side that same year, agreed that “this site is ruined.” She observed, with distaste, “the beautiful and sublime giving place to the useful and the low.” It was the prayer of all persons of discrimination, she wrote, “that Goat or Iris Island may be preserved from this desecration.”

She descended the Goat Island cliff by way of the new circular staircase named for Nicholas Biddle, the Philadelphia banker and financier who underwrote its construction so that visitors might enjoy a view of the Horseshoe Falls from the rocks in the river below. As Mrs. Gilman wrote, “here its height and power are fully appreciated.” She returned to Goat Island and climbed up the maligned Terrapin Tower to encounter an even more breathtaking view, “the crown and glory of the whole.” Her exaltation was transcendent. “I felt the moral influence of the scene acting on my spiritual nature, and while lingering at the summit, alone, offered a simple and humble prayer.” At the extreme end of the Terrapin pier she lay down with her head directly over the Falls, like Francis Abbott, and “ceased to pray or even to think.… I gave myself up to the overpowering greatness of the scene, and my soul was still.”

Other visitors were beginning to see in Niagara a manifestation of the Creator’s great design. Early travellers had described the spectacle as hellish; now it was divine. Mrs. Gilman felt “as if the Great Architect were near,” and the poets and artists who followed picked up the theme. To William Henry Bartlett, sketching prominent Canadian sites in 1836, to see Niagara was “to see God in the excellence of His power.”

But the most widely quoted testimonial to the moral and religious inspiration provided by Niagara came from Charles Dickens. The novelist, exhausted by his work on two prodigious novels,
Barnaby Rudge
and
The Old Curiosity Shop
, had embarked on a five-month tour of the United States. He arrived at the Falls by train from Buffalo on a raw, chilly morning in April 1842. The trees were still naked of foliage, and a damp mist was creeping up from the ground. He had reached Buffalo at about five-thirty and was so impatient to see the Falls that he set off immediately after breakfast.

Unlike the contemplative Hawthorne, Dickens could not wait to see the Falls. He kept straining his eyes, “every moment expecting to behold the spray.” Each time the train stopped he listened, hoping to hear the roar. At last he saw two white clouds “rising up slowly and majestically from the depths of the earth.” Soon his journey ended, and at last he “heard the mighty rush of water and felt the ground tremble underneath my feet.”

He did not linger on the American side but stumbled down the steep, slippery bank and climbed over broken rock, “deafened by the noise, half-blinded by the spray, and wet to the skin,” to reach the ferry landing. Crossing the Niagara River at a point where the immense torrent of water poured headlong from the heights above, he felt “stunned and unable to comprehend the vastness of the scene.”

Where Hawthorne’s response to the spectacle had been intellectual, Dickens’s was spiritual. “It was not until I came on Table Rock, and looked – Great Heaven, on what a Fall of bright-green water! – that it came upon me in its full might and majesty. Then, when I felt how near to my Creator I was standing, the first effect, and the enduring one – instant and lasting – of the tremendous spectacle, was Peace. Peace of Mind, tranquillity, calm recollections of the Dead, great thoughts of Eternal Rest and Happiness; nothing of gloom or terror. Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an Image of Beauty; to remain there, changeless and indelible, until its pulses cease to beat, for ever.”

Dickens passed “ten memorable days … on that Enchanted Ground!” He did not stir, in all that time, from the Canadian side, but wandered to and fro, observing the cataract from every angle and vantage point and at every hour. “To have Niagara before me, lighted by the sun and by the moon, red in the day’s decline, and grey as evening slowly fell upon it; to look upon it every day, and wake up in the night and hear its ceaseless voice; this was enough.”

2
The father of geology

In gazing upon the tumbling waters, Charles Dickens had never felt closer to God. In the years that followed, more visitors noted evidence of the Deity’s work. To many the Falls was a shrine. John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, was one who saw it as “a pledge of God to mankind that the destruction from the waters shall not again visit the earth.”

These references to Niagara Falls as a manifestation of the Divine would become even more frequent as the century advanced. It was as if the true believers used the cataract as a crutch to bolster their faith, to reassure themselves that the Almighty was alive and well and manifest in Nature. For with the emergence of the new science of geology, the old faith was beginning to unravel.

The old faith insisted that the age of the Earth could not be determined by the character of its rocks but by the words of the Old Testament, which made it clear that the earth was less than six thousand years old. Against this was the troubling evidence of the Niagara gorge. It was possible to calculate, at least roughly, the speed at which the river had nibbled away at the limestone cliffs, forcing the cataract farther and farther upstream. Anyone who had lived beside the river for any length of time could see the result of that erosion – great platforms of rock crashing into the gorge, piles of talus heaped below the smaller fall, caves hollowed out behind the tumbling curtain.

During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a number of Niagara observers, on the basis of this evidence, tried to reckon the real age of the river. In 1790, one Niagara observer, William Maclay, pointed out to the surveyor-general of the United States (who had himself been studying the rate of attrition) that people who had lived along the gorge for thirty years insisted that the Falls had moved twenty feet upriver in that time. At that rate, he said, the river was 55,440 years old.