A few thousand years before the last advance of ice smothered the Escarpment, an earlier Niagara River flowed northwest, gnawing out a gorge all the way back from the site of the town of St. Davids to the head of the present Whirlpool Rapids Gorge. Re-advancing ice had filled this channel with the usual debris of broken rocks and soil so that it was hidden beneath a mantle of earth and vegetation until the Falls, working upstream from the edge of the Escarpment above Queenston, collided with it.
The softer debris in the buried gorge offered less resistance than did the hard dolostones of the Lower Great Gorge. The Niagara River could then quickly tumble over the wall of the glacial rubble and scour out the soft clays and sands, creating the Whirlpool Basin and re-excavating the Whirlpool Rapids Gorge. The fascinating Whirlpool Basin marks the intersection of the older and the younger channels of the Niagara River. The evidence is in the northeast wall for all to see.
Goat Island
The retreat of the ice led to the draining of Lake Iroquois and the lowering of the water level of the subsequent Lake Ontario. A new route east through the valleys of the Mattawa and Ottawa rivers acted as drainage for Lake Algonquin, lowering its level and drying up its outlet through Lake Erie.
The land around the Great Lakes, continuing its recovery from the crushing pressure of the ice, slowly tilted south, changing the drainage pattern so that once again the waters of Algonquin flowed out into Lake Erie and surged into the Niagara. As the volume increased, the erosion of the canyon accelerated and widened. The cataract, moving at a rate that may have reached six feet a year, continued to work its way upstream. Thus was begun, at the time of the building of the pyramids, the broader chasm known as the Upper Great Gorge that leads to the present site of Niagara Falls.
Here, some five hundred years ago, the river encountered an obstacle that caused it to split into two channels. This was Goat Island, created of silts and clays that had originally lain on the bottom of the vanished Lake Tonawanda. On the eastern side of the island, the American Falls took shape, on the western side, where the river makes an abrupt, ninety-degree turn, the Horseshoe. The island’s sheer northwestern face, rising 170 feet from the basin below the furious waters, divides the two cascades.
The waters immediately surrounding Goat Island are relatively shallow and studded with small islets and large isolated rocks, many of them the scenes of dramatic rescues and rescue attempts. Goat Island is so close to the American shore that only a small amount of Niagara’s flow plunges over the edge on that side. As a result, the American Falls are not as effective at erosion as the Horseshoe. The channel here is broken by well-known landmarks such as Bath Island, long used as an anchor for the bridge to Goat. Luna Island divides the American cataract, forming a third waterfall, slender and shimmering, variously known as Luna Falls, Iris Falls, or Bridal Veil Falls.
On the Canadian side of Goat Island, several historic pinpoints of rock stand out from the shore, washed by the spray of the racing river. The Three Sisters islands at the southwest end of the island are the best known, but at one time the Terrapin Rocks, so called because they resembled gigantic tortoises, were equally famous. The water here was so shallow that a slender bridge was constructed out to the rocks and a stone tower built on the very lip of the Horseshoe Falls. The tower did not last out the nineteenth century; the danger from erosion caused the owners to destroy it. But Terrapin Point remains. In 1955 the area was permanently drained of water and back-filled to create an artificial viewing space, perhaps the best of all the vantage points. Here, on the western rim of Goat Island, thousands of visitors look down over the cataract at the very point where the waters hurl themselves over the precipice, 170 feet to the vortex below.
Farther out from Goat Island toward the Canadian shore, the river deepens. Here the current is so strong that the shape of the cataract is constantly changing. Since the first white man, Father Hennepin, reported on the Falls more than three centuries ago, the waterfall has moved about a third of a mile upriver and changed from a gentle curve to a horseshoe bend to today’s gigantic inverted V with it point upstream, where the tumbling waters, tearing away at the dolostone, have created a deep notch. It will change again, for it appears to have oscillated between horseshoe-shape and notch-shape over the centuries depending on the rate of recession.
The shape of the American Falls is also changing. Once this fall was likened to a gigantic weir, its crest a straight line between Goat Island and the opposite shore. But once again the implacable river, tearing out the softer shale, has caused the hard dolostone cap to crumble, leaving a familiar V-shaped notch at the western side to destroy the symmetry.
So powerful is the thrust of the water plunging off the Horseshoe that it has gouged out a hollow beneath the level of the riverbed some two hundred feet deep. On the American side, the pressure of the water is not strong enough to move the piles of talus – broken rock – that are heaped up to more than half the cataract’s height.
The Falls can never be totally controlled, even though modern engineers have come close. The cataract can now be turned off at the pull of a lever. And even at the peak tourist periods in the daylight hours of summer, Niagara Falls is not quite what it once was. Today less than half the river’s flow (and even less than that in the dark of winter) pours over the precipice. The remainder is carefully channelled into tunnels and canals to feed the great power stations that face each other across the gorge just south of Queenston.
Nobody can see the cataract today in all its splendour as the Victorian visitors in their top hats and bonnets saw it. But then, the Victorians in their turn could not see Niagara Falls as the native peoples and the early explorers saw it – a terrifying display of thundering water, hidden at the end of a dizzy gorge, framed in a luxuriant jungle of foliage, half-concealed by the pillaring mists, unprofaned by the hand of humankind.
Each era has had its own vision of Niagara Falls. Some have seen it as a manifestation of the Deity’s omnipotence, others as a Gothic horror lurking among nameless dangers. For every person entranced by its beauty, there has been another seduced by its power. Some have seen it as a backdrop for a non-stop carnival; others have wanted to preserve it exactly as the first explorers found it; and more than a few have wished to destroy it in the interests of science and commerce.
The noble cataract reflects the concerns, the fancies, and the failings of the times. If we gaze deeply enough into its shimmering image, we can perhaps discern our own.
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A prodigious cadence
Within half a century of the discovery of the New World, the European explorers began to hear whispers of an immense waterfall hidden away in the wild heart of the unknown continent. Jacques Cartier may have had a hint of it from the Indians as early as 1535. Samuel de Champlain was told of it in 1603 and marked it on the map simply as “waterfall.” That exotic forest creature Etienne Brûlé, the first white man to reach the Great Lakes, almost certainly saw the Falls sometime before the Hurons killed him in 1633. But he left no personal record of his journeys and adventures.
In the seventeenth century, the Falls was a place of mystery and even magic. A sort of medical missionary, François Gendron, gave a hearsay account, in 1660, of how spray from the Falls was petrified into a form of rock or salt, “of admirable virtue for the curing of sores, fistules, and malign ulcers.” Two centuries later, confidence men would still be hawking “congealed spray” from the cataract.
The first eyewitness description of Niagara Falls did not appear until 1683, when Father Louis Hennepin, a Recollet priest who had accompanied René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, on his journey in search of the Mississippi, published his Description de la Louisiane, an instant best-seller that went into several editions. Fifteen years later he expanded and revised, not always accurately, his first brief report on the cataract.
A butcher’s son from the Belgian town of Ath, Hennepin by his own account “felt a strong inclination to fly from the world” and so joi
ned the austere missionary order of Recollets, mendicant friars who owned nothing but the grey cloak and cowl that was their habit. Hennepin was a mass of contradictions. He wanted to retire from the world, and yet he longed to travel to strange lands and yearned for high adventure in exotic places. Sent on a mission to the port of Calais, he fell “passionately in love with hearing the relations that Masters of Ships gave of their Voyages.” Often he would hide behind the doors of taverns, eavesdropping as sailors talked of “their Encounters by Sea, the Perils they had gone through, and all the Accidents which befell them in their long Voyages.”
His dreams were realized in 1675 when, at the age of about thirty-five, and no doubt at his own urging, he was selected as one of five of his order to take passage for New France. The ship’s company included two great figures of the French regime, François de Laval, the first Bishop of Quebec, and La Salle, the future explorer.
Hennepin and La Salle, whose subsequent westward expedition he was to join, struck sparks off one another from the outset. A single incident suggests a great deal about Hennepin – his prudery, his belligerence, his sensitivity. On board ship was a group of young women, a small contingent belonging to that grand company of more than one thousand filles du roi, the “King’s Daughters,” sent out to New France as prospective wives for settlers and soldiers. The zealous young cleric found their behaviour immodest and took it upon himself to lecture them for “making a lot of noise with their dancing” on the transparent pretext that they were keeping the sailors from their rest. He had no sooner rebuked the women than La Salle rebuked him. A cantankerous argument followed, which the touchy Hennepin would never forget. La Salle, he was to claim, turned pale with rage and from that point on persecuted him.
Always a bit of a braggart, jealous of the exploits of his contemporaries, ever eager to take all the credit to himself, Hennepin patronized and belittled the explorer in his accounts, displaying little of the charity associated with his cloth – not the most amiable of companions, one must conclude, in the exploration of darkest America. Later on, when he and two comrades were captured by the Sioux, he managed to make enemies of both his fellow prisoners before their release.
Yet he was certainly courageous, hard working, energetic, adventurous, and, above all, curious, and for that we must be grateful. After Hennepin arrived in Canada in 1675, he was sent as a missionary to Fort Frontenac, on the present site of Kingston, Ontario, then a wild and remote outpost in the land of the Iroquois. La Salle, meanwhile, had obtained the Kitig’s authority to explore the western regions of New France. In those days no exploration was undertaken without the presence of a priest. In 1678, Hennepin’s superiors ordered him to accompany La Salle on his travels. Nothing could have pleased him more.
Hennepin was to be part of an advance company of sixteen under Dominique La Motte de Luciere charged with the task of setting up a fort and building a barque on Lake Erie. Travel was hazardous in those times. The company set off from Fort Frontenac in savage November weather aboard a ten-ton brigantine, tossed about fiercely in the mountainous waves. Hugging the shoreline for safety, the crew eventually managed to run the ship into the protection of a river mouth (probably the Humber) near the present site of Toronto. That night the river froze and the following morning the entire company was obliged to hack out a passage to the lake with axes.
On December 6 they reached the mouth of the Niagara, which no ship had yet penetrated. It was too dark to enter, and so they stood out five miles from shore, trying to manage a little sleep in their cramped quarters. The following morning, December 7, they landed on the western (now the Canadian) bank at a small Seneca village. Here, the friendly Indians with a single fling of the net pulled in some three hundred small fish, all of which they gave to the newcomers, “ascribing their luck in fishing to the arrival of the great wooden canoe.”
To the Indians, and indeed to the early explorers, the lower Niagara and the Falls above were little more than an impediment, forcing a long and weary portage over steep ridges. When Hennepin and several of the party paddled up the river, they found their way blocked by the current of the first of the great gorges through which the Niagara rushes. They were forced to abandon their craft and set off on snowshoes, toiling up the miniature mountain now known as Queenston Heights.
Following the indistinct portage trail of the Indians, they could see, through a screen of trees, the columns of mist rising from the great cataract and hear the rumble of its waters. But they did not pause, for they were anxious to move beyond the Falls to locate a spot where La Salle could build his barque (to be called Griffon). They camped that night at the mouth of Chippawa Creek (now the Weiland River), scraping away a foot of snow in order to build a fire. The next day, surprising herds of deer and flushing out flocks of wild turkeys, they retraced their steps and spent half a day gazing on Niagara’s natural wonders.
Standing on the high bank above the cataract, they peered through a tangle of snow-covered evergreens and deciduous trees, naked and skeletal. They clambered down to the rim of the gorge for a better view, probably in the vicinity of Clifton Hill, a wintry forest then, a neon carnival today. And so Hennepin reached the very lip of the precipice.
See him now on that chill December morning, shivering in his grey habit, staring down into “this most dreadful Gulph” and then averting his eyes because of the mesmerizing effect. “When one stands near the Fall and looks down,” he was to write, “… one is seized with Horror, and the Head turns round, so that one cannot look long or steadfastly upon it.”
The great cataract was farther downstream then. To Hennepin’s gaze, it formed an almost even line from bank to bank, curving gently from the cliffside of Goat Island to what is now the Canadian shore, its crestline only half its present length. On the far side he could see that the cataract between the river bank and Goat Island was broken into two parts, as it is today (the smaller being the Luna or Bridal Veil Falls), while close to the vast overhang of Table Rock on the near shore a fourth jet cascaded into the gorge (and, though he did not record it, there was probably a fifth). That one has long since vanished, as a result of the Falls’ implacable backward erosion.
It is said that the priest, who carried a portable altar strapped to his back, went down on his knees to make an obeisance to his Deity, his ears assailed as if by Divine thunder. True or not, it is a plausible fancy, for Hennepin, by his own account, was shaken by the “dreadful roaring and bellowing of the Waters” and by the spectacle of the fearsome chasm, which he and his comrades “could not behold without a shudder.” Small wonder! At that point, as each second ticked by, 200,000 cubic feet of water – the equivalent of a million bathtubs emptying – was being hurled into the gorge from the precipice.
These falls were unlike any that Hennepin had seen or heard of. He had probably viewed alpine cataracts in Switzerland, for he had travelled through southern Europe, but this fall defied the conventional image of how a cataract should look. It is its width, not its height, that makes Niagara spectacular. Taken together, the three falls are more than twenty times as wide as they are high. Their massiveness makes them unique. Fifty other waterfalls in the world have more height than Niagara, but of these only Victoria Falls is broader.
Any falls with which the Father was familiar would have been slender – long, lacy columns of tumbling water bouncing from crag to crag like some sure-footed alpine creature. But here there were no mountains, and that astonished and puzzled Hennepin. The river coursed across a flat, forested plain and then, without warning, split in two and hurled itself over a dizzy cliff. “I could not conceive,” he wrote, “how it came to pass that four great Lakes … should empty themselves at this Great Fall, and yet not drown a good part of America.”
He could not free himself of the stereotype of the mountain cataract. Europe got its first visual rendering of the Falls in an engraving based on the priest’s description. It shows the Horseshoe Falls twice as high as they are broad, the American Falls thre
e times as high. And there are mountains in the distance! That became the basis for all pictorial representations for the next sixty years. Even as late as 1817, the Hennepin version of the Falls, complete with mountains, was appearing on maps of the region.
Later, Hennepin made his way down the steep bank of the gorge, struggling over great boulders and slabs of slippery shale, threading his way between fallen trees and through a frozen web of vines and branches, to stand at the edge of the boiling river and to look up, through the veil of mist, at the half-obscured cataract. Here the thunder of the waters was so oppressive that he hazarded the guess it had driven away the Indians who had once lived in the vicinity, existing on the flesh of deer and waterfowl swept over the brink. To remain, Hennepin intimated, was to court deafness.
First drawing of Niagara Falls based on Hennepin’s description
Among those literary wanderers of the day who sought a wide and appreciative audience, exaggeration was the fashion. Tales abounded of strange and exotic sights in the world’s secret crannies – of dragons and devils, half-human creatures, sea beasts, two-headed beings, one-eyed cannibals, and all manner of wild and mysterious fauna. Hennepin was not free of hyperbole. Gazing across at the lesser cataract and watching the sheet of water pouring over the protruding edge of dolostone, he realized it would be possible to walk behind the falling waters. Later, he insisted that the ground under that fall “was big enough for four coaches to drive abreast without being wet.” That was a gross exaggeration.
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