Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  The span, when completed, weighed a thousand tons. It was hung from four ten-inch cables of wrought iron, each constructed of 3,640 wires, oiled, spliced, reeled, strung, adjusted, and finally wrapped by his own patented methods. As he wrote, with his usual confidence, the finished webs were not only pleasing but “their massive proportions are also well calculated to inspire confidence in their strength.” The tension composing each wire, he declared, “is so nearly uniform I feel justified in using the term perfect.”

  In developing his theory of stiffening, Roebling was intuitive; the principles of aerodynamics were not known in 1854 and would not be for the best part of a century. No other engineer caught on to the fact that a high wind could cause undulations in the floor of a bridge that would build up until the bridge was destroyed.

  Even Ellet failed to grasp this principle. The Niagara Suspension Bridge would survive for forty-two years. His own, over the Ohio River at Wheeling, lasted a mere five. Completed in 1849, it was the longest span in the world – more than a thousand feet – but remarkably light and narrow for its length. It lacked the strong mesh of stays and trusses that Roebling insisted upon, and that was its undoing.

  In May 1854, a high wind struck Ellet’s bridge and collapsed it into a tangle of twisted girders. A reporter for the Wheeling Intelligencer had just walked off the structure when the catastrophe occurred. He turned to see it “heaving and dashing with tremendous force.” It “lunged like a ship in a storm,” the walkway rising almost to the height of the towers, then falling back, twisting and writhing until, in one last determined fling, half the flooring was nearly upside down.

  “The great body of the flooring and the suspenders forming something like a basket between the towers, was swayed to and fro like the motion of a pendulum. Each vibration giving it increased momentum, the cables, which sustained the whole structure, were unable to resist a force operating on them in so many different directions, and were literally twisted and wrenched from their fastenings.” Shortly afterward, “down went the immense structure from its dizzy height to the stream below, with an appalling crash and roar.”

  The engineering profession as a whole was baffled by this unexpected development. But not Roebling, who read the account and knew at once what had happened. His immediate reaction was to order additional stiffening for his bridge. From this point on engineers ignored Roebling’s principles at their peril. Almost ninety years later one group did. On November 7, 1940, the Wheeling disaster was duplicated, almost blow for blow, when a high wind struck the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge over Puget Sound in Washington State, causing it to shake to pieces.

  In July 1854, a different kind of disaster struck Roebling’s bridge crew. A plague of cholera broke out, causing sixty deaths in the first week. Roebling didn’t stop his own work for a minute. Constantly exposed to the disease, he decided to use his willpower to fight it off, as he had once fought off seasickness. He paced his room all night, refusing to give in. “Keep off fear” he declared, “– this is the great secret. Whoever is afraid of cholera will be attacked, and no treatment can save him.…” Whether through willpower or plain happenstance, he survived. The epidemic ended in August.

  The following January, Roebling’s bridge weathered a tremendous twelve-hour gale. “My bridge didn’t move a muscle,” he said proudly. Less than three months later, on March 8, 1855, with the structure almost complete, he put it to a series of tests using heavy locomotives. That day, a twenty-three-ton engine of the Great Western Railway crossed the span “without the least vibration.”

  On March 18, when the bridge was opened to the public, a twenty-eight-ton engine carrying twenty double-loaded freight cars with a gross weight of 368 tons crossed the bridge, covering its entire length – the first train in history to cross a bridge suspended by wire cables. “No vibrations whatever,” Roebling noted jubilantly. “Less noise and movement than in a common truss bridge.”

  The first passenger trains, jammed to the roof with people, crossed at the rate of twenty a day. “No one is afraid to cross,” Roebling exulted. “The passage of trains is a great sight, worth seeing it.” The Niagara Falls, New York, Gazette headlined a “Great Triumph of Art.” It was an even greater triumph of engineering. For this was the first railway suspension bridge in the world, constructed at a cost of only $400,000. As Roebling reported to the bridge companies, a European bridge would have cost four million “without serving a better purpose or insuring greater safety.” Stephenson’s heavy tubular bridges in Great Britain were now seen as obsolete. The suspension bridge belonged to the future.

  Roebling’s Niagara bridge remained intact until, in 1897, it was finally retired to make way for a wider and stronger structure geared to the increase in rail traffic and the heavier rolling stock. But its wire cables were as sound as they had been when Roebling installed them more than forty-two years before. The same could not be said for the two bridges constructed by the other two men – Edward Serrell and Samuel Keefer – who had once been in the running with Ellet and Roebling to span the Niagara.

  Serrell was given a contract to build a highway suspension bridge over the Niagara between Lewiston and Queenston. The 1,053-foot span was completed in 1851, damaged by a gale in 1855, and rescued by Roebling, who installed a system of guy ropes to protect it from the high winds. In the spring of 1864, after an ice jam had caused the workmen to loosen the guys, another gale destroyed Serrell’s bridge.

  Three years later Keefer, an Ottawa engineer, was given the task of building the Clifton suspension bridge two miles closer to the Falls than the Roebling structure. This wooden suspension bridge – 1,268 feet long – was opened in 1869, widened and reconstructed with steel in 1887, and reopened in 1888. Seven months later, on January 9, 1889, a hurricane tore it from the cliffs and dumped it into the river, where it remains hidden beneath the waters to this day.

  Roebling’s stint at Niagara was scarcely completed before he was contemplating a new and more ambitious suspension bridge. In 1867 he achieved his ambition when he was appointed chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. Two years later, tragedy struck. Just as work on the bridge was about to begin, on June 29, 1869, he suffered an injury. He was standing on a piling at the ferry slip in Brooklyn when the ferry hit it a glancing blow. Roebling’s foot was crushed and some of his toes had to be amputated.

  No one considered the accident serious. Roebling, with his usual stoicism, fought off the pain, but his willpower could not fend off tetanus as it had once fought off seasickness. He died six weeks later. A statue was raised to him by the citizens of Trenton, but his real memorials are the bridges – not just his bridges, but all the suspension bridges – whose graceful ancestor linked two nations at the mid-point of the nineteenth century.

  Chapter Four

  1

  Miss Bird “does” Niagara

  2

  Frankenstein’s monster

  3

  Mr. Church’s masterpiece

  1

  Miss Bird “does” Niagara

  To Isabella Lucy Bird, a spunky if snobbish Englishwoman, Roebling’s unfinished suspension bridge appeared infinitely more interesting at first glance than her initial view of the Horseshoe Falls. “The floor of the bridge is 230 feet above the river, and the depth of the river immediately under it is 250 feet!” she wrote. “The view from it is magnificent; to the left the furious river, confined in a narrow space, rushes in rapids to the Whirlpool; and to the right the Horse-shoe Fall pours its torrents of waters into the dark and ever invisible abyss.”

  This was her second trip to Niagara, but until this moment she had not been too impressed by its surroundings. She was just twenty-three years old, on the verge of a career that would establish her under her married name – Isabella Bishop – as one of the most popular and widely read travel writers of her time. Deeply religious – her father was an evangelical low-church Anglican clergyman – well educated, and more than a little jingoistic and supercilious, s
he was one of a growing band of peripatetic Englishwomen who were exploring North America as they might have scrutinized the unknown jungles of Africa.

  Since the opening of the Erie Canal, a dozen or more women had published lively accounts of their adventures at Niagara Falls, including one appearing in 1848 entitled An Englishwoman in America. At Niagara, Miss Bird was scribbling notes for her own work, which with perfect assurance she would call The Englishwoman in America. The two books reflected the political and social bents of their authors. Everything about North America espoused by the earlier writer, Sarah Mytton Maury, a formidable mother of eleven, the youthful Miss Bird decried. That included slavery, Roman Catholics, Irish immigrants, and the Democratic party.

  Her first view of the cataract in the summer of 1854 had been disappointing. The Horseshoe Falls were partially obscured by foliage and mist while the American Falls seemed to her not much more than a gigantic millrace. But she reserved her disdain for the growing commercialism that was defacing and degrading the natural surroundings – a collection of mills on the American side and “a great fungus growth” of museums, curiosity shops, taverns, and pagodas on the British.

  She had scarcely attained what she called “the proper degree of mental abstraction with which it is necessary to contemplate Niagara” when she was beset by the usual gaggle of hack drivers, urging her to do the rounds of the area for four dollars. She fled to the Clifton House only to be importuned by a new group with another volley of appeals. Most of them appeared to be half tipsy.

  In that summer season, the white Clifton House, with its three green verandahs, its huge ballroom, and its crystal chandeliers, was the centre of social activity at the Falls. Balls, picnics, and parties were held, many in the handsome garden at the front of the hotel. Here, to the strains of an invisible orchestra, the anointed danced under flickering torches in a scene that reminded Miss Bird of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  The hotel could accommodate four hundred guests, “tourists, merchants, lawyers, officers, senators, wealthy southerners and sallow down-easters, all flying alike from business and heat.” But when Miss Bird returned in the autumn, the gaiety was over, and she sat down to a rushed lunch with only twenty-five persons. Her sensibilities were offended not only by the speed with which the meal was eaten – she clocked it at five minutes – but also at the frantic pace that the visitor was otherwise expected to maintain to take in every spectacle.

  All Miss Bird wanted to do was to contemplate the Falls in solitude, but that was difficult. She found herself unable to resist the cozening of guides and hack drivers who insisted that she view the spectacle from every angle – from above, below, and even behind – descend the spiral staircase to its base, cross by ferry through its spray, and visit Bloody Run, Burning Springs, and other points of interest, not to mention the Indian curiosity shops, which seemed to her to have little to do with the Falls.

  She was determined to view the Falls from Goat Island, and now, on this second visit in 1855, she found she could travel by hack across Roebling’s newly opened bridge to the American side without hazarding the rocky ferry crossing. That, however, meant another infernal squabble with a crowd of some twenty ragged hack drivers, all clamouring for a fare. She and two other guests, a Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence (whom she clumsily disguised in her book with the pseudonym “Walrence”), were scarcely out the door when the drivers all began shouting various prices.

  The first offered to do the rounds for five dollars. A second dropped to four dollars and a half and was immediately attacked as a thief and a blackguard, whereupon “a man in rags” offered to take them to Goat Island for three. When she accepted, the first hackman offered to meet the three-dollar price, insisting that his rival was drunk and his carriage wasn’t fit for a lady.

  A fist fight followed, with much shouting and squabbling, until the ragged man succeeded in driving up to the door. Only then did Miss Bird realize, with sinking heart, that the hack really wasn’t fit for ladies – the stuffing was quite bare of upholstery, the splashboards were held together by pieces of rope, and the driver was at least half drunk.

  Off they went, bumping along the Niagara gorge, 250 feet above the green flood, with no protective parapet to offer security. At the bridge they paid a toll of sixty cents to a man who insisted on coins, saying (as many did at that time) that banknotes were only waste paper. But the view was magnificent.

  Having crossed the bridge, assuring the American customs officers that they were not smugglers, they were jolted over the portage road, all stumps and potholes, which the half-tipsy driver made no attempt to avoid. “There now, faith, wasn’t I nearly done for myself?” he exclaimed, as he was flung from his seat and almost over the dashboard.

  More and more visitors to the Falls were becoming irritated by the commercialization of the Niagara area, and Miss Bird was no exception. Niagara Falls, New York (it had long since discarded the name of Manchester), with its “agglomeration of tea gardens, curiosity-shops, and monster hotels, with domes of shining tin,” did not appeal to her. It was not until she crossed Augustus Porter’s bridge and paid her twenty-five-cent toll that she began to appreciate her surroundings. Here on Goat Island (she preferred the little-used name Iris Island, conjuring up as it did the goddess of the rainbow) Isabella Bird let her emotions run away with her.

  It was a glorious afternoon. A slight shower had fallen, so that sparkling raindrops hung from every leaf and twig. A rainbow spanned the river, and the fresh, clear light shone on the scarlet and crimson leaves of the sugar maple. The droshky drivers and the satanic mills were all forgotten. Here at last she had achieved the full, joyous realization of her ideas of Niagara. She could look out beyond the tangle of the shore at islets garlanded with trees and vines and carpeted with moss. Untrodden by the foot of man, these pinpoints of green foliage were protected by waters that raged and foamed in wild turmoil – beauty and terror in perfect combination. The trio made their way across the island and walked through the shaded groves of ancient trees, then on to little Luna Island to drink in “a view of matchless magnificence.”

  She could not ignore the darker side. Since 1848, no one could venture onto Luna Island without being reminded of the bizarre tragedy that had occurred on a hot July evening that year. A group of tourists, including a Mr. and Mrs. De Forest, their young daughter, Nettie, and a family friend, Charles Addington, described as “a young man of great talent and promise,” disported themselves on the islet. The De Forests and some others returned to Goat Island to rest on one of the benches, De Forest calling out to his daughter to follow and to stay away from the water.

  “Never mind – let her alone – I’ll watch her,” said Addington. The child pulled gleefully on his coat, whereupon he seized her playfully, crying, “Ah! you rogue, you’re caught! Shall I throw you in?”

  She wriggled out of his arms, took one step too far, and toppled into the roaring river. Addington sprang after her, tried to pull her back, and failed. Both went over the Falls to their deaths, the child locked in the young man’s arms, Addington crying out, “For Jesus’ sake, O save our souls!” – or so the guide told it. The mangled bodies were found some days later, the little girl still clutching her parasol.

  Duly chastened by this dreadful tale, Miss Bird and her companions climbed to the top of Terrapin Tower, where the scene itself transcended everything that had gone before. “No existing words can describe it, no painter can give the remotest idea of it; it is the voice of the Great Creator,” Isabella Bird wrote. She shuddered at the sight of the cauldron below, lost in foam and mist, and of the frail bridge that had brought her to this spot, and felt as she came down the trembling staircase that one wish of her life had been gratified.

  The mixed bag of impressions continued, rather like a modern television program in which a splendid travelogue is interrupted by squalid commercials. Bath Island, one of the several rocky pinpoints in the rapids above the American Falls, was “lovely in itself, but desecrated by th
e presence of a remarkably hirsute American, who keeps a toll-house, with the words Tee-creams’ and ‘Indian Curiosities’ painted in large letters on it.”

  Back on the mainland she was again struck by the beauty of the scene. But her enthusiasm was swiftly dampened by a visit to a curio shop, where she bought several overpriced souvenirs. The hack driver, meanwhile, having managed to refortify himself with drink, almost overturned the cab on the way to the Whirlpool. There Miss Bird, who had a distinct flair for the macabre, was transfixed by the impetuous rush of the waters. “Their fury is resistless, and the bodies of those who are carried over the falls are whirled round here in a horrible dance, frequently till decomposition takes place,” she reported.

  Now she insisted that their guide tell the story of the origin of Bloody Run, a narrow stream that poured over a massive cliff on the American side and into the Stygian chasm. Lawrence protested, fearing the effect of the story on the weak nerves of his wife. But the implacable Miss Bird got her way, confessing, as she gazed into the yawning depths, that “imagination lent an added horror to the tale.”

  On a sultry morning in September 1763, a body of one hundred British soldiers, forwarding goods from Fort Niagara to Lake Erie, had sat down on the edge of this precipice, at a spot known as Devil’s Hole, to take their rest. There they were the victims of two ambushes by Seneca Indians in the pay of the French. The natives tomahawked them on the spot and then hurled the lot – wagons, horses, soldiers, and drivers – over the cliff until the little stream, in Isabella Bird’s later description, became “a torrent purple with human gore.”

  Back at the Clifton House, still yearning to enjoy an uninterrupted view of the Horseshoe Falls, she felt herself put upon again when she was urged to go behind the curtain of falling water. The Lawrences were too nervous – said they couldn’t stand the trip – but as an Englishwoman, Miss Bird must chance the adventure. The capabilities of Englishwomen, she thought drily, were vastly overrated by Americans. Nevertheless, she felt she had no choice but to uphold the honour of her country and her sex.