Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  He was no boaster, but after one of his exploits he enjoyed playing to the crowd. When he rescued Chapin, he climbed up on one of the taller cedars on the little island and waved a green branch to the spectators. When he returned, he distributed a boatload of green boughs to the crowd, who replaced them with coins thrown into the boat and then carried him on their shoulders into the village. Fishing and sailing parties found his presence reassuring. To some, he was indispensable.

  When Blondin and Farini were cavorting high above the gorge, Robinson was piloting the little steamer Maid of the Mist, which had in 1854 replaced an earlier vessel of the same name. The Maid had been built as a tourist excursion craft, shuttling back and forth across the river so close to the Falls that the passengers, dressed in oilskins, were drenched by the spray. George W. Holley, a longtime Niagara resident and chronicler, reported that the journey aboard the Maid beneath the spray of the cataract was so impressive that many were not content with a single trip but returned time after time to enjoy the experience. “The admiration which the visitor felt as he passed quietly along near the American Fall was changed into awe when he began to feel the mighty pulse of the great deep just below the tower, then swung round into the white foam directly in front of the Horseshoe, and saw the sky of waters falling toward him. And he seemed to be lifted on wings as he sailed swiftly down the rushing stream through a baptism of spray.”

  Now, having lost her U.S. landing rights, the Maid had become unprofitable, and her owners proposed to sell her as she lay at the Canadian dock. But the only offer received for the vessel was conditional on her being delivered at Queenston. That would mean the unthinkable – a trip downriver, through the rapids and the Whirlpool and then into the gorge below, a journey no one had ever made. But Robinson agreed to make it as captain and pilot and managed to secure two other volunteers, an engineer, James H. Jones, and a mechanic, James Mclntyre, as crew.

  The vessel was a single-stack paddlewheel steamer, seventy-two feet long with a draught of eight feet, powered by a one-hundred-horsepower engine. When she set off on the afternoon of June 15, 1861, from the dock just above the Niagara Suspension Bridge, few of the crowd that saw her depart expected to see Robinson and his crew again alive. One hundred yards below the eddy in which the Maid was safely tethered, the river plunged sharply into the rapids that led directly to the Whirlpool. From there to Queenston, it was “one wild, turbulent rush and whirl of water, without a square foot of smooth surface in the whole distance.”

  At three o’clock, Robinson took his place at the wheel and jangled the starting bell. With a shriek from her whistle, the little craft swung out into midstream and shot into the rapids under the bridge. Robinson and Mclntyre both gripped the wheel with all the strength at their command, only to find themselves impotent in the raging water. Robinson struggled vainly to wrestle the ship into the inside curve of the rapids, but she was swept directly by a fierce crosscurrent toward the outer curve. A jet of water struck the rudder, and he felt her heel over. Another column dashed up her starboard side and carried off her smokestack. The vessel trembled so violently that Robinson thought she would crumble to pieces. Another shock flung him on his back, while Mclntyre was thrown against the starboard side of the open wheelhouse.

  As she plunged into the Whirlpool, Robinson scrambled to his feet and placed one boot firmly on Mclntyre’s prostrate body to prevent his rolling overboard. Below the hatches, Jones was on his knees uttering a prayer that he later believed was his salvation. Now, for a moment, the Maid rode at even keel. Robinson, seizing the wheel, managed to turn her through the neck of the vortex while receiving another drenching from the towering waves. The rest of the trip was very much as he had imagined it – like the swift sailing of a large bird in downward flight.

  Robinson never really recovered his sangfroid. His wife declared that he “was twenty years older when he came home that day than when he went out.” He sank wearily into his chair, determined to abandon the river forever. In his neighbour’s words, “his manner and appearance were changed. Calm and deliberate before, he became thoughtful and serious afterward. He had been borne, as it were, in the arms of a power so mighty that its impress was stamped on his features and on his mind. Through a slightly opened door he had seen a vision which awed and subdued him. He became reverent in a moment. He grew venerable in an hour.”

  Chapter Six

  1

  The cave of the forty thieves

  2

  Private greed

  3

  A ramble on Goat Island

  4

  Saving Niagara from itself

  5

  Casimir Gzowski to the rescue

  1

  The cave of the forty thieves

  By the 1860s, after Blondin and Farini had enticed more thousands to Niagara and the new railway suspension bridge had made access easier, the battle for the tourist dollar was becoming more feverish. It was concentrated on the old military reserve on the Canadian side, that quarter-mile-long strip of souvenir shops, taverns, refreshment booths, and inns known to all as the Front. The Front began at the Falls where the old Table Rock had stood. Its downstream terminus was the elegant Clifton House. Two less savoury establishments – Thomas Barnett’s Table Rock House and Saul Davis’s Table Rock Hotel – crowded as close to the Horseshoe as possible and used every means available, legal or illegal, to seduce the visitor.

  Here were sown the seeds of a bitter rivalry between Davis, an out-and-out swindler, and Barnett, an obsessive museum collector as well as innkeeper. Their twenty-year war, which began in 1853 and dragged on into the mid-1870s, was fought without quarter against the gaudiest of backdrops. Here barkers elbowed their way through the crowd or stood outside their emporiums urging the newcomers to view the wonders, not of the Falls, but of those hucksters who had set up shop in their shadow. Roguish Irish girls flirted with passers-by, inveigling them into “Indian” tepees where spurious native curios were sold for outrageous prices. Mountebanks with Malacca canes and derby hats steered the curious toward their own waiting hacks, whose drivers, working on fat percentages, drove the protesting victims to the wrong hotels. Men with oversize cameras offered to take free photographs, then bullied the luckless customers into paying up. “Congealed spray” from the cataract still enjoyed a brisk sale; so did sulphur water allegedly from the Burning Spring a short distance upriver. And everybody peddled the tale of the “maid of the mist” who, it was claimed, was sent over the Falls as a sacrifice to the god who lived there. The tale was as false as the water that refused to burst into flames. This was not Mexico. The local Indians had never indulged in human sacrifice.

  The twin communities, one on either side of the international river, had now taken on separate and quite different characteristics. Niagara Falls, New York, was mainly mills and factories – although William Dean Howells did pay twenty-five cents to view a five-legged calf at the entrance to the private park at Prospect Point. Clifton, on the Canadian side, was high carnival.

  This dichotomy had less to do with national character than with propinquity. The Canadian village catered to tourists because that was where the tourists wanted to be. The Canadian Falls were far more spectacular than their U.S. counterpart, an incontrovertible truth that some Americans considered a slight to the national endowment. Howells remarked that “my patriotism has always felt the hurt of the fact that our great national cataract is best viewed from a foreign shore.” He watched those tumbling waters “with a jealousy almost as green as themselves” and tried to make believe the American Falls were finer, but finally gave up and grudgingly admitted that the Canadian cataract “if not more majestic, is certainly more massive.”

  The American tourists were easy prey for the human vultures who worked the Canadian side without hindrance from an obliging police force. When John Crist, a Pennsylvania farmer, visited the Falls on July 5, 1866, with his two boys and their aunts, he asked to be driven to Table Rock – or what was left of it.
The cabman, instead, deposited the party at Saul Davis’s notorious Table Rock Hotel, which paid a commission to hack drivers. Crist was invited to enter the building, which was headquarters for a variety and fancy goods store, a staircase to the river bank, guided tours under the sheet of water, and a photographer’s booth. Edward Davis, a son of the owner, assured the unsuspecting farmer that everything within was free. He must see the “Boiling Springs,” which, he was told, were directly behind the hotel; indeed, the only access to them, Davis insisted, was through the building.

  Once inside, Crist and his sons were hustled into one room, the women into another, and all were ordered to don suits of oilskin clothing. The baffled farmer wanted to know what this was all about and was told that the oilskins were necessary “to see the Boiling Springs.” There would be no charge, though he might give ten or fifteen cents to his guide if he wished. After that the party was hurried, not to the non-existent Boiling Springs or even to the Burning Spring some distance away, but down the circular staircase in the cliff face to the base of the Horseshoe. Crist didn’t want to go, but one of the boys rushed ahead, and so he followed, tipping the guide fifteen cents for a five-minute view of the cascade.

  On his return, Crist ordered a glass of beer but didn’t get it. Instead, a man at the door ordered him to settle up for the oilskins. The price was five dollars – an enormous sum at a time when labourers received less than a dollar a day.

  When Crist tried to leave, he was seized by the coat and hurled back into the room. Three more men, including another of Saul Davis’s sons, Charles, now appeared. Crist offered them his pocketbook: “There is one dollar in this purse, all I have got except a quarter.”

  “You’re a damn pretty fellow to come all the way to the Falls with only one dollar in your pocket,” Davis sneered. He added that he would keep the entire party imprisoned until he got his money.

  When Crist asked if there wasn’t a law in Canada whereby he could seek redress, Davis shook his fist in his face. “That’s the law in Canada and we’re the officers to carry that law out!” he said. He cursed and swore at Crist, who then demanded to see the American consul. Davis refused. The farmer would not get out alive, he said, unless he paid up. At that Crist borrowed four dollars from one of his sisters and was released.

  This was no isolated case; at Davis’s Table Rock Hotel it was the norm. Threats, abuse, and violence were visited upon the luckless and gullible arrivals who were suckered into believing that the Davis family were philanthropists interested only in providing free views of the cataract. When another American, George Loveridge, protested at being charged twelve dollars, one of Davis’s henchmen pushed him across the room and shook a fist in his face. “God damn you,” he shouted, “you can’t go out of that room without paying what I ask.” Thoroughly cowed, Loveridge paid, and with good reason. The Davises were prepared to use force. They seized a luckless Manhattan surgeon by the whiskers and the throat, pushed him through a glass door, and hurled him to the floor, wrenching his back.

  The hack drivers aided and abetted this extortion, hustling unwary tourists to the Davis establishment. Appeals to the law had no effect. When a Professor Cooper from New York demanded to see a justice of the peace, Edward Davis cried, “You Goddamned American sons of bitches, you can’t move from here till you pay every cent.” Faced with a similar request from a Pennsylvania tourist, Edward Davis shook his fist in the newcomer’s face and announced that he was a justice of the peace.

  “If you do not pay your bill, I will smash you,” Charles Davis told a Peterborough farmer, John H. Weir. At that, Mrs. Weir burst into tears, whereupon one of Davis’s women employees berated Weir as “a damned pretty clod-hopper to take a girl around and not pay your expenses.”

  The Davis family got away with these swindles because most of their victims lived hundreds of miles away and could afford neither the time nor the money to launch a civil suit. Even when they stayed on and succeeded in getting a ruling, Davis immediately appealed, and few plaintiffs could commit themselves to further appearances. Nor was it easy to obtain witnesses against the family; the hack drivers were understandably reluctant to imperil their main source of income. As the United States consul, Martin Jones, wrote to the secretary of state, W.H. Seward, “no respectable citizen of Canada who is familiar with [Davis’s] Table Rock House speaks well of it, and everyone seems anxious … to get rid of such a nest of swindlers, yet there appears to be no one here of sufficient courage to take an active part in breaking its power.”

  Davis’s depredations received a public airing at last when he sued the Hamilton Times for libel in 1868. The newspaper had called his Table Rock Hotel “the cave of the forty thieves,” which “needs suppressing periodically.” When the suit came to trial, the Times was prepared. It paraded before the court a series of witnesses who had been swindled by the Davis family. The judge threw the case out and came down hard on Davis. “This monstrous evil,” he said, “ought to be exposed and an end put to it.” But an end was not put to it. Davis carried on as before.

  Nonetheless, his courtroom loss must have pleased his longtime rival, Thomas Barnett, who had been operating his famous museum of curiosities near the Falls since 1829. Now housed in its new $150,000 stone building, the eclectic museum – said to be the largest on the continent, and also the very first – held close to ten thousand specimens that ranged from stuffed rattlesnakes to Egyptian mummies.

  Barnett was also the proprietor of the original Table Rock House. But in 1853, Davis built his own establishment with a similar name, situating it between Barnett’s inn and Table Rock itself. With that move, Davis was in a position to intercept Barnett’s customers.

  The two men were bound to be incompatible. Barnett did not stoop to the kind of chicanery that had made Davis so unpopular. He charged his customers a flat dollar for a trip down his spiral staircase to the foot of the cataract. For another dollar each could buy a certificate proving completion of the trip. It was said that a German prince had offered two dollars for a certificate claiming that he had gone farther behind the sheet of water than any other human. Barnett declined the bribe.

  Barnett was a genuine collector, typical of the breed, so proud of his museum that he often let in visitors for half price and teachers and students for nothing. By the mid-1860s he had on display 150 native Canadian birds, 490 foreign birds, 175 mammals, 38 fish, 42 reptiles, 8,000 entomological specimens, and a confusion of shells, fossils, eggs, coins, statues, paintings, and Eastern antiquities.

  He displayed everything that came his way, including the corpse of his own dog. The animal had been born without hind legs, so Barnett had invented a two-wheeled device that, attached to the dog’s nethers, aided its locomotion. When the dog died, Barnett had a taxidermist stuff the skin while he removed the skeleton for a second exhibit. Both are still on show in Niagara, complete with the rear wheels.

  Barnett’s obsession threatened to become his downfall, for he could not stop. The museum expanded, was moved to larger quarters, was rebuilt twice, and, by the late 1860s, was in the process of beggaring its owner. Nonetheless, Barnett found funds to contribute to charity – to the victims of the Quebec fire of 1845, for example, and to the Crimean War fund.

  Davis, by contrast, was a jailbird, an American who had served three months of a two-year sentence for fraud in the New York State prison. His relatives lobbied for his release, and Davis himself promised a sum of money to a friend to get him out. The governor was persuaded to give him a pardon, but before that came through Davis was released as a result of “a flaw in the indictment.”

  He came to Niagara in 1844 and opened the Prospect House on the American side, which he sold to his brother-in-law in 1853 in order to launch his Table Rock Hotel. In the spirited contest with Barnett, few holds were barred. When Barnett got the court’s permission to take his customers on a path past Davis’s hotel in order to view the Falls, Davis retaliated by encircling the hotel with a stone wall and exacting a twenty-
five-cent fee from every Barnett customer.

  That was too much. The government, which still owned the old military reserve on which the Front squatted, cancelled Davis’s lease, giving Barnett a monopoly. Davis coolly ignored the order and no one tried to enforce it. Both men had built stairways to the water’s edge, and this caused endless recriminations. In 1865, somebody burned down Davis’s stairway. Davis tried forcibly to use Barnett’s. When Barnett resisted, Davis blasted rocks on his own property so that they hurtled down the cliffside and effectively blocked his rival’s staircase. When Barnett successfully obtained an injunction to stop him, Davis responded by charging Barnett and his son with perjury for making false affidavits. Nothing came of that.

  Davis regained his lease to the river frontage, but this was quickly seized by the sheriff for non-payment of debt. Barnett bought it, thus gaining the exclusive right to conduct visitors under the Falls. Davis responded with a whispering campaign suggesting that Barnett’s stairway was unsafe. He followed that by posting large signs advising tourists not to go under the cataract because of the danger of falling rocks.

  The long-simmering feud bubbled into violence and bloodshed on June 24, 1870. Colonel Sidney Barnett, son of the museum owner, was infuriated by Davis’s signs posted on his property warning tourists not to proceed down the bank. He tore down the signs, and a wild mêlée with members of the Davis faction followed.

  In the confused account of what happened next, certain facts stand out. After the encounter, Sidney Barnett returned to the museum, where he encountered two of Davis’s sons, Edward and Robert, apparently in a dispute with his father. The two Davises were seated in a carriage pulling their cart, which contained photographic equipment. Barnett heard, or thought he heard, somebody shout that they were going to kill his father. At that the Barnett contingent, already worked up from their previous encounter, began to hurl stones at the two brothers.