Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  The pair jumped out of their carriage, produced pistols, and started firing, killing one of Barnett’s black employees. The two were charged with murder but acquitted on the ground of self-defence. The hapless Sidney Barnett was found guilty of assault and severely reprimanded by the court.

  At Saul Davis’s Table Rock Hotel, the outrages continued as before with the willing co-operation of hack drivers from both sides of the river, who delivered their protesting fares into the arms of Davis’s black enforcer, Ab Thomas, and a white prizefighter, Jesse Burke, both of whom threatened physical violence if unwanted photographs weren’t purchased or the rental of oilskin clothing was refused. Davis was persona non grata with the authorities, but his wife was not. She obtained a new lease giving the family access to the foot of the Falls after her lawyer found a loophole in Barnett’s document.

  It soon became clear that Barnett’s preoccupation with his vast collection was driving him into bankruptcy. He made two desperate attempts to recoup by staging the kind of garish spectacle that had once lured customers to the Falls. Neither of these worked, partly because too much commercial greed had already tarnished Niagara’s reputation.

  First Barnett tried to stage a traditional Indian burial ceremony to attract visitors to his museum. He recruited members of the Six Nations band, suitably painted and dressed in ceremonial garments. Barnett provided an authentic coffin that he announced contained the ashes of twenty warriors from Queenston, dug up from a thousand-year-old burial mound. But even Barnett had to admit that the ceremony was a flop. The chief delivered a funeral oration in his own tongue that lasted two hours, while his followers, lined up in rows, chanted a burial song unintelligible to the visitors. That was followed by a march to the museum garden where the coffin was interred in a pyramidal vault. By that time most spectators had departed.

  Now Barnett made a second attempt to attract business. He was convinced that he needed something glamorous (for the Falls, it seemed, had lost their magic). The Wild West beckoned. Why not exploit it?

  In 1871, Niagara Falls was virtually on the frontier. On the Canadian side of the border, civilization ended at Lake Huron. The country west and north of the Niagara Peninsula was a no-man’s land of lakes, Precambrian rock, and rolling prairie, populated by Indians, fur traders, and buffalo. The Hudson’s Bay Company had only recently sold its vast reserve to Canada; it was still mainly empty and wholly mysterious. But the American West was wild and storied, thanks to the dime novels of E.Z.C. Judson, better known by his pseudonym, Ned Buntline. The last spike joining the Central and Union Pacific railroads had been driven only two years earlier. Pony express riders, buffalo hunters, and Indian fighters were the folk heroes of the day. Long before Buffalo Bill Cody created his Wild West show, Thomas Barnett decided to hold one of his own, complete with Texas cowhands, frontier scouts, and Indians on horseback attacking herds of bison.

  This ambitious and cumbersome attraction was totally out of keeping with the Niagara ambience, but Barnett persisted. He sent his son Sidney all the way to the western plains to bring back a herd of buffalo. At the North Platte River, Sidney Barnett encountered one Texas Jack Omohondro, who agreed to hire some Pawnee braves to capture the needed animals. That proved abortive. The buffalo sickened and died in captivity, and the United States government, terrified of another Indian war, ordered the unpredictable Pawnees back to their reservation.

  Undaunted, Colonel Barnett trekked on to Kansas City, where he sought out the famous scout, Indian fighter, and federal marshal James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok. With his shoulder-length hair, drooping moustache, and reputation as a gunfighter, Hickok was just the man to manage the exhibition the Barnetts planned for Niagara.

  By this time, Saul Davis was crying hoax. The buffalo hunt had been postponed so many times, he declared, that he was planning to sue Barnett for the expenses he had incurred in buying two bears and a quantity of gingerbread to entertain the crowd. Barnett replied drily that Davis’s best option was to feed the gingerbread to his bears.

  The Great Buffalo Hunt was scheduled at last for August 28 and 29, 1872. “No expense has been spared,” the advertisements announced, “to make it the most interesting, the most exciting, and the most thrilling spectacle ever witnessed east of the Mississippi” – hyperbolic phrases reminiscent of those that had once been applied to the great cataract itself. Members of the Sac and Fox Indian tribes had been engaged to appear in full war costumes, mounted on fleet ponies from the plains. A Mexican vaquero troupe would also participate. Special excursion trains would run to the Falls, and there would be seats for fifty thousand spectators.

  Alas, when the great hunt was launched, only three adult buffalo and a calf were still alive to be hunted, and only three thousand spectators turned up to watch. Wild Bill, mounted on a small mustang, loped about after a cow, which had to be goaded to desperation before it would run at all. The show was a fiasco. Barnett’s losses came to twenty thousand dollars.

  He struggled on in the face of mounting debts, but his days as a Niagara entrepreneur were over. In November 1876, he sold his four buffalo to an agent of P.T. Barnum for seven hundred dollars. The following year his museum and all his other buildings went on the auction block to satisfy his debtors. The purchaser, by the unkindest of all cuts, was Saul Davis.

  2

  Private greed

  In 1873, the year after Barnett’s abortive buffalo hunt, the new premier of Ontario, Oliver Mowat, besieged by complaints from individual citizens and especially from the U.S. consul at Clifton, decided to act. He established a royal commission under Edmund Burke Wood, a Member of Parliament known as Big Thunder, to investigate crime at Niagara. It sat for five months and in November produced a scathing indictment centring on the person of Saul Davis. Wood noted that the local police consistently turned a blind eye to Davis’s misdemeanours because they were beholden to an electoral body “under the influence of those by whose vote they occupy their respective positions.”

  As a result, the Mowat government appointed a special magistrate and special police constables to clean up the town and especially the Front. Wood also recommended that the government establish a public park on the old military chain reserve “to correct the abuses and protect the public,” but Mowat would have none of that. Law-and-order was one thing; the novel idea of the public sector providing parkland for the people was quite another. The Front survived.

  The new provisions helped to quell the extreme criminal element at the Falls. (When he achieved his monopoly at Table Rock, Davis no longer needed to swindle sightseers.) But the carnival ran on. Droves of hackmen continued to harass visitors. Barkers still lured the unwary into souvenir stalls, and peddlers peddled everything from German lapis lazuli and Vesuvian lava to caged animals. One persistent showman tried to sell a live bear to Victor-Henri Rochefort, the radical journalist and political gadfly, who had just escaped from a French penal colony. Rochefort felt a certain kinship with the animal, which “turned sadly about in his cage as I had done in mine a few months earlier.” He regretted being unable to free his fellow prisoner but reflected that its first act “would probably have been to devour its liberator.”

  Like so many others, Rochefort was appalled by the tawdry atmosphere that took so much of the grandeur from the spectacle of the cataract. No longer sublime, Niagara was quickly falling into disrepute, suffering from what one journalist called “the disastrous results of a bad name.” The American side was disfigured by ugly stone dams, gristmills, outdoor clotheslines, heaps of sawdust, stables, advertising placards, shanties, lumberyards, a pulp mill, and a gas works. On both sides of the river, as William Morris, the English designer, remarked during a visit, “the very pick of the touts and rascals of the world” were assembled.

  The hotel clientele was now largely transient, a radical change from the days when well-to-do Southerners would come by the hundreds to stay for several months. The Civil War had brought an end to that; few could now afford to leave their
ravaged homes. Cheap fares and fast trains made it possible to enjoy a one-day trip to Niagara without the expense of putting up at one of the big hotels that lined both sides of the gorge. As one old Falls hand described it to the New York Times, “if a man should come here and stay two weeks, they would put him in a glass case and have him in one of the Indian museums for sale for a curiosity.” As for the hotels themselves, he reported, they “are old – far older in appearance and fittings than those in any other Summer resort in America … there is no hotel on either side of the river … where a guest need expect to be treated with anything like civility.… The solid truth is, there is no comfort here. The big hotels are barns, with nobody in them, and there are 4,000 or 5,000 people in ‘the Falls’ all vying with each other to see who can skin visitors out of the most money in the shortest time.”

  The saving grace – more than one visitor mentioned it – was the cheerful presence of the pretty girls in the curio shops, where Indian moccasins, beadwork, stuffed birds and animals, natural crystals, canes, rock ornaments, bows and arrows, and souvenir photographs were sold. There were hundreds of these little shops, most staffed by comely Irish women, all flirtatious and affable – “remarkably affectionate in their manners,” as one customer put it. “No man likes a stiff and backward girl,” he wrote, “and when you go into a store and a pretty ‘saleslady’ calls you my dear and changes it to my darling before you leave, the effect is as pleasant as it is startling.”

  The hack drivers, who were present in droves, were a different breed. They pursued customers relentlessly and then insisted, against all protests, in taking them to places they didn’t want to go and charging whatever the traffic would bear. One literary traveller, W.G. Marshall, told of “running the gauntlet of fourteen hotel runners, each especially anxious to take us under the shelter of his protection” before escaping and boarding the bus to the Clifton House.

  The drivers received a 25-percent commission on every nickel their reluctant passengers paid out. They, in turn, paid a fancy sum for the privilege of using the hack stand at one of the big hotels. At the Cataract on the American side, for example, it cost an annual thousand dollars to secure hack privileges. At some of the larger hotels the amount was said to approach six thousand. No hotel on the New York side was more than a three-minute walk from the railroad station (one, indeed, was directly across the way). Yet every hotel had its omnibus meet the trains and charged each guest twenty-five cents for a one-way trip. When room and board could be had for about three dollars a day, or a single meal for fifty cents, this was a considerable sum.

  On the American side of the river, every viewpoint was fenced in by greedy entrepreneurs so that there was no place from which the great cataract could be seen without payment. One farmer who was swirled around the region in 1877 with his wife and two daughters kept a list of all the entrance fees and expenses paid for four persons in a carriage in one day:

  To Goat Island $2.25

  To Prospect Park 1.00

  To Railway Suspension Bridge 1.00

  To new Suspension Bridge 2.50

  To Whirlpool Rapids, American side 2.00

  To Whirlpool Rapids, Canadian side 2.00

  To the Whirlpool 2.00

  To the Burning Springs 1.60

  To the Battle Ground 2.00

  To under the Horseshoe Falls 4.00

  To “Into the Shadow of the Rock” 4.00

  To through Cave of the Winds 6.00

  To hack hire 7.00

  To fee to driver 0.50

  Total $37.85

  He was persuaded to spend this sum – the equivalent of about $530 in 1992 dollars – by a “plausible fair-spoken knave” who got 25 percent of every fee. At the end of the day, one of his daughters was so ill from nervous excitement she could hardly alight from the carriage, and his wife was too exhausted to leave the hotel. Small wonder, then, that the New York Times was able to report of the Falls that “its name has become a reproach and a warning throughout the land” and that “Niagara as a summer resort has well-nigh ceased to exist; it remains but a show.”

  Yet the seeds of Niagara’s renaissance were already being sown unwittingly by the get-rich-quick artists themselves. Years later, after the long struggle to preserve the Niagara gorge was won, the first president of the state park paid a backhanded compliment to those who had “outraged public decency by their importunate demands, exorbitant actions and swindling deceits.” In hindsight, he said, “we can thank some of those now innocuous offenders for the zeal which their conduct imparted to the champions of Niagara.” Had private greed “not so far overreached itself and had it left even decently tolerable conditions at Niagara, the task of securing the public reservation would probably have been even greater than it was.”

  3

  A ramble on Goat Island

  In the mid-nineteenth century, few North Americans cared about or even thought about the continent’s natural beauty. The emphasis was on “progress,” which meant carving out roadways, draining swamps, clearing forests, and exploiting natural wonders, such as the Falls, for profit. In the inexorable march westward, those who subdued the wilderness were seen as nation-builders. As one observer has noted, more was written between 1830 and 1850 about the coming of the railroads than about the destruction of the scenery.

  Few worried about the Falls. After all, no greedy hucksters could steal or plunder them. It occurred to only a few – poets, painters, European travellers, and American intellectuals – that the environs of the cataract were just as important as the cataract itself.

  The idea of actually setting aside a tract of untrammelled wilderness in perpetuity for future generations to admire and enjoy was a novel one. There were no wilderness parks in North America in the mid-century. Canada would not have its first, at Banff, until 1887. The United States acted earlier. Yosemite State Park, built on federal land but managed by California, was opened in 1864. Its first commissioner was the remarkable landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who had created Central Park in New York City and would soon launch a crusade to save what was left of the Niagara Falls environment.

  That fight, which lasted for fifteen years, was waged by two groups of people, working on both sides of the international border. The long, tiring struggle that started slowly, almost ineffectually, would involve some of the leading figures of the day, including a number of intransigent politicians who had no stomach for the principle of public ownership of natural attractions. It might be said to have had its beginnings on a warm August afternoon in 1869. Anyone rambling under the green canopy of Goat Island could not have failed to notice three men of substance – bulky and bewhiskered – roaming through the groves, engaged in animated conversation. These were the days before the diet craze, when bulk was considered a symbol of power and eminence, and certainly this was a trio of commanding presence.

  The first was William Edward Dorsheimer, a Buffalo lawyer and politician, a powerful backroom influence in the liberal wing of the Republican party, and federal district attorney for the northern district of New York State. Facial hair was also the fashion with men of influence, and Dorsheimer, a big man, made up for his receding hairline with a vast moustache that curled across his jaw to marry up with his full sideburns. The second – broad-shouldered, full-chested, and bearded – was an up-and-coming young Brooklyn architect, Henry Hobson Richardson, who had just received a commission to design Dorsheimer’s Buffalo mansion. The third was Frederick Law Olmsted, tall and rugged, with a high dome and a large western-style handlebar moustache that suggested his recent sojourn on the nation’s frontier.

  These were all men in the prime of life with much of their careers still ahead of them. Richardson, the youngest, was just thirty. He had secured only a few architectural commissions – Dorsheimer’s was one – but he was already attracting attention. Four years later he would be acknowledged as the leading architect in North America, putting his personal stamp on a neo-classical form to be known forever after as
Richardsonian Romanesque. Dorsheimer was thirty-eight, the son of German immigrants. Within five years he would be elected lieutenant-governor of his state. A successor praised his “courage and tact, fascination and audacity, rare skill on the platform, creditable associations and marked literary attainments.” At forty-seven, Olmsted was the oldest of the trio. Most of his adult years had been spent on a personal quest to find himself and to find for himself an occupation that suited his restless nature. At last he had succeeded. Before his death he would be known as the father of American landscape architecture and also the Saviour of Niagara Falls.

  An activist who seemed to radiate inexhaustible energy, Olmsted was plagued by inner doubts and subject to various illnesses – digestive problems, sudden headaches, and periods of nervous exhaustion that were at least partly psychosomatic. His career had been an odd mixture of failure and success. He had quit Yale because of a series of fainting spells. He had tried farming and publishing and failed miserably at both. Central Park was his triumph. The design he and his partner submitted was chosen from a field of thirty-three. He was appointed superintendent of the new park and acting secretary of the New York sanitary commission – important posts that he was forced to abandon because, it was said, he couldn’t work under anybody.

  Off he went to California to manage a mining estate. That failed too, but by this time Olmsted knew where his future lay. The phrase “landscape architect” had scarcely entered the language, but that was what Olmsted intended to be. Central Park and Yosemite had given him direction. His crusade would be to save the American wilderness. Olmsted saw Niagara as a pilot project for a larger and more ambitious campaign. If he succeeded there, he intended to turn his energies to the protection of the entire Allegheny watershed.