Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  But Beck’s ambitions had already damaged the EDC; talk of expropriation had hurt its credit badly. Mackenzie stepped in with a dazzling series of mergers and realignments that placed it under the umbrella of his newly organized Toronto Power Company. Now the EDC, its transmission lines, and its contracts with Mackenzie’s Street Railway Company and Pellatt’s Electric Light Company were all part of the same package. Mackenzie assumed direct control, with his partners in subordinate positions.

  Whitney easily won the summer election in 1908, and Beck was returned with a huge majority. But he remained obdurate in his near fanatical opposition to Mackenzie. When, in August, Canadian General Electric submitted the lowest tender to build the Hydro line, Beck tried to block the contract because Mackenzie’s colleague, Nicholls, controlled the company. Whitney stepped in and persuaded the vengeful Hydro chairman to allow CGE to have two-thirds of the project.

  The first sod for the transmission line was turned on November 18 at Exhibition Park in Toronto. Whitney was on hand to make a conciliatory speech. “We have undertaken to safeguard the interests of the people,” he said, “but only with the assurance that it will not be at the expense of private rights.”

  In actual fact, the premier was growing more and more disenchanted with the private power lobby. Mackenzie brought suit to try to prevent Toronto and London from taking power from Hydro. The Whitney government immediately introduced an act placing these contracts beyond the jurisdiction of the courts. That touched off a vicious press campaign in Montreal, London, and New York, designed to convince the financial world that the “socialist legislation” would damage Canada’s credit in the money markets. The British press was especially vitriolic. The Financial Times of London wrote of “an outrageous parody of lawmaking,” and the Monetary Times referred to “bullying legislation which takes away the first right of the British subject.”

  All such comments were published in a widely distributed pamphlet whose purpose was to force the federal government to disallow the act. A petition for disallowance was heard in October, but Hydro went forward with construction anyway, convinced, correctly, that Ottawa would throw out the case. Whitney had never had any doubts about that. The London manager of the Bank of Montreal had already told him privately that Canada’s credit was in no way harmed. The press campaign had not only nettled the premier but, by its intemperance, had also turned many London investors against the private power interests. The battle between Beck and Mackenzie, two strong and stubborn personalities, was over, at least for the moment.

  When the power was switched on in Berlin on the night of October 11, 1910, the premier referred to the long and bitter struggle. “We have been attacked, vilified, and slandered,” he said. “Large sums of money have been expended in creating and fomenting prejudice and ill feeling against us. And still larger sums have been expended in conducting a campaign against us outside of Ontario. Our opponents left nothing undone that could be done, and men of influences, from the humblest man in the land up to the Prime Minister of Great Britain, were approached in the endeavour to destroy our power legislation and render it impossible for the wonderful new force to be used and enjoyed by the people.… We, Adam Beck’s colleagues, can never forget his steady confidence in the result and the bravery and pluck with which he stood up against all attacks.”

  This was Adam Beck’s triumphal moment. The movement for public power had been launched in Waterloo and Berlin by Snider and Detweiler. But Snider, who had broken with Beck because of his leak of information to the press, was no longer in the picture. It had been Beck’s day, and his alone. The streets, garlanded with foliage, bunting, and strings of coloured lights, were lined with people standing three deep as the representatives of thirty-four participating municipalities were driven through town. Some ten thousand crowded into the community’s largest skating rink, festooned with banners proclaiming “Power at Cost” and “We Are Proud of Our Boy, Adam Beck.” At the end of the proceedings, after everyone had had his say and before the festive banquet – cooked for the first time with electricity – the premier took centre stage. There stood a little girl, Hulda Rumple, dressed in red, white, and blue and wearing a crown of bulbs, which in a moment would glow with electric light.

  Whitney had already called for three cheers for Beck. Now, with his voice breaking slightly, he said, “I have been asked to press the button which will turn on the people’s power. I am proud and happy to do it in the name of the province. But with your approval I propose to use a true and tried influence, one in which we all have learned to have unbounded confidence.”

  In the semi-darkness he turned and beckoned to the Hydro chairman, standing in the background. “Give me your hand,” he said. As the crowd cheered he grasped Beck’s hand and used it to press the button. The darkened rink was instantly enveloped in a blaze of light, while Hulda Rumple’s crown sparkled. “Congratulations,” the premier said to Beck, “and thanks from Ontario.”

  Beck had already spoken. “The work is not finished,” he told the crowd. “It has only begun. Let us gird our loins and earnestly, honestly, and indomitably go on, and on, and on until this great public service serves all our people and serves them well. That is our ambition, that is our aim, that is our ideal.”

  3

  The Second Battle of Niagara

  Our dreams exceeding by thy bounteous spray;

  With power unrivalled thy proud flood shall speed

  The New World’s progress towards Time’s perfect day.

  Thus did Benjamin Copeland in his 1904 poem, Niagara, capture the euphoria that greeted the growing use of Niagara’s power. Two years later, H.G. Wells visited Niagara and wrote enthusiastically about the “noble masses of machinery,” so clean, so noiseless, so irresistible, heralding, in Wells’s view, a world in which the greatness of life was not to be found “in such accidents as mountains or the sea” but in a world that human beings would create, as they had created electric power. To Wells it did not matter if the Falls ceased to flow, provided its waters “should rise again in light and power … in cities and in palaces and the emancipated souls and hearts of men.”

  Wells was captivated by the wave of optimism engendered by the great age of heroic invention at the turn of the century. But with the Canadians also preparing to tap the cataract for hydro power, a few voices began to express their opposition to the kind of future that the novelist was envisaging. The very future of the Falls as one of nature’s great showplaces was in doubt. What if unlimited water should be diverted from the two cascades by power-hungry industrialists and power-hungry governments? Lord Kelvin himself had said he hoped the Falls would have vanished by his grandchildren’s time.

  These ominous forebodings touched off the Second Battle of Niagara, as it was called, to save the Falls. A series of articles in newspapers and leading periodicals began to harp on the uncertain future of the great cataract. Niagara, “saved from the hand of the catch-penny sharper … has fallen into the hands of the catch-million capitalist,” a writer in Outlook declared. Worlds Work identified the catch-million capitalists as those early twentieth-century whipping boys, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, and the Astors, fair game in those trust-busting days for any muckraking journalist. These were the men behind the Niagara Falls Power Company, the New York Central Railroad, and General Electric.

  The key figure in the new preservation campaign was J. Horace McFarland, president of the American Civic Association and editor of the “Beautiful America” column in the influential Ladies’ Home Journal. “Every American – nay, every world citizen – should see Niagara many times, for the welfare of his soul and the perpetual memory of a great work of God,” McFarland wrote. And yet, he warned, the Falls was about to be “sacrificed unnecessarily for the gain of a few.”

  “Shall we make a coal pile of Niagara?” he asked his readers in 1905. He urged them to write letters to the White House and to Rideau Hall, the governor general’s residence in Ottawa. Thousands responded. Clubs a
nd newspapers took up the cry. Under McFarland’s prodding, Theodore Roosevelt mentioned the subject in his annual message to Congress. When McFarland asked the president for suggestions to prevent the destruction of Niagara, Roosevelt gave him a forthright reply: “Get as many intelligent citizens as you possibly can to write urgently upon this subject to their representatives and Senators in Congress. That will help mightily.”

  Tens of thousands of letters swamped Congress and had their effect. In March 1906, the International Waterways Commission, which had been studying the problem, advised that no more than thirty-six thousand cubic feet of water a second be diverted from the Canadian falls and half that amount from the American side. Any greater diversion, the report declared, would be dangerous. “It would be a sacrilege to destroy the scenic effect of the Falls.”

  Roosevelt sent the report to Congress, whereupon the private power companies besieged Washington with attorneys, engineers, promoters, and lobbyists issuing contradictory statements designed to kill its impact. But the House Committee on Rivers and Harbors, chaired by Theodore Burton of Ohio, resisted the pressure and put the recommendations into a law “for the preservation of Niagara Falls.”

  In 1909, a new international treaty established the amount of water that could be diverted from the Falls. The United States would be allowed a total diversion of twenty thousand cubic feet a second, slightly more than the Waterways Commission had recommended three years before. The Canadian diversion would be held at thirty-six thousand. For the time being, at least, the Falls was safe.

  A commission appointed by the United States war department had recommended that the entire gorge area for three hundred feet back from the cliff be purchased as a national park and that the buildings along the crest be removed, together with the Schoellkopf power station at the foot as soon as it became obsolete. Few of these recommendations were followed. The proposed park was considered too expensive; the factories kept working and were not removed until 1945, and the power station operated until 1961 and was not torn down until 1965.

  The preservation movement had concentrated on the beauty of the cataract and its surroundings, successfully preventing the bulk of the water from being looted for private gain. But the humanists behind the Second Battle of Niagara could do nothing to suppress the carnival atmosphere that had been a part of the Niagara environment for the best part of a century; nor is there any evidence that they wished to do so. It was neither feasible nor necessary to deny tourists who were lured to the Falls the attractions they expected. Indeed, both communities had every intention of using the Falls as a backdrop for fun and frolic.

  In 1910, the Twin Power Cities of the World, as the press dubbed them, mounted a successful carnival built around the magic of electricity. But electricity was already losing its novelty, and electrical exhibits had less and less drawing power. After all, every town had become a “White City.” When the two communities tried to repeat the spectacle the following year it was a near flop. The program promised a gigantic automobile parade, with five hundred illuminated cars – “three miles of electrical enchantment.” But the auto, too, was becoming commonplace. Henry Ford had just introduced his Model T. The parade fizzled out. “Prince Nelson the Great” was supposed to walk a tightrope across the gorge, his costume emblazoned with 180 miniature lights. But the prince got cold feet and failed to turn up.

  A feeling of déjà vu hung over the affair like a pall. The crowds were large – as many as one hundred thousand persons – but they didn’t spend much money. The hotels and restaurants failed to prosper. The organizing committee had made the colossal error of hiring a non-union press to print the official program. Labour was beginning to feel its strength, and this gaffe kept many away.

  Strapped for funds, the organizers had gambled a good chunk of their budget on one event. It cost at least one thousand dollars in gold (some reported five thousand), but when it was over no one begrudged that. For this was the only spectacle that looked to the future and not to the past. Without the presence of Lincoln Beachey, the carnival would have been more than a disappointment. He helped save it from disaster.

  The automobile may have lost its excitement, but the airplane had not, and Beachey was a pilot who knew no fear. The Niagara Falls Gazette called him “one of the nerviest aviators in the country.” “He will fly anywhere and over any obstacle and is known as the man who will take more chances than any aviator in the world,” the Cataract Journal told its readers.

  Variously depicted as “fearless,” “intrepid,” “dauntless,” and “daring,” the twenty-four-year-old Beachey, clean-shaven and debonair, had in less than a year become the best-known stunt flyer in North America, if not the world. Wearing an ordinary business suit with white shirt and tie rather than a pilot’s leather jacket and helmet, he barnstormed about the country in his specially reinforced Curtiss pusher biplane. Beachey was already developing his vertical “death dive,” which saw him plummet straight down from the clouds, pulling out only at the last possible moment. He came so close to the ground on these dives that he was once able to scoop up a handkerchief with the tip of one wing. On another occasion at Dallas, Texas, he made a vertical dive onto a race track, flew straight under the starting wire, and pulled out without touching either the wire or the ground.

  Beachey would collect his gold only if he piloted his flimsy craft immediately above the Horseshoe Falls and then flew downriver directly under the Upper Steel Arch Bridge. The closest bridge to the Falls, its arch supported a roadway of 840 feet, only 150 feet above the river. To meet the conditions, Beachey would have to zoom down from the crest of the Horseshoe almost to the water’s surface, fly under the bridge between its two massive pillars, and then climb again to a safe height. He agreed at once.

  Beachey flew in from Buffalo on the afternoon of June 26, making the fourteen-mile trip in sixteen minutes. Thousands cheered as the plane landed on the American side, and the following day hundreds paid a fee to examine it. A little after five that afternoon, as bells rang and whistles blew, Beachey took his plane into the air in the teeth of a high wind and rose several thousand feet above the Falls while crowds on both shores cheered.

  He swept down the gorge, circled round, and made a second pass at the Falls to lose altitude. He soared up the river above the Falls, circled back toward the crest, his speedometer clocking eighty miles an hour, then suddenly dove at a forty-five-degree angle directly into the wall of mist rising high above the river.

  Blinded by the spray, he had to shut his eyes for a moment. The drop was so swift that the engine stalled briefly, then coughed into action. As he pulled out of the dive, he spotted an open space between the two bridge supports and swept through, just twenty feet above the furious water, on what he later called “one big, beautiful joyride.”

  A second bridge, the cantilever structure built by the Michigan Central Railroad in 1883, now barred his way. But Beachey easily lifted his craft over it, circled about, and raced back over the Falls again before landing to the cheers of the crowd. He was, that day at least, “the most talked of aviator in the world.” In banner headlines, the Cataract Journal announced that he had saved the carnival.

  Beachey moved on to greater triumphs. In 1913 he added to his reputation by looping the loop over San Diego Bay. He challenged Barney Oldfield, the great automobile racer, to a contest, and won. In the Palace of Machinery at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, he made the first indoor flight in history. In that city on March 14, 1915, fifty thousand people watched him take off from the polo grounds in a light monoplane built especially for him. Down he came in a terrifying vertical plunge from 3,500 feet. But he had misjudged the speed of his descent. As he tried to pull out of the dive at 500 feet, both wings broke off the plane and it crashed into San Francisco Bay. “The Silent Reaper of Souls and I shook hands,” he had written of an earlier flight. “Today the old fellow and I are pals.” But the friendship ended on that sunny afternoon. Before his body
could be hauled from the wreckage of his plane, Lincoln Beachey had drowned.

  4

  The red-headed hero

  By February of 1912, when he won his second life-saving medal, William “Red” Hill had established himself as a local hero and also as something of an eccentric. He was obsessed by the Niagara River – drawn to it as if by an irresistible force. It haunted his dreams, controlled his waking hours, held him captive. To Hill, the Niagara was an old friend; he knew its every current, eddy, and whirlpool; he knew it in every season – knew it and loved it.

  It had been that way since his father, Layfield Hill, impatient with anyone who feared the river, had swum out into the current with five-year-old Red on his back to give him a taste of Niagara, the temptress. The following day he pushed his son, fully clothed, into fifteen feet of water. “Sink or swim!” Layfield cried. Young Red swam.

  He was born with a caul – a membrane covering the fetus – and so, following a mystic tradition, was believed to have second sight. His wife, Beatrice, claimed that he often awoke suddenly in the dark to announce that he would find a body in the morning. More often than not he was right, as he was right about the weather, which he could predict with uncanny accuracy, simply, he said, by listening to the roar of the Falls.

  It was once believed that a child born with a caul bore a charmed life. Certainly Red Hill’s life seemed charmed. He took chances and survived. The river had no terrors for him, but then, it is also said that a person born with a caul is in no danger of drowning. Neither flood nor fire fazed him. At the age of nine, when his parents’ home burst into flames, he rushed back barefoot into the inferno to rescue his two-year-old sister, Cora, who had been trapped inside. For that he was awarded his first life-saving medal.