Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  Bobbing and weaving down the chute of the gorge – moving faster, indeed, than the cars on the road above, which were caught in a traffic jam – the barrel plunged northward to its destination. Standing on the bridge at Queenston, an immense crowd, far larger than the one that had greeted Hill’s father, shouted “Here he comes!” as the crimson cask emerged from the white water. A power boat took the barrel in tow. It was so badly battered now that it could not be used again. When Red Hill and his family went out to the cemetery to place a wreath on the grave of Red, Sr., Beatrice Hill was not with them. The excitement over the rescue had caused her to collapse with a heart attack.

  Like his father, young Red was no businessman. Unlike the shrewd Farini, he had made no attempt to sell tickets or organize the spectacle for maximum profit. And because the police had infiltrated the area, trying to forestall him, it was difficult for him to arrange a collection. And so, three years later, in September 1948, he determined to try again, using a cigar-shaped steel craft weighing about a thousand pounds. Once again he managed to elude the law and push off secretly from thick woods bordering the river. Once again the waves in the rapids hurled the barrel high in the air – an estimated forty feet this time. Once again the barrel kept circling and slowly filling with water in the heart of the vortex.

  The barrel approached the shore two hours after it entered the Whirlpool, and again Hill’s brothers towed it to shore. He was badly battered, for his safety harness had broken and he had been forced to tie himself down, an awkward feat with the barrel rolling and tossing in the waves.

  The trip to Queenston took another three hours, and when Red emerged he announced that it had been ten times worse than the previous venture. Recording equipment that he was supposed to use to describe the trip broke loose and smashed into his left knee. He emerged, stunned and bruised, to announce, “I’m all through with stunts like this.”

  But, of course, he wasn’t, and neither was his brother Major (his Christian name) Lloyd Hill, who seemed determined to outdo both his brother and his father. In 1949, Major attempted the same trip in another steel barrel, this one equipped with fins worked by levers. These, he said, would allow him to steer himself away from the Whirlpool. They didn’t work. Badly bruised after two hours of circling in the maelstrom, he was finally rescued in the most spectacular fashion – hauled up sixty-five feet to the Spanish Aero Car (built in 1916) hanging on its cable above. As he lay in hospital, Major heard Red announce that he would complete the abortive journey to Queenston. That was too much for Major. He left his bed, walked out of the hospital, and made the journey himself.

  It was clear that the two Hill brothers were trying to best each other, partly for the honour of the family but also because each saw himself as the legitimate successor to his father. The following July, the thirty-one-year-old Major, a tall and lanky war veteran, announced he would do something that none of the other members of the family had attempted. He would plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Major attempted to surround the effort with an aura of scientific respectability. He wanted, he said, “to disprove certain theories about the Falls.” He wanted to show that “there’s no rocks in the centre about seventy-five to one hundred feet from the Falls.” A more probable purpose was to underline the family’s charmed life. “The Falls,” said Major, “can’t kill the Hills.”

  A vast crowd turned up on the hot afternoon of July 16, 1950. The press estimated half a million spectators, undoubtedly an exaggeration. They left disappointed. At 1:15, Hill started out from a point three miles above the cataract, but the current quickly drew his barrel under the weir of wire mesh that screened the flow of water to the intake of the Canadian Niagara Power Company. Hill’s friends rushed to retrieve the barrel, intending to push it out into the racing stream, but power company employees convinced them the attempt would be dangerous because of large rocks in the current leading to the intake. They hauled Hill from the barrel and, to the disappointment of the throng, sent it plunging empty over the Falls. Major Hill made another rapids trip that summer but did not attempt the Falls again.

  Young Red was miffed. His brother had not invited him to take part in the adventure, and he felt the snub keenly. He also felt the family’s honour had been besmirched by Major’s failure to make good on his pledge. For years he himself had been toying with the idea of “taking the big drop.” Now, the Hills’ reputation at stake, he determined to try the stunt himself.

  He announced he would go over the Falls in a rubber ball, as his friend Jean Lussier had done. The trouble was that he was broke. A month after his last rapids trip a bailiff had seized his goods and chattels to satisfy his bank, his landlord, and the welding service that had made the new barrel. Strapped for cash, he took his problem to a friend, a local tinsmith named Norman Candler, who devised an inexpensive contraption that Hill dubbed “the Thing.” That was an apt name, for it resembled nothing that had ever entered the Niagara River before.

  The Thing consisted of thirteen truck tire inner tubes bound together by webbing and encased in string fish net. “This barrel is not something made on the spur of the moment,” Hill declared stoutly, but it certainly looked it. In fact, Hill’s first reaction on seeing it was one of disappointment. “I thought it would be different,” he said.

  He went across the river to see Jean Lussier, who told him, “I wouldn’t even go on the Chippawa Creek in a rig like that.”

  “Well,” said Hill with a shrug, “that’s as far as my money would go.”

  Its very flimsiness appealed to him, or so he said in what seems to have been a masterpiece of rationalization. “It will ride high and take the knock” was the way he put it.

  He had reached the point where he could not back out no matter what anybody said. He had made a public announcement; he had devised a unique craft; and he had the family reputation to consider. One Hill had already backed out of the plunge. This one had no intention of doing so.

  Indeed, the prospect of danger seemed to exhilarate him. “I’ve been watching the Falls for years and I know I can take care of them,” he said. At times he seemed to be convincing himself that the journey over the brink would be easy. “There won’t be any mistake. I’ll ride high over the water. I’ll get wet but nothing will happen to me.”

  His brother Wes, the youngest of the four Hill boys, tried to talk him out of the stunt. “It’s too light,” he told him. “You’re heavier than it is. You’re going to shoot out of it like a ball out of a cannon. Not only am I not going to help you, I’m going fishing.”

  Wes had planned to fish for four days with a group of friends, but he couldn’t bear to abandon his brother. A day after he left, he drove all the night from the fishing camp back to Niagara. “Prepare yourself,” he said to Beatrice Hill. “You’re not going to see him any more.”

  A friend suggested that Red fake the trip by sending the Thing over empty. He could then climb into it secretly and make money by exhibiting the device and appearing on radio or on television. Red scorned the idea. “It’s the Falls I want to go over,” he said. “I want that more than the fame or the money.”

  His mother pleaded with him to wear a life jacket. He wouldn’t hear of it. “That would take the kick out of the show,” he told her. Yet he seemed in no hurry to make the hazardous trip. “I’ll make her soon enough,” he told a group of cronies who were urging him on. “Don’t get excited.”

  The date was set for August 5. Red was sitting in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee when Wes arrived. “I’ll see you later,” Red said as he headed for the Rapids Tavern. “No you won’t,” said Wes, glumly.

  Hill left the tavern carrying a paper bag containing two bottles of beer. “FU see you about 2:30,” he told a friend. “I may drop dead before you get back,” the friend replied.

  A pickup truck brought him to Usher’s Creek above Chippawa, where the Thing was concealed behind a pile of brush. Hill took his ease in the truck, drinking beer, waiting for the odd craft to be towed to the m
outh of the creek. Helpers pumped up the inner tubes and an air mattress in which he was to lie during the journey. An opening had been left at one end that Hill planned to close just before going over the crest of the Horseshoe. “Just when I feel that last dip before she goes over, I’ll jam one of the tubes over the opening and hold it there,” he announced. “Then I’ll just curl up like a good little boy and ride ’er down.”

  Hill supervised the final details himself, planning to enter the craft only at the last moment. As he said, “This is my life. I’ll feel safe so long as this is run my way.” He climbed into a rowboat and smiled ruefully back to the knot of friends on the bank as he was rowed to the main channel. When he reached it, he entered the Thing.

  Red took with him a variety of good-luck charms that well-wishers had pressed on him – four silver dollars, a four-leaf clover, a chip from the Blarney Stone, some holy medals, a wreath of heather, a tiny doll, and his father’s good luck piece: a small plastic elephant. “I’m not superstitious or religious,” he had said, “but when people give me things like this it shows they think a little something of me.”

  Two hundred thousand spectators – twice the usual number for an August weekend – blackened the banks on both sides of the river to watch Hill’s awkward craft dancing, whirling, and shooting through the rapids. It hurtled directly to the crest of the Falls, dropped over in one piece, and vanished in the turbulence below.

  A few moments later, two inner tubes that had apparently become detached floated to the surface. Then the rest of the tubes popped up in disarray, “looking like so many doughnuts on a string,” in the words of one witness. Clearly the device had not held together but had been torn to pieces by the terrific force of the water. The crowd stood silent. There was no sign of Red Hill.

  “Where is he?” his mother cried out. “Where is he? He’s my oldest boy. I want him back! I want him back!” She collapsed sobbing on the dock.

  Near where the parts of the Thing surfaced the inflated rubber mattress was found floating. Red’s shoes, which he had removed after climbing into the craft, also turned up. But the broken body of the riverman didn’t appear until the following day near the Maid of the Mist landing.

  Thus the Hill legend began its tragic end. Corky would die a year later, killed by a falling rock while working on the new Ontario Hydro plant, Sir Adam Beck No. 2. Major Lloyd Hill would die an alcoholic, by his own hand in a jail cell. It was he, standing over the remains of the Thing, who uttered his brother’s epitaph.

  “Well,” said Major, “he put on a great show.”

  Chapter Eleven

  1

  The witch’s end of fairyland

  2

  The park man

  3

  The river takes over

  4

  The fighting Tuscarora

  1

  The witch’s end of fairyland

  Whenever he gazed across the Niagara River at the manicured vistas on the Canadian side, Robert Moses was consumed with frustration. He had been appointed head of the New York State Power Authority on March 8, 1954, charged with the daunting task of building the largest hydroelectric plant in the western world at Lewiston. Directly opposite he could also see the newest Canadian plant, Sir Adam Beck No. 2, taking shape; indeed, by the time Moses got the job, Beck 2 was almost complete. But the American project had now been delayed four years by congressional wrangling. A venomous conflict between the proponents of public power and its antagonists, who attacked public ownership as “creeping socialism,” had not yet been resolved.

  Moses saw something else on the Canadian side that made him envious. The Niagara Parks Commission now had under its care the entire clifftop from the Falls to Queenston. The handsome drive along the river took tourists past green lawns, public parks, recreation trails, gardens, a golf course, heritage buildings, and historic groves – everything from an art library to a floral clock. By contrast, the dingy American side, apart from the original state reservation, had been left to haphazard exploitation by private interests. The results – a welter of grime-coated factories, railroad tracks, telephone poles, and coal piles – were, to Moses, simply appalling.

  The main entrance to the city of Niagara Falls, New York, led along Buffalo Avenue, a dreary, two-mile wasteland of electro-chemical and electro-metallurgical factories – industries attracted to the community by the prospect of cheap Falls power. But now the atmosphere was acrid with fumes rising from the tall smokestacks. Motorists rolled up their car windows when passing through “the Witch’s End of Fairyland,” as one writer called it.

  This was the legacy of the heroic age of invention – the reality behind the Utopia that the earlier entrepreneurs had contemplated. The dream city that was supposed to take shape above the cataract had become nightmarish. Pollution was now a fact of life for the citizens of Niagara Falls, the majority of whom worked for or were provided for by the same companies that polluted the atmosphere – Olin Corporation, Union Carbide, Du Pont, and Hooker Chemical. The city fathers cared less about the tourist industry than they did about the thousands of blue-collar jobs the factories provided.

  Robert Moses’ plan was to circumvent the gritty Buffalo Avenue entrance by building a parkway along the river. “I am a park man,” he had said more than once. He had, indeed, invented the modern parkway – a ribbon of divided highway running between two sylvan strips of grass and trees. Besides his new post as chairman of the power authority, Moses was chairman of the State Council on Parks, chairman of the Tri-borough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, coordinator for federal-state highway construction in New York City, and a member of the Long Island State Power Commission. He had been a public servant for all of his career and was used to wearing several hats. At one period he had held ten appointive jobs simultaneously.

  Moses had already built 416 miles of parkway in New York State. Now, in his mind’s eye, he could contemplate an impressive stretch of parkland running along the American side of the Niagara gorge. He would construct it from the massive mountain of earth, clay, and stone that would be available when the power tunnels and reservoir were excavated. Matching its Canadian counterpart, the park and road would finally frame the Niagara picture, and there was no doubt that once the power project was under way, Moses would pull it off. He had absolute authority and knew how to use it. But even if he had wished to, he could not eliminate the cloud of smog that hung over the city, causing the eyes to smart and the lungs to choke. It could be seen clearly by any air traveller – a dark mantle of greyish brown, masking the land below.

  There was far worse pollution beneath the soil, but few were aware of that in 1954 when Moses, the park man, was named energy czar. In the various chemical waste dumps scattered about the area – all within earshot of the great natural wonder – potential disaster lurked.

  One of the biggest producers of chemical waste was the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation, named for Eldon Huntington Hooker, who had started his business in a three-room farmhouse and was by 1906 producing caustic soda from salt brine. The waste from Hooker Chemical and other companies stemmed from the revolution in organic chemistry that had occurred in the late thirties and forties. This had its origin in discoveries made just before the turn of the century, when scientists found that carbon, which is the principal component of coal and oil, has remarkable properties that allow its molecules to form long, complex chains and rings. On the eve of the Second World War, chemical companies began to use carbon to create thousands of new medicines, solvents, plastics, pesticides, weed killers, dyes, fabrics, preservatives, transformer fluids, and other products. These ranged from polyester clothing to 2, 4-D and were greeted enthusiastically as the harbingers of a dazzling new post-war world. But in manufacturing the new chemicals, the industry also created waste products that were unknown in nature, many so durable they would remain in the environment for years without breaking down. Some were soluble in fats but not water. Thus they could accumulate in the fish and animals e
aten by humans.

  By the late forties, with the chemical revolution in full swing and consumers demanding more and more of the new plastics and fabrics, Hooker needed a suitable place to dump the fast-accumulating waste. To the Hooker company, William Love’s old unfinished canal, dating back to the 1890s and used thereafter as a winter skating rink and a summer swimming hole, was the ideal dump site. Hooker first arranged with the owner, the local power company, to store wastes in the ditch. In 1947 Hooker bought the site.

  The canal was a mile long, fifteen yards wide, and between ten and forty feet deep, built at right angles to the river. The company drained it, lined it with a casing of clay, and deposited in it twenty thousand tons of chemical waste contained in thousands of fifty-five-gallon metal barrels. A thin cap of clay and grass covered the whole. At the time this was considered an adequate safeguard. No one, apparently, foresaw that the barrels might rust or break, or that if they did their contents could leach through the clay with horrifying results. And few, if any, in those days realized there was a connection between the discarded chemicals and a wide range of health problems that included birth defects, liver damage, some chronic diseases, and cancer.

  One man did raise a small warning flag. In 1948, a Boston scientist, Dr. Robert Mobbs, wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association that one of the insecticide chemicals in the waste dump, lindane, was a possible cancer-causing agent. Years later, when a Hooker vice-president told a television audience that in the forties his company had no reason to be aware of hazardous wastes, Mobbs was outraged. “Did Hooker come looking for the evidence?” he asked. “Like hell they did. They ignored, minimized and suppressed the facts.…” If he had known about lindane, he asked, why hadn’t they?

  That Hooker was concerned about future problems and wanted to purge itself of all liability became clear in 1953. By that time, the grass-covered canal was being using as a children’s playground. In May, the Niagara Falls Board of Education, reeling from the pressures of the post-war baby boom, agreed to buy the land from Hooker as part of an urgent plan of school construction. Parents in the burgeoning LaSalle district, in which Love Canal was located (between 97th and 99th streets), were desperate for a school closer to their homes. When Hooker offered the property for a token dollar, the board jumped at it in the belief that the company was acting as a good corporate citizen.