Niagara Page 5

  The Falls, circa 1825

  Even she, however, could not hazard the full experience. “We more than once approached the entrance to this appalling cavern, but I never fairly entered it … I lost my breath entirely; and the pain at my breast was so severe, that not all my curiosity could enable me to endure it.”

  Flushed with success and encouraged by the canal open for business, Forsyth in 1826 added two wings to the Pavilion and plunged into a series of acrimonious disputes that were to be his downfall. He was a rogue, certainly, but in the struggle for the tourist dollar that was just beginning, all were rogues of a sort. The successful rogues had the political establishment on their side; Forsyth didn’t. For all of a decade he battered his head against the unyielding wall of officialdom. One cannot help admiring his stubbornness, if not his greed.

  For greed brought him down. He didn’t want a piece of the Falls; he wanted it all. This single-mindedness antagonized his rivals. These included John Brown, who had opened the Ontario House a short distance upriver, and two miller-merchants, Thomas Clark and Samuel Street, Jr., who had beaten Forsyth and secured ferry rights on the river in 1825.

  All were interconnected. Clark also owned a chunk of Brown’s hotel. A powerful figure in the burgeoning community and a former member of the Legislative Council, he had the ear of the lieutenant-governor. He and his partner, Street, were among other things land speculators and money-lenders; the fact that many of the most prominent figures in the region were in his debt gave him an edge that Forsyth could not command.

  Forsyth was stubborn to the point of being bullheaded. When Brown built a plank road from his hotel to the Falls, Forsyth ripped it up. When Clark and Street got ferry rights on the river, Forsyth mounted a pirate operation, harassing the partners so aggressively that they couldn’t operate.

  Charges, countercharges, and lawsuits enlivened the battle. When Brown’s hotel burned down mysteriously, Clark spread the rumour that Forsyth was to blame. When Brown rebuilt it, he found that Forsyth had encircled the Pavilion with a high board fence, shutting off all access to Table Rock and the Falls. But the government had set aside a public strip one chain (sixty-six feet) wide along the river bank as a military reserve. This was Crown property, and Clark persuaded the lieutenant-governor to send a troop of engineers to tear the illegally placed fence down. When Forsyth put it back up, the army tore it down again, an act that many considered an outrageous use of the military over an issue that should properly have been decided in the courts. Forsyth sued; but when the civil suit was finally argued, he lost. He lost again when Brown sued him for tearing up his road. He lost a third time when Clark and Street sued him for ruining their ferry business. That should have been enough, but Forsyth refused to give up. He filed two countersuits and lost those, too.

  These civil actions failed to stop the irrepressible hotelier from operating his illegal ferry system. What Clark needed was a criminal action. To effect that, he managed to wangle a licence of occupation – something Forsyth had failed to get – for that part of the old military reserve that lay near his dock. The government reasoned that this would “keep the shore open and free of access to the public who had been shut out by Forsyth.” Now the Pavilion’s owner realized he could go to jail if he trespassed on what had become the licensed property of his rivals.

  In the end Forsyth was beaten down. His attempts to corral the tourist trade at the Falls had failed. In 1833 he sold out – to Clark and Street. The winners immediately focused their attention on an ambitious real-estate speculation, which they named the City of the Falls. In spite of the grandiloquent title, it was an ordinary subdivision of fifty-foot lots to be laid out on Forsyth’s old property. Its purpose, they claimed, was to preserve the area from vandalism and commercial enterprise!

  Future residents of the City of the Falls were to have the use of a fashionable Bath House complete with Pump Room and Dance Hall. But this attempt to create a miniature Saratoga Springs at Niagara failed. Only a few lots were sold, in spite of an aggressive advertising campaign, while the attempt to pump water up from Table Rock to a reservoir in a tower collapsed when the wooden pipes burst. As a result there was water, water everywhere except in the Bath House, which fell into disuse and subsequently burned. The entire scheme folded, and the investors, including Clark and Street, lost heavily. As for the Pavilion, it was soon superseded by the more luxurious Clifton House, named for the struggling community growing up on the Canadian bank of the gorge.

  It was here that the Front was born – that notorious quarter-mile strip, just three hundred yards wide, that ran from Table Rock to the Clifton House and provided a haven for half a century for every kind of huckster, gambler, barker, confidence man, and swindler. Here half a dozen hotels soon sprang up along with a hodge-podge of other shops, booths, and taverns. And here Thomas Barnett built his famous museum with its Egyptian mummies and Iroquois arrowheads.

  The City of the Falls had failed, but the Front was its byproduct. Those canny promoters, Clark and Street, had used their influence to occupy most of the military reserve, something Forsyth had never been able to achieve. What they could not occupy legally they grabbed anyway. When the new governor sent the army down to stop them from erecting buildings on the reserve, they sued for damages, even though the soldiers had been careful to remove only one stone. The courts, however, awarded the partners five hundred pounds and then gave them a deed to the whole. It would take another protracted court action and many years of protest before the Front finally wound down.

  3

  The jumper and the hermit

  The long carnival began on September 8, 1827. The natural spectacle was no longer enough – or so the entrepreneurs believed. If the crowds required further titillation, they would provide it. And the cataract provided a perfect backdrop.

  William Forsyth began it before he sold out, with the help of John Brown, of all people. The lure of mutual profit wiped out, at least temporarily, their personal vendetta. Forsyth could not let the Falls go to waste; to him, the thundering cataract, rattling the windows of the Pavilion, ought to be used. He was the first of a long line of promoters who felt the same way.

  He and Brown roped in an American, Parkhurst Whitney, proprietor of the Eagle Tavern on the other side, and together the trio devised a spectacular feat. If the Falls inspired horror, then Forsyth intended to pour on more horror – albeit slightly counterfeit. He could scarcely send a human being over the Falls (that would not occur to anyone until the start of the next century), but he could send some four-footed surrogates. He and his partners would buy a condemned vessel, deck it out as a pirate ship, and, with a cargo of “wild and ferocious animals,” send it hurtling over “the stupendous precipice” of the Horseshoe Falls. The posters heralding the event anticipated the extravagant style that Phineas Barnum was about to make famous: “The greatest exertions are making [sic] to procure Animals of the ferocious kind, such as Panthers, Wild Cats, Bears and Wolves; but in lieu of some of these, which it may be impossible to obtain, a few vicious or worthless Dogs, such as may possess considerable strength and activity, and perhaps a few of the toughest of the Lesser Animals, will be added to, and compose, the cargo.…

  “Should the Animals be young and hardy, and possessed of great muscular powers, and joining their fate with that of the Vessel, remain on board till she reaches the waters below, there is great probability that many of them, will have performed the terrible jaunt, unhurt!”

  The idea of actual living beings plunging headlong into the unforgiving waters was tempting to those who, no doubt, would have welcomed the return of bear-baiting. Certainly the crowds that blackened the treetops, housetops, hotel verandahs, and wagons to witness “the remarkable spectacle unequalled in the annals of infernal navigation” were the biggest yet seen at Niagara. Estimates ranging from ten thousand to thirty thousand were bandied about. Stages and canal boats had been crowded with visitors descending on the twin communities. Wagons poured in, crammed w
ith farmers and their families. Five steamboats loaded with thrill seekers arrived from Lake Erie, each with a brass band on deck. Gamblers brought wheels of fortune; hucksters set up stalls to hawk gingerbread and beer. Upper-class ladies arrayed themselves in what the Colonial Advocate called “the pink of fashion.” Hotels and taverns were overbooked.

  At three that afternoon, with the Stars and Stripes at its bow and the Union Jack at its stern, the derelict merchant ship Michigan was towed to a point just above the rapids. There was no crew, but effigies of sailors lined the decks. The cargo scarcely lived up to its billing: two bears, a buffalo, two foxes, a raccoon, an eagle, a dog, and fifteen geese.

  With an approving shout from the crowd, the Michigan entered the first set of rapids. The rest was anticlimax. The ship lost its masts and began to break up before reaching the crest of the Falls. The bears and the buffalo jumped overboard; at least one bear was recaptured and put on display. The ship broke in half, tumbled over the precipice, and went to pieces. One of the geese survived. None of the other animals was found.

  The results exceeded the promoters’ wildest dreams. So much liquor and beer were consumed in the taverns and hotels that the entire stock was drunk up before half the crowd was accommodated. The message was clear: the Falls was not simply a static spectacle to be gazed upon and admired; now it could be used.

  Two years later the first of the Niagara daredevils turned up in the person of Sam Patch, the Jersey Jumper, a twenty-three-year-old millhand who had perfected his curious vocation by leaping into millponds. Patch had been astonishing crowds by his high jumps into raging waters, including a seventy-foot leap into the chasm at Passaic Falls in New Jersey and a ninety-foot plunge from the masthead of a Hoboken sloop. In October 1829, he was invited to the Falls by a group of Buffalo businessmen who had talked of drawing crowds by blowing up a dangerous corner of Table Rock and now saw a chance to mount a stronger attraction.

  Patch jauntily obliged and produced a poster attesting to “the reputation I have gained, by Airo-Nautical Feats, never before attempted, either in the Old or New World.” He announced he would plummet 120 feet into the abyss from a platform fastened to the cliff of Goat Island between the two falls. The distance was probably less than one hundred feet (the Colonial Advocate placed it at eighty-five) because the platform was secured one-third of the way down the cliff.

  On a rainy Saturday, as crowds lined both sides of the river as well as the banks of the island, Patch appeared, shed his shoes, and climbed a ladder to the platform. It was only large enough for one man and wobbly to boot, but Patch was unconcerned, acknowledging the cheers of the multitude. Then he stood up, took a handkerchief from around his neck, tied it to his waist, and kissed the Stars and Stripes flying from the stand. He stood erect, feet together, arms at his sides, toes pointing downward, took a lungful of air, and stepped off into the torrent.

  “He’s dead, he’s lost!” the crowd shouted – or so one report claimed. But he was very much alive. His head burst from under the water; the crowd went wild; and Sam, singing merrily to himself, swam into the arms of the nearest spectator and cockily declared that “there’s no mistake in Sam Patch!”

  The press was predictably ecstatic. “Sam Patch has immortalized himself,” burbled the Colonial Advocate. “He has done what mortal never did before.” The Buffalo Republican called Patch’s jump “the greatest feat of the kind ever effected by man.” Emboldened by the experience, Patch left immediately for the nearby Genesee Falls, leaped from a height of 120 feet before five thousand awestruck spectators, hit the water in a kind of belly-flop, and was instantly killed.

  His body was not recovered until the following spring, and as so often happens, there were those who claimed he wasn’t dead. So began the Sam Patch legend. “SAM PATCH ALIVE!” ran a headline in the New York Post less than a month after his death. People began to see Patch everywhere; some even claimed they had spoken to him. Others wrote poems, plays, stories, songs, novels, even a fake autobiography of the Jersey Jumper. And at Niagara, guides pocketed tips by pointing to the exact spot where Sam Patch had made his last successful leap.

  If certain eccentrics were tempted to exploit the aura of the macabre that still hung over the Falls, others were drawn to the cataract by a craving for the sublime and the beautiful. While Sam Patch was drawing the spectators at the lower extremity of Goat Island, a strange young man named Francis Abbott was taking his ease at the upper end where the roar of the rapids drowned out the roar of the crowd. Here, in the core of the island forest, the Hermit of Niagara found the solitude he craved. Abbott had nothing in common with the Jersey Jumper but a watery fate.

  In his long, chocolate-coloured cloak, his feet bare, Abbott was a familiar if unusual figure as he wandered, aloof and ascetic, violin in hand, from Goat Island to the shallows where he bathed at least twice a day in the coldest weather, often surrounded by floating chunks of ice.

  He had arrived at the Falls on foot on June 18, 1829, a tall, well-formed man carrying a roll of blankets, a flute, a book, and a cane. He put up at Ebenezer Kelly’s modest inn on the American side and asked if there was a library or a reading room in the community. There was. He repaired to it, deposited three dollars, borrowed a book and some sheet music, and then bought a violin. He announced he would stay for a few days.

  He stayed longer, for the Falls had captured him – obsessed him. “In all my wanderings,” he told the innkeeper, “I have never met with anything in nature that equals it in sublimity, except perhaps Mount Etna during an eruption.” He was astonished, he said, that some visitors arrived, gazed briefly on the spectacle, and left – all in a single day. He proposed to remain at least a week. A traveller might as well, he said, “examine in detail all the museums and sights of Paris, as to become acquainted with Niagara, and duly appreciate it in the same space of time.”

  A week, it developed, was not long enough. He talked of staying a month, perhaps six months. He fixed upon Goat Island as suitably distant from the crowd and asked Augustus Porter for permission to build a hut on its shores. That was the last thing Porter wanted – new buildings disturbing the sylvan setting. But Abbott was allowed to move into the only dwelling on the island, a one-storey log cabin occupied by a family that had, apparently, been on the scene before Porter. They gave him space and let him do his own cooking. When the family moved he had the place to himself – an ideal situation; then, when another family moved in, he left the island and built a small cottage on the main shore directly opposite the American Falls.

  But it was Goat Island that seduced him. With the pet dog he had acquired he tramped back and forth along its upper shore until his bare feet had beaten a hard path through the woods. He continued to bathe in a small cascade that lay in the narrows between Goat and its diminutive neighbour, Moss Island.

  The Porters had constructed a shaky pier that led from Goat, the main island, above a series of half-submerged rocks to the Terrapin Rocks, three hundred yards out in the torrent. From the far edge of the pier a single piece of timber projected over the cataract. To the consternation of onlookers, the Hermit would saunter out to the rocks in his bare feet and then out onto the timber, walking heel and toe, back and forth, maintaining his balance while his long, unshorn hair streamed out behind him in the wind and the spray. Sometimes he would even stand on one leg, perform an elegant pirouette, then drop to his knees to gaze into the cauldron below. On occasion he would alarm the watchers still more by letting himself down by his hands to hang directly over the Falls for fifteen minutes at a time.

  He explained to one of the ferrymen that when crossing the ocean he had seen young sailors perform even more perilous acts aloft on the masts. Since he himself expected to go to sea again, he said, he must inure himself to such dangers. This brief, tantalizing glimpse into his past life served only to deepen the mystery of his background. Who was this man whose uncanny lack of fear and whose flirtation with fate seemed more a matter of cool curiosity than a death wis
h? Sometimes at midnight he was seen to walk alone in the most hazardous spots; at those times he avoided his fellows “as if he had a dread of man.” Who was he?

  Probably an English officer on half pay, or perhaps a remittance man. He was well educated and clearly had travelled widely in Europe and Asia. He played several musical instruments, was a fair artist, and on those rare occasions when he was inclined to be sociable could indulge in sophisticated conversation. But at other times he shunned human companionship, refused to speak or listen to anyone, communicated his wishes by writing on a slate, and didn’t bother to shave. Then his only covering was a blanket in which he wrapped himself.

  He was, in short, a recognizable type, one of the first of a breed of eccentric Victorian Englishmen who would turn up from time to time in remote global outposts – in China ports, on South Sea beaches, in western cow towns, or in Africa’s dark heart. For such a stereotype, Niagara offered an ideal setting.

  Two years almost to the day from his arrival, Francis Abbott was seen by a ferryman to fold his garments neatly on the shore below the boat landing and enter the water. He seemed to keep his head under for a suspiciously long time, but the ferryman was used to Abbott’s odd behaviour and had other duties to attend to. When he next looked, Abbott was gone. Nor was he ever seen alive again, though his body was not found in the river until eleven days later.

  His death was as mysterious as his life. Was it accident or suicide? No scrap of paper in his hut remained to provide a clue, even though he was known to scribble away day after day, tearing up the results at night. His faithful dog stubbornly guarded the door and was removed with difficulty. Within, his flute, violin, guitar, and music books lay scattered about. On a crude table were found a portfolio and the leaves of a large book, all blank. Not even his name had been inscribed on them.