Niagara Page 7
During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a number of Niagara observers, on the basis of this evidence, tried to reckon the real age of the river. In 1790, one Niagara observer, William Maclay, pointed out to the surveyor-general of the United States (who had himself been studying the rate of attrition) that people who had lived along the gorge for thirty years insisted that the Falls had moved twenty feet upriver in that time. At that rate, he said, the river was 55,440 years old.
Such calculations did little to shake the religious faith of the masses. As late as 1834, George Fairholme, a “scriptural geologist,” argued that the Falls was formed “immediately subsequent to the restoration of order after the Mosaic Deluge” and was now no more than five thousand years old.
Those who held that the earth had developed over an enormous span of eons through a series of gradual changes were considered heretics. Others, attempting to justify the Biblical story, theorized that the earth had developed as a result of a series of sudden, and indeed supernatural, shocks in which mountains had been thrust up almost overnight while gigantic tidal waves had destroyed all life. After each death-dealing upheaval, new life had been reintroduced by God himself, improving by stages until modern man emerged. Now the world was complete and perfect, as the Deity intended.
With these various theories Charles Lyell, the author of the three-volume, trail-breaking Principles of Geology, had no patience. “Never was there a dogma more calculated to further indolence and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity,” he declared. Always clear-headed, Lyell touched off the revolution in geology that marked the Victorian Age and paved the way for Charles Darwin’s seminal work.
Lyell knew and admired Darwin, and yet when he reached Niagara in 1841, he did not share his friend’s theory of evolution, a theory that had yet to see print. More than twenty years would pass before Lyell came to accept it. But he knew a great deal about the age of the earth, for he had examined fossils, shells, and strata in his wanderings across Europe. Principles had already been published. In these volumes Lyell indicated his debt to earlier observers who had studied the geology of the area. As for Fairholme, he had never visited the cataract and never would. Lyell did, and in just ten days neatly disposed of the theses of the Fairholme school, although many people stubbornly continued to believe them.
He was a handsome man, Lyell, with long, ascetic features and the high dome and broad forehead of a savant. He was the eldest of ten children of a bookish family in Scotland. His father had an abiding interest in nature, and young Lyell was a great one for shinnying up trees, hunting for birds’ nests, and collecting butterflies. He was always as much a naturalist as he was a geologist.
Actually, Lyell was trained as a barrister. A sophisticated member of Lincoln’s Inn, he was briefly a regular on the circuit court of southern England. In his spare hours, he played the flute and read a great deal of poetry. Milton was his favourite; no doubt Lyell, who had ruined his eyes poring over law books, identified with the sightless poet. He himself would be nearly blind in the evening of his life. His weak vision and his frail physique did not stop him from scaling cliffs and scrambling down river banks in England and Europe, examining strata and collecting old shells and other fossils from prehistoric seas in an effort to discover the origins of river valleys. On these occasions, it was said, he was insensible to both fatigue and heat.
By 1828, when he set off on a nine-month trip through France, Italy, and Sicily, Lyell had abandoned the practice of law. This was the first of several journeys that brought about a revolution in his thinking and would spark a corresponding revolution in geology. His Principles argued that there was a natural – not a supernatural – explanation for every geological phenomenon, that the process of geological development worked so slowly that the earth must be much older than was believed, and that modern geological processes (mountain building, for instance) didn’t differ from ancient ones. In short, there never was a series of divine cataclysms, and the existence of mankind on earth was relatively short.
Darwin drew heavily on Lyell’s methods and style. The Principles, Darwin declared, “altered the whole tone of one’s mind.” Even when observing something never seen by Lyell, “one yet saw it partially through his eyes.” It is not too much to say that without Lyell’s pioneer work, The Origin of Species might not have been written.
Lyell arrived at Niagara on August 27, 1841, and got his first view of the Falls from a point three miles downriver. The sun was shining full on the cataract and there was no building in view to suggest the presence of civilization – “nothing but the green wood, the falling water, and the white foam.” To Lyell, the twin cataracts were even more beautiful than he had expected, though not so grand. In geological interest, they were “far beyond my most sanguine hopes.” The splendour of Niagara grew on him, as it did on so many others, after several days. “I at last learned by degrees to comprehend the wonders of the scene,” he said, “and to feel its full magnificence.”
He, too, noted with mild asperity the harsh encroachment of industrialization on the ethereal world of the cataract. The steam railway had arrived, and Lyell wrote that “it has a strange effect when you have succeeded in obtaining some view of the Falls … to be suddenly awakened out of your reverie by the loud whistle of a locomotive drawing a load of tourists, and of merchants trafficking between the east and west, who discuss the Falls in three hours between two trains.” On the other hand, “Goat Island is the most perfect fairyland that I know.” He feared that within a decade it would be given over to factories.
Lyell spent his days at Niagara roaming the gorge, climbing the cliffs, and collecting specimens – shells, fossils, and, in one case, fragments of a mastodon skeleton – in order to determine the geological history of the region. His guide, the botanist Joseph Hooker, who had explored Goat Island, told him of the great slabs that had tumbled from Table Rock in 1818 and again in 1828 as the river chewed into the softer strata beneath. Hooker also pointed out an indentation about forty feet long that had been carved in the middle ledge of limestone in the American Falls since 1815.
During the same period, Lyell learned, the river’s erosion had also changed the shape of the Horseshoe Falls, while in just four years Goat Island had lost several acres. Various estimates for the age of the river had been advanced by earlier writers. Robert Blakewell had figured it at ten thousand years – a hypothesis Lyell had accepted in his Principles. Others, assuming an erosion rate of a foot a year, calculated that the Falls must have started their retreat from Queenston some thirty-five thousand years earlier. Lyell now tentatively settled on this figure. That presupposed that the erosion rate had been uniform everywhere, but as we know – and as Lyell guessed – it would have been faster at some points, slower at others. Was its current average progress more or less rapid than in the past? That he could not determine.
We can see him now in retrospect, a stooped figure because of his poor eyesight, digging into the shale with his trowel and squinting at the fossils he discovered. With the American geologist James Hall he collected specimens both from the beaches of Goat Island and from the overhanging cliffs above the river. They were, he discovered, remarkably similar. From this he deduced that Goat Island had once been under water (Lake Tonawanda, as we now know) and that a prehistoric river had covered the entire area to a greater depth.
Above the lip of the gorge he found traces of that ancient river bank. The following year he came upon a remnant of the riverbed high up on the Canadian side, a mile and a half upriver from the Whirlpool. Thus he was able to show that the Niagara had once been a broader, shallower watercourse (as it still is above the Falls) and that it had been turned into the turbulent stream at the bottom of a deep and narrow gorge by the advance of the cataract. Evidence of that older, wider river, left behind above the gorge walls, gave Lyell the clues he needed.
Lyell’s companion, James Hall, had pointed out that the Whirlpool was probably connected with a break in the Escarpment at
St. Davids, west of Queenston. This led to a spectacular discovery – the so-called St. Davids Gorge, the buried channel of another prehistoric river running northwest from the Whirlpool to Lake Ontario. Lyell, who charted it, realized that the Falls, excavating its way upstream, had encountered the course of this ancient stream filled with the rubble of the ages – sediments from the older river and lake and soil from ice sheets – and dug it out again. This explained not only the ninety-degree turn of the river but also the presence of the Whirlpool. More geological evidence found later proved the theory correct.
Lyell left the study of Niagara and went on to a knighthood and a host of awards, medals, and honorary degrees. He died at the age of seventy-seven while again revising his Principles. “The Falls of Niagara,” he wrote, “teach us not merely to appreciate the power of moving water, but furnish us at the same time with data for estimating the enormous lapse of ages during which that force has operated. A deep and long ravine has been excavated, and the river required ages to accomplish the task, yet the same region affords evidence that the sum of these ages is as nothing, and as the work of yesterday, when compared with the antecedent periods, of which there are monuments in the same district.”
There was a time when those thoughts would have been considered outrageously heretical. But the work of Hall and Lyell, both of whom published scientific accounts of their findings, put an effective stopper on further controversy among the savants. Today Lyell’s ideas are so commonplace that he himself has faded into obscurity. Only the devotees of geological history now remember the half-blind barrister who climbed the great gorge and unravelled some of the mysteries of the ages.
3
Spanning the gorge
The railroads transformed Niagara, exploited it, glamorized it, cheapened it, and created on the banks of the gorge what has been called “the centre of a vortex of travel.” By 1845, close to fifty thousand sightseers annually were swarming over the region, a figure that had doubled in just five years. But the onrush had only begun. The promoters of two major lines, Canada’s Great Western and New York’s Rochester and Niagara (the forerunner of the New York Central), had their eyes on the new Mecca. Anybody who could afford a ticket could soon enjoy a spectacle that had once been the exclusive privilege of the upper classes.
What was needed was a bridge suspended across that terrible chasm to join the two lines. Someone figured that it would immediately attract double the number of tourists, who would no longer be held back by the prospect of a a turbulent ride in a small ferry. The someone was a respected civil engineer, Charles B. Stuart, who had worked surveying both lines. If the toll were as little as twenty-five cents a passenger, so Stuart figured, the bridge would return a profit of 1 percent on the investment in the very first year.
Stuart knew very little about building bridges. He wasn’t at all sure that spanning a gorge eight hundred feet wide and two hundred feet deep was practical. He canvassed the leading engineers in Europe and North America and got a negative reception. Only four said it could be done. But within a few years each member of that remarkable and optimistic quartet – Charles Ellet, Jr., John Roebling, Samuel Keefer, and Edward W. Serrell – would himself build a suspension bridge across the Niagara between the Falls and Lewiston.
The first to respond to Stuart’s query was Ellet, impelled by the swift and impetuous enthusiasm that marked his career. Bold, flamboyant, and ambitious, Ellet was fairly dying to be the first man to bridge the river. That had been his hope since 1833 when, after studying suspension bridges in France, he had announced that Niagara offered him his greatest challenge. He did not know, he said, “in the whole circle of professional schemes, a single project which it would gratify me so much to conduct it to completion.”
Now, it seemed, he was to achieve that gratification. His qualifications were admirable. He had trained in Paris at the prestigious École Polytechnique. More important, he had already built a suspension bridge, the first in North America, over the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia. Handsome, dark-eyed, slender, and six feet, two inches tall, he looked like an athlete, and though his health was actually precarious, his energies were prodigious. Now he stood on the brink of a brilliant career that would gain him the title of the “Brunei of America” – a reference to one of the best-known builders of railway bridges in Great Britain who was later the designer of the Great Eastern, the biggest ship in history.
He was supremely confident that he could span the river. He had told Stuart that “a bridge may be built across the Niagara below the Falls, which will be entirely secure and in all respects fitted for railroad uses. It will be safe for the passage of locomotives and freight trains, and adapted for any purpose for which it is likely to be applied.”
He also explained that to be successful it would have to be carefully designed and properly constructed. There were, he said, “no safer bridges than those on the suspension principle if built understandingly, and none more dangerous if constructed with an imperfect knowledge of the principles of their equilibrium.” The day would come when Ellet would have rueful cause to remember those words.
That the suspension bridge was both graceful to look at and economical to build was undeniable. Hung on seemingly gossamer cables and curving seductively over a frothing gorge below the Falls, it would be esthetically ideal. Because it required less material than other steel bridges, it would be cheaper. Nor would any other method of construction be practical. Supporting piers would be difficult to construct securely in that treacherous current; worse, they would obstruct both the view and the flow.
The history of suspension bridges, however, was enough to alarm the more conservative engineers – hence the pessimistic response to Stuart’s canvass. Vibrations set up by the feet of marching troops or by droves of cattle had caused several such bridges to collapse, often with fatal results, on both sides of the Atlantic. The experts who pooh-poohed the idea of a suspension bridge at Niagara were convinced it would crumple under the vibrations caused by heavily loaded trains. Yet a suspension bridge it was to be.
The bridge was to be built by two companies, one Canadian, one American, acting together. An eminent Canadian, William Hamilton Merritt, promoter of the first Weiland Canal, would be president of the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge Company. His American opposite was Lot Clark, president of the Niagara Falls International Bridge Company, of which Charles Stuart was a prominent board member.
The contest over who should get the contract to build the bridge quickly narrowed down to the two candidates who knew more about suspension bridges than any other engineers on the continent – the colourful Ellet and the sombre German-born bridge builder John Augustus Roebling, the father of the wire rope industry in North America. Ellet had been first on the scene, and that gave him a considerable advantage over his ponderous rival. The newly formed bridge companies encouraged competition to keep down prices. Ellet’s cause was helped in July 1847 when he landed a commission as engineer of another suspension bridge to be built at Wheeling, West Virginia – a plum that undoubtedly impressed the directors of the twin firms.
Ellet contracted to build the Niagara bridge for no more than $190,000 and to have it open for traffic by May 1, 1849. It would be about two and a half miles downstream but in full view of the Falls. It would require an eight-hundred-foot span, twenty-five feet wide – large enough for two carriageways, two footways, and a railway track in the centre.
He was ready to start early in 1848, but a serious problem faced him: he must, at the outset, get a line across the torrent. That could not be done in the conventional manner by boat; the Whirlpool Rapids would devour any craft that attempted the feat, and the ferries were too far upstream. At a dinner in a tavern on the American side, he and his colleagues pondered the question. Ellet favoured a rocket. Somebody else suggested a bombshell hurled by a cannon. A few thought a steamer might hazard the crossing.
In the end, the bridge builder accepted a more original idea – one that tickled
his sense of the theatrical. A local iron worker and future judge, Theodore G. Hulett, suggested he offer a cash prize to the first boy who would fly a kite to the opposite bank. A covey of kites on long strings immediately appeared above the gorge from the Canadian side to take advantage of the prevailing winds, which blew from west to east. But no one succeeded in spanning the river until a fifteen-year-old American, Homan Walsh, arrived on the scene. Carrying his kite, The Union, he crossed to the Canadian shore by ferry just below the Falls and walked along the top of the cliff for two miles to the point where the bridge was to be built.
He waited a day for a favourable wind, then sent his kite aloft, paying out ball after ball of twine as it soared high above the gorge. All day long Homan Walsh kept his kite flying until at midnight, as he expected, the wind died and the kite began to settle. Suddenly he felt an uneven tug, the string went slack, and he realized that his efforts had been in vain. The string, caught in the rocks of the gorge, had snapped.
Now he found himself marooned in Canada: the broken ice in the river was so heavy no ferry could chance a crossing. For eight days he lingered in Clifton, staying with friends, until the river cleared and the service resumed. Back he went to recover and repair his kite, then returned to the Canadian cliffside where, at last, his efforts succeeded. For the rest of his long life – he lived well into his eighties – Homan Walsh liked to tell that story.
A day after the successful flight, a stronger line was attached to the kite string. A rope followed, and, eventually, a cable consisting of thirty-six strands of No. 10 wire. Ellet then built two temporary wooden towers, each fifty feet high, facing each other across the gorge, over which the 1,200-foot cable was passed and anchored.
Now he had to devise a method by which workmen and supplies could shuttle back and forth across the gorge. In the Eagle Tavern, over a pint of ale, he and Hulett worked out a design for an iron basket that could hang suspended from rollers on the cable and be winched from one side to the other by a man turning a windlass. Ellet, with his sharpened sense of publicity, decided upon a personal demonstration – after all, both bridge companies were floating stock in the enterprise, and he himself had subscribed for a substantial amount. Getting into the precarious cable car, the ebullient engineer had himself hauled to the far side and back again. The wind was high, the weather chilly, but Ellet, perched 240 feet above the rapids, was having a wonderful time. The view, he wrote to a friend, was “one of the sublimest prospects which nature has prepared on this globe of ours.”