Niagara: A History of the Falls (11 page)

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.”

Soon others were clamouring – and paying a fee – for a chance to experience this most novel of Niagara’s thrills. Ellet’s contract did not allow him to collect tolls, but he got around that problem by charging a dollar to anyone who would like to “observe at first hand the engineering wonder of bridging the Niagara.” As many as 125 people a day took up the offer, three-quarters of them women. One man, so the story went, took one look at Ellet’s iron basket and opted for the little rowboat then used as a ferry. Then he walked back to the bridge site to meet his wife, who was coolly descending from the iron basket.

Ellet’s spectacular bridge machinery was not the only new tourist attraction at the Falls. The crowds were increasing and entrepreneurs were taking full advantage of the influx. A water-powered inclined railway, completed in 1846, brought sightseers to the base of the American Falls, while the little steamer
Maid of the Mist
, launched the same year, took its passengers directly into the spray of the Horseshoe.

Ellet, meanwhile, was constructing a preliminary bridge to act as a scaffolding from which to build the platform of the subsequent railway span. Actually, he was building two suspension bridges, side by side, and planning to lash them together. He built four massive towers, two on each side of the gorge, to support four cables. Two sets of walkways, each four feet wide and each suspended from two cables, were by now projecting over the gorge on both sides of the river. The sections of the downriver platform had been joined, but the neighbouring walkway was still under construction, projecting one hundred feet from the Canadian bank and two hundred from the American, when a furious gale struck.

The force of the wind instantly wrecked the unfinished portion of the southern section, throwing the floor across the cable that carried Ellet’s iron basket. Two men working on the Canadian side managed to reach safety, but three on the American side were stranded. Marooned on the unsteady platform, clinging helplessly to the suspending cables with the floor swaying alarmingly under their feet, they were forced to stay put until the wind dropped. Then, as a twelve-foot ladder was lashed to the iron basket, Theodore Hulett called for a volunteer to try to rescue the trio.

A young workman, Charles Ellis, stepped forward. “I’m your man!” he said. Hulett warned him not to take more than one man at a time into the basket. The basket cable was already under strain because the full weight of the Canadian side of the bridge lay across it. Could it even sustain the additional weight of two men before snapping? Moved by the pleas of the stranded workmen, Ellis gambled that it could. Ignoring Hulett’s warning, he allowed all three to climb into the basket. All were brought safely to the American side.

Meanwhile, an extraordinary and totally unexpected event occurred. It had no effect on the bridge construction, but it was so unbelievable it defied common sense. Indeed, it was not credited by those who did not witness it and not understood by those who did. On the night of March 28, 1848, Niagara Falls went dry.

The rapids above the cataract dwindled to a trickle. The twin cascades shrank until they consisted of little more than a few thin streams of water, dripping over the exposed cliff. And the silence! People long used to the roar of Niagara were actually awakened by the unaccustomed quiet. They lined the cliffside and in the torchlight saw long stretches of mud and naked boulders between scattered pools of water.

The following day almost everyone in the neighbourhood was able to explore the recesses and crannies that had never before been exposed to mortal eyes. People walked from shore to shore picking up souvenirs – bayonets, swords, gun barrels, and tomahawks from the War of 1812. A detachment of cavalry trotted up the riverbed. A party of enthusiasts danced a quadrille on a flat rock near the middle of the stream.

On the American side, George W. Holley drove out more than three hundred yards from the Goat Island shore, stood on the lip of the Horseshoe, and with the aid of a team of horses began salvaging huge pieces of timber hanging over the naked precipice.

On the Canadian side, Thomas Street and his daughter rode for three-quarters of a mile down the dry riverbed above the Falls. From Table Rock they walked to the edge of the precipice about one-third of the way to Goat Island, stuck a pole into a crevice, and tied a handkerchief to it. Street looked over at the river below and saw the water so shallow that immense jagged rocks previously hidden by the swirling waters stood out starkly. He shuddered when he thought of how frequently he had passed over these hazards in the
Maid of the Mist
. That same day the rocks were blasted to fragments and removed.

In the evening, the churches were crammed with people who talked fearfully about the end of the world. But before a real panic could set in, a new sound broke the unaccustomed silence – a low growl that caused the earth to vibrate and the air to tremble. A few minutes later, a wall of water crashed over the lip of the Falls and Niagara was in business again.

The explanation for this curious and frightening episode was fascinating. Heavy westerly winds blowing across Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, had driven the bulk of its water over the Falls. Then the winds changed. Much of the water that was left was forced back far to the west. The wind also broke up the ice, which formed a jam in the river near Buffalo, effectively damming it until only a trickle ran between the banks. When the ice jam broke and the wind dropped, the Falls returned to their former glory.

Ellet, having repaired his damaged platforms, completed his service bridge in July 1848. Now it was possible to make a trip from bank to bank as easily as the one the astonished populace had enjoyed so briefly the night the Falls went dry. Ellet was so captivated with the idea that he could not wait for safety railings to be erected on both sides of the span. He called for a horse and buggy and, standing with the reins in his hand “like a Roman charioteer” in one account, drove himself across the flimsy structure to the cheers of the spectators. Women fainted at the sight, so it was said, while strong men gasped; but then, women were forever fainting and strong men gasping in the records of that century.

Such stunts, so typical of Ellet, not only enhanced his own reputation but also focused public attention on his project. And therein lay the seeds of his downfall. The service bridge was so popular that when Ellet opened it in midsummer, everybody wanted to use it. Within a year it would accumulate a five-thousand-dollar profit in tolls – but for whom? This question added to the nasty wrangle that was developing between Ellet and the bridge companies.

Indeed, Ellet’s relationship with the two companies had been testy from the beginning. The international nature of the Niagara gorge did not help. Matters were complicated because the companies were operating under two legal systems. Moreover, there was jealousy between the two presidents, and arguments arose about which company was responsible for paying the contractors. Just as construction was getting under way, a depression struck that delayed shipments of masonry. The companies tried to insist that Ellet act as a salesman to push stock in the venture, something he had not contemplated. They suggested he postpone the project or settle for a lesser structure that would be suitable for wagons and teams only. It did not help matters that Ellet was also at work on the Wheeling bridge and absent from Niagara for days at a time.

Ellet was infuriated by these wrangles. “I have worked hard,” he wrote to Lot Clark of the New York company in May, “–expended a great deal to come here – broken up my home – abandoned important interests – deserted my business – have paid away my money, received nothing, and been stripped of all the profits.”

Two months later the controversy reached a climax over the service bridge tolls that Ellet was keeping for himself. The bridge companies fired him and, with the help of an obliging Canadian sheriff, seized the bridge. The courts issued an injunction giving temporary control and possession of the structure to the companies. When the injunction was lifted in October, a wild confrontation followed in which Ellet’s agents took control of the American side of the bridge with the help of a cannon loaded with buckshot.

Ellet soon gave up the legal struggle that followed. A compromise of sorts was reached: it was said that he was paid off with ten thousand dollars. At the end of December, Ellet, to his considerable relief, relinquished all connection with the Niagara bridge and got on with the job at Wheeling. Niagara Falls now had a bridge suitable for the carriage trade only. Ellet’s successor would be his one-time rival, the methodical John Roebling. It was he who would build the world’s first railway suspension bridge across the forbidding gorge.

4
John Roebling’s bridge

Roebling was a far different creature from Ellet. Apart from their engineering expertise, they were as dissimilar as steel and silk.

The deliberate and generally humourless Roebling was as inflexible as the bridges he built. Compared with the impulsive and irrepressible Ellet, he was rocklike. He was the Ironmaster of Trenton – a man of iron with all the virtues of iron, as his eulogist would eventually declaim. “Iron was in his blood and sometimes entered his very soul.” Roebling’s will was so strong that he used it to ward off seasickness on the immigrant ship that brought him to America in 1831. He
determined
not to yield to the malady, striding about the deck all night, refusing to give in.