Read Niagara: A History of the Falls Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
1. The cave of the forty thieves
5. Casimir Gzowski to the rescue
4. Fame and fortune or instant death
3. The Second Battle of Niagara
5. The soaring ambitions of Adam Beck
1. The witch’s end of fairyland
3. The long crusade of Lois Gibbs
Maps
Drawn by Geoffrey Matthews
The five gorges of the Niagara River
Powerplants on the Niagara River
Power canals on the Canadian side
The covered conduits to the Moses powerplant
The scaled-back reservoir on the Tuscarora’s land
Love Canal: the emergency declaration area
Rendering on pp. ii-iii by Paul McCusker
All illustrations follow
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;
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; and
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.
For illustrations used in this book, grateful acknowledgement is made to their sources as follows: The Metropolitan Toronto Public Library:
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-
this page
; Section 1,
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,
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,
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,
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; Section 2,
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,
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. New York Historical Society:
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. National Archives of Canada: Section 1,
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,
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. Niagara Parks Commission: Section 1,
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; Section 2,
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,
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. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (M. and M. Karolik Collection): Section 1,
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. Corcoran Gallery: Section 1,
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-
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. Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society: Section 1,
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;
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;
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; Section 2,
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; Section 3,
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-
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. National Gallery of Canada: Section 1,
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. Hulton Picture Library: Section 2,
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,
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. Local History Department, Niagara Falls (New York) Public Library: Section 2,
this page
,
this page
,
this page
,
this page
; Section 3,
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,
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. Ontario Archives: Section 2,
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. George Seibel: Section 2,
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. Niagara Falls (Ontario) Public Library: Section 2,
this page
; Section 3,
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. Ontario Hydro: Section 3,
this page
,
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. Wes Hill: Section 3,
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. New York Power Authority: Section 3,
this page
,
this page
. State University College, Buffalo: Section 3,
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. York University Archives, Toronto
Telegram
Collection: Section 3,
this page
. Library of Congress:
page 167
.
Chapter One
1
Ice and water
2
A prodigious cadence
3
“The most awful scene”
1
Ice and water
In the beginning was the ice.
It crept down the continent as far as the present state of Kansas, advancing, retreating, and advancing again over a period that lasted for two million years. The remnants of that ice are still with us in the glaciers that overhang the Gulf of Alaska, in the Columbia ice fields in the Rocky Mountains, and in the Barnes Icecap that sprawls over the mountain spine of Baffin Island. Its claw marks are everywhere.
The ice destroyed the drainage pattern of eons. It blanketed the weathered Precambrian surface of the North so that wherever it reached vast layers of soil as much as forty yards deep were washed or carried away. It dammed and diverted great rivers, gouged out new inland seas, smothered jungles, buried forests, and crawled up mountainsides, grinding everything in its path – a chill and glittering wall as much as two miles thick.
Twenty times this monstrous frozen barrier slowly built up, inch by inch, and oozed south. Twenty times it shrank and retreated, leaving behind vast ponds of meltwater, the ancestors of the Great Lakes. We know little about the earlier advances because the evidence was obliterated by the ice itself. But we do know something about the last one. Niagara Falls was the child of that most recent incursion, a mere fifteen thousand years ago.
The Niagara is a young river, barely twelve thousand years old, a mere blink in geological history. But the Niagara Escarpment, through which it gnaws its way, is far more ancient, the product of millions and millions of years of geological transformation, first by the laying down of countless layers of sedimentary rocks and then by the slow erosion of ice and water. It is the presence of this ragged cliff of dolostone and shale over which the river plunges that has made possible the second-largest cataract in the world. Victoria Falls, hidden in the heart of Africa, is vaster but remote, while Niagara Falls is the great Mecca of North America, at the very crossroads of the continent.
Straddling the international border in the industrial heartland of North America – a heartland created largely by its own presence – the Falls in the summer months attracts upwards of twelve million people, more than are to be found in all of Greece. This mass of humanity – kings and princes, presidents and poets, movie stars, painters, honeymooners, would-be suicides, and just plain people – is crammed together in an area that covers no more than twenty-five square miles.
One-fifth of all the fresh water on the planet lies in the reservoir of the four upper Great Lakes – Superior, Huron, Michigan, and Erie. All the outflow is destined to enter the Niagara River and plunge over the Falls. The geography here can be confusing. The Niagara flows north from Lake Erie, not the typical direction of flow in this part of Canada, while the Falls erodes its way south. And the Niagara is more like a strait than a river; it has no valley below the Falls, only a series of spectacular gorges through which the water races on its northward dash from Erie to Lake Ontario. It does not swell in size from source to mouth as other streams do, for there are scarcely any tributaries to feed it. The same amount of water that enters it from Erie pours from its mouth, thirty-four miles downstream.
It is a deceptive watercourse. Its average flow at Queenston is greater than that of much vaster streams such as those western rivers, the Columbia and Fraser, that daunted the early explorers. But there is another, more dramatic aspect to Niagara. The land between the lakes does not slope at an even grade but suffers, instead, an abrupt and spectacular drop, the height of a twenty-storey building, at the Niagara Escarpment. Thus, through a geological accident, Niagara Falls was created.
Its genesis goes back more than 450 million years to a time when much of the Precambrian Shield was submerged beneath ancient seas. Slowly, eon after eon, the debris of the ages was deposited on the ocean floor – a monstrous geological rubbish heap formed from the mounting silt and the myriad shells of small ocean creatures. Layer upon layer of these sediments were compressed and cemented together by chemical action and the pressure of their own weight – forming a sandwich of shales, dolostones, limestones, and sandstones. The various strata of this sedimentary sandwich may be seen today on the exposed face of the Niagara Gorge, the softer shales capped by a hard, uncompromising layer of dolostone, a form of limestone in which some of the calcium has been replaced by magnesium.
When the seas retreated and the water level dropped, the surface of the new land was exposed as a flat, unbroken plain. Little by little, the land began to tilt, spurred on by forces deep within the earth’s crust. Down those featureless slopes the rainwater drained, forming streams and rivers that began to erode the rock. As the tilting continued, the plain, now riven by valleys and gorges, became a
cuesta
: a landform that slopes gently back from a steep cliff. In Ontario that cliff is the Niagara Escarpment. Two million years ago it was buried under a creeping blanket of ice.
An ice age begins slowly, almost imperceptibly, when the average temperature drops by a few degrees. Snow falls and lingers. Spring comes later; summers are shorter; winters stretch out. At last the time arrives when the snows of one year do not melt but are carried over to the next winter. As the snow accumulates from that little boreal patch, growing inexorably year after year, gargantuan ice sheets begin to form.
Just as the pressure of the sand and mud piled up over the centuries cemented the geological debris of the Escarpment into stone, so the mounting snowfields, compacted by their own weight, were metamorphosed into ice. Like pitch poured from a spout, the ice was forced by the pressure to radiate out from a central core, overriding and wrecking the old drainage pattern.
As the sun’s heat waned and then grew warmer again, the ice sheets advanced and retreated, rearranging the shapes of ancient rivers and lakes. The last of these great sheets clawed its way south about one hundred thousand years ago, ripping up the land, choking the basins of earlier lakes, and burying the entire Niagara Escarpment under tons of ice. One tentacle probed almost as far south as the site of Chicago. Then, about eighteen thousand years ago, the weather mysteriously turned warmer, and once again the ice began its long retreat. Perhaps in some future era it will return.
In the wake of this vanishing rampart, great lakes – greater than those we know today – formed and reformed from the glacial meltwater. Early Lake Erie and its sister, Iroquois, the ancestor of modern Lake Ontario, became separate bodies of water. At the same time, another lake – Tonawanda – a vast, shallow pond, no deeper than thirty feet, lay between the two, just south of and parallel to the Niagara Escarpment.
Tonawanda’s outflow spilled over the Escarpment and tumbled into Lake Iroquois from five different passages. Lake Iroquois then reached the foot of the cliff at the present site of Queenston. As the ice withdrew and the land, released from its pressure, slowly rose, Tonawanda’s waters pooled at the western end of its bed, and all the spillways except the one at the Queenston site disappeared. That one, 12,500 years ago, became Niagara Falls, seven miles below its present position. Lake Tonawanda continued to shrink to become the Niagara River as it is now seen in the flatland above the site of the Falls.
The cataract dug out a pool at its base, now known as Cataract Basin. Then it began the slow process of undercutting the top layer of the Escarpment that produced the present Niagara gorges. Shale when wet is harder and more impervious to erosion than when dry. So it was that the shales immediately under the protective cap of dolostones began to flake off during the annual cycle of freezing and thawing, encouraged by seepage from the river above working through the cracks and fissures. As the substructure fell away over the years, the ledge of dolostone became so top-heavy that great chunks broke off and plunged into the waters.
That process has continued to this day. The most spectacular modern example is that of Table Rock, a huge platform of dolostone several acres in size that once hung over the gorge near the lip of the Horseshoe Falls. In the last century it was a favourite vantage point for tourists and photographers. Over the years, as the rock beneath it weathered and crumbled, vast slabs of it tumbled away until, bit by bit, Table Rock disappeared.
The same fate befell Prospect Point, directly across from Table Rock beside the American Falls, another popular vantage point, most of which tumbled into the river in 1954. Another much-frequented tourist area, the Cave of the Winds at the foot of the Bridal Veil, or Luna, Falls has been totally altered. Here, another overhanging ledge of dolostone protected visitors, allowing them to walk directly behind the falling water. In 1955 it became so dangerous it had to be dynamited.