Niagara: A History of the Falls (32 page)

Ice bridges did not form every year: a special set of circumstances was required. The great ice bridge of 1899 was the most massive in human memory, and the longest lasting. It formed and reformed over a two-month period, appearing first on January 9, breaking up on the eleventh, reforming again on the sixteenth, breaking up again on the twenty-second, and then reforming for a record stay.

The winter of 1899 was particularly cold; for days the thermometer stayed below zero. Shifting winds blew clouds of spray over the rocks, trees, and shrubs until they seemed to be sheathed in alabaster. Weeks of freezing weather had caused large sheets of ice to form on the surface of Lake Erie. A thaw followed, and as the ice began to rot, a high wind from the west sprang up, breaking the ice into fragments. These chunks were swept into the entrance of the Niagara River, where the current bore them downstream. At the same time, more ice formed on the reefs and bars, narrowing the river’s channel.

Trainloads of spectators lined the banks to watch the awesome spectacle of a river of ice racing relentlessly toward the Falls. As it was forced among the rocks of the upper rapids, it broke into smaller, uneven pieces, and these were hurled over the brink hour after hour in a mighty frozen cascade.

Great jagged blocks of ice squeezed through this narrow gap and with such force that their edges were worn as smooth as if sliced by a monstrous knife. At first the water foaming out of the Niagara Falls Power Company’s tunnel farther downstream broke up the mass. Then, as the weather grew colder and more ice piled up, all the blocks were wedged together into a solid ice bridge, “as pretty as any that graced the gorge.” Out onto this craggy expanse, where the hummocks rose as high as thirty feet and fissures radiated off in every direction, Harry Applegate ventured on the morning January 10. He was the first of several to make his way from the American shore to the Canadian and to get his name in next day’s newspapers.

Over the next ten days the ice bridge twice broke up and reformed. In spite of the obvious dangers, several more people succeeded in making the crossing and gaining a few moments of fame. By January 20, seasoned veterans of earlier ice bridges declared this one safe, and small groups of thrill seekers headed out over the treacherous surface.

The river below the Falls was fifteen hundred feet across and almost two hundred feet deep. Just behind was the full force of the cataract. Yet so strong was this frozen bridge that hundreds were able to cross from shore to shore. Even horses had occasionally made the trip on ice bridges formed in previous years. Those who crossed took its measure before venturing out onto the broken expanse, noting the fissures and crevasses to be avoided and the great hummocks to be climbed or circumvented. Although they realized that the longer they remained on the ice, the greater was the danger, they were often forced to take a roundabout course to achieve their goal. Sooner or later, they knew, the unwieldy mass would move again. The route was uneven. The hummocks denied any sure footing. People stumbled, never knowing where the tumble might take them. At times the route ran up the slippery slopes of a great mound, at others down between the walls of a deep crevasse.

With the winter season at its height, thousands crowded into the two Niagara communities to witness the spectacle. The first shanty appeared on the ice on January 20, and others soon followed. If the ice held there would be curio shops, Indian tepees, photographers’ shacks, makeshift saloons, and even buildings identified as “hotels.” Since this was an international no-man’s-land, liquor could be dispensed freely, if not cheaply.

Old-timers who remembered previous ice bridges looked forward to the informal winter carnival – the crowds on the ice, singing and laughing, paying top prices for coffee and sandwiches, the cliffs echoing with their shouts. Men planted flags on hillocks to record that they’d been the first to clamber to the top. Others explored crevasses to estimate the thickness of the ice. Some of these were thirty to forty feet deep, suggesting that the ice itself, most of which was submerged, was more than one hundred feet thick.

On Sunday, January 22, a young travelling salesman from Buffalo, Charles Misner, headed off for Niagara Falls with his friend Bessie Hall of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a student at Slocum’s School of Shorthand in Buffalo. Misner was eager to cross the ice bridge but Miss Hall hung back. Indeed, the sight was fearsome. High winds in Erie had again broken up the huge floes that covered the lake, driving them down the Niagara and over the Falls, damming the lower gorge and causing the water to rise. Squeezed by the pressure of the water, the ice had formed into towering hummocks in the centre of the river. It took all of Misner’s powers of persuasion to convince his pretty companion that the ice bridge was safe.

It wasn’t. Even the great Upper Steel Arch Bridge, built the previous summer (known later as the Falls View or Honeymoon Bridge) – the greatest metal arch in the world – was threatened. The ice piled up against the supporting pillars to a height of eighty feet, crashing into the steel work and rending the metal. Already gangs of men were preparing to blast the frozen monster away with dynamite.

Misner and his companion picked their way gingerly over the ice. Two hundred yards out from the
Maid of the Mist
landing, they found a boulder of ice and sat down to enjoy the scenery. Half an hour passed. Misner noticed that many of the others on the ice had returned to shore. But he felt perfectly safe, and when Miss Hall remarked that she could hear a singing noise under her feet, he told her it was only her imagination.

At last, feeling that they had seen all that could be seen, they started back toward the American shore. They had not gone far when, by gestures, a crowd on the bank indicated that they could not reach the boat dock: the ice had broken away from the shore, leaving a stretch of water too wide to cross. To get to land, they would have to work their way down to the Steel Arch Bridge.

Misner now felt the first stirrings of disquiet. He said nothing to his companion, who was herself showing alarm. The farther they went, the more anxious they grew. A crowd had gathered on the banks and on the bridge above. The couple began to hear sounds as of something falling.

They were now hurrying as fast as possible. Ahead lay a large fissure in the ice, three feet across. Misner tried to bridge it by filling it with chunks of ice in order to help Miss Hall over. He could see black water a hundred feet below and knew that one unsure step would mean death for both. He prepared himself to jump across the gap when he heard a loud report like that of a cannon, followed by grinding and crashing. The great ice bridge had torn loose from its foundations and was starting to move downstream toward the Whirlpool. It was 4:10 p.m.

Their only hope of escape lay on the Canadian side. Grasping his companion’s hand, Misner started across the frozen river. Almost immediately he felt the ice part beneath his feet. Bessie Hall fell full length between two great ice boulders. Had Misner not been holding her with a sure grip, she would have gone to the bottom or been crushed between two grinding chunks of ice. He managed to pull her free just before the pieces collided.

The ice was carrying them past the Upper Steel Arch Bridge. Near them on the moving mass was another person who hadn’t been able to reach the American shore, a boy who had saved himself by climbing onto an ice hillock. As he passed under the bridge he grasped one of the girders and climbed safely into the superstructure. But Misner and Miss Hall, unable to reach the bridge, were swept past and carried downstream for another two hundred yards. Misner could see on the American side the end of the tunnel from the power station. Its tailrace, shooting out at a rate of eighty-five miles an hour, created an undertow so strong that it sucked in anything that passed by. Astonishingly, they passed it in safety. A few yards later they heard a shout from the shore. For the first time in memory the ice bridge had come to a sudden standstill. It was now about 5 p.m.

Looking up, they could see thousands of people lining the banks, urging them to hurry. They set off for the Canadian side, stumbling, often vanishing from sight in one of the gullies, then reappearing to the cheers of the crowd. Often they were forced to leap blindly into ravines five or ten feet deep. At one point, Bessie Hall tried to give up, but Misner persuaded her to keep going. From time to time he was forced to leave her briefly while he ran ahead to scout the best way to cross the ice. Some of the spectators, believing that he was leaving his friend to her fate, grew angry and began to shout “Coward!” One man announced that if Misner reached shore alone he would shoot him on the spot. But Misner was determined to save them both.

At last, after forty-five minutes of struggle, they crossed a fifty-yard expanse of slush and reached the Canadian shore to a mighty cheer from the crowd. There, in Misner’s own words, “willing hands stood waiting to receive us and to congratulate us on our almost miraculous escape from certain death.”

Within hours the waters of the river were again jammed solid. The new ice bridge was larger and stronger than any that season. It remained in place for a record seventy-eight days until April 11, when the spring thaw finally caused its breakup. To the very end, the ice bridge of 1899 became a target for acts of bravura. The day before it finally disintegrated, five adventurous Canadians managed to cross to the American side and return, dragging a scow with which they propelled themselves across the major gaps.

3
Annie

Late in July 1901, Annie Edson Taylor sat in her dreary little room in a boarding house in Bay City, Michigan, and contemplated a bleak future. She was broke, lonely, and despondent. She knew she was too old to continue in her career as a dancing teacher. Who wanted to learn the arts of the ballroom from a bulky and shapeless woman of sixty-three, with coarse features and a rasping voice? Having exhausted her savings, Annie Taylor now faced the poorhouse. There was no social security at the century’s turn. You begged, you took charity, or you starved.

All her life she had been a private entrepreneur, making her own way, traipsing from town to town, but always solvent. Now what was left for her? The three traditional women’s jobs – stenographer, teacher, telephone operator – were reserved for younger women. If only, she thought, she could do something that no one else had ever done, then perhaps the world would take notice and reward her. In this fantasy she was kin to Arthur Midleigh, though her purpose was fortune as well as fame.

This was the year of the great Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and, as Annie’s copy of the New York
World
made clear, tens of thousands were heading for Lake Erie to take in the big fair and then go on to see the sights at Niagara Falls. Just a few days before, on July 15, Carlisle Graham, the obsessive cooper, had restored his tarnished reputation by taking a five-foot, cigar-shaped, metal barrel on another perilous ride – his fifth – through the Whirlpool Rapids. Trapped in an eddy, Graham was retrieved from the barrel badly bruised, just before he almost died of suffocation.

Annie put down the paper and sat in thought. Then it came to her, as she wrote later, “in a flash.” Suddenly this flabby and overweight woman decided to do what younger and more athletic daredevils had shrunk from doing. She would become the first human being to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

On the face of it, she seems the unlikeliest of candidates for the brief but blazing celebrity that such a venture would bring. Yet her career was that of a survivor. She was a nineteenth-century rarity – a determined and independent female entrepreneur who had suffered her share of misfortune yet had always overcome adversity.

As a child she preferred playing games with boys to dressing up dolls. She devoured adventure stories, her brain “teeming with romance.” Her marriage to David Taylor, more than a dozen years her senior, was not happy. When he died of wounds suffered in the Civil War, she was left on her own.

She enrolled in a four-year teacher-training course in Albany on borrowed money, completed it with honours in three, and decided to make her way to San Antonio, Texas, then on the very rim of the western frontier and unreachable by either rail or water. She left New York on a White Star steamer in 1870, stopped off for a month in Cuba, sailed on to Galveston, took a train to Austin, and arrived at her destination by stagecoach. There she was able to board with the family of an old school friend. She got a job teaching at a nearby public school and within a year was made vice-principal.

For the next three decades she lived the life of a vagabond, moving restlessly from one city to another. In her autobiography, written after the Niagara adventure, she presented herself as a woman of pluck and audacity who was forever being set upon by miscreants. In San Antonio, she said, she was attacked in her boarding house by burglars who chloroformed her in an attempt to make off with the rent money she was collecting on behalf of the absent landlord, her friend’s father. In 1873 she left San Antonio and was scarcely out of town when the stage on which she was travelling was attacked by three masked robbers who ordered her to hand over all her money. “I’ll blow out your brains,” one threatened. “Blow away,” she cried. “I would as soon be without brains as without money!” They departed empty-handed, she recounted. There is, in her writing, a suspicious fuzziness, a lack of detail, and an absence of dates that encourages scepticism.

She moved to New York City where she enrolled in a dancing school and emerged as a qualified instructor in dancing and physical culture. Off she went to practise her new profession in Asheville, North Carolina, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Birmingham, Alabama, and again, San Antonio. She travelled across Mexico, took passage to San Francisco, then headed back to New York by train. Once again masked gunmen appeared, lined up all the passengers, and emptied their pockets of valuables. Since Annie had hidden her money and jewellery she had nothing to show and so lost nothing; “nor was I a bit afraid,” she later wrote.