Niagara: A History of the Falls (35 page)

Annie made straight for the city and with her lawyer’s help served a writ on the stage company, retrieved her barrel, and took it back to Niagara Falls. She estimated its temporary loss cost her fifteen hundred dollars, and she warned that if anybody tried to steal it again, “I have a pistol and I know how to shoot.”

Now she discovered that Carlisle Graham had also betrayed her by staging a re-enactment of her Falls plunge to add to the film that had been made of his own adventures. Graham hired both Truesdale and Billy Holleran to set up the scene and sent his own empty barrel over the cataract while the cameras rolled. He did not hire Annie to play herself, probably because she objected to being portrayed in a medium that was considered socially disreputable. If the dime museums were indecent in her eyes, so were the raunchy nickelodeons. Annie saw herself as a lecturer on a platform, not a cheap sensationalist in a flickering peep show.

Annie hired a new manager, William A. Banks, who booked her in a number of state fairs. Then he decamped, not only with the precious barrel but also with her stock of pamphlets and photographs. Worse still, Banks had engaged his attractive young girl friend, Maggie Kaplan, to pass herself off as “the Heroine of Niagara Falls” and to sell Annie’s stolen pamphlets to the gullible. It was all too much: many of those who had paid to see the real Annie – wrinkled, dour, and dowdy – began to wonder if she
was
the genuine article.

At this point, Annie’s barrel vanishes from history. It was said that Banks sold it for five hundred dollars (the cat had long since disappeared). Annie immediately ordered an exact replica of the famous cask and with it by her side became a familiar figure on the sidewalk outside the New England Restaurant in Niagara Falls, New York, seated in the shade, peddling souvenir postcards, being photographed with tourists, or selling copies of a new autobiography in which she revealed more than a trace of bitterness over her failure to make a fortune from her adventure. “None of the thousands of people who have come to see me,” she wrote, “ever thought of the brain to plan such a trip and the courage to make it.”

She remained convinced, against all the evidence, that she represented a lucrative investment. In 1903 she went to New York City to try to raise some financial backing. “I am sure if I appeal to the generous members of the Stock Exchange, they will help me in my adversity,” she said. There was no response, and so she returned to her souvenir stand in the summer and travelled the lecture circuit in the winter, making just enough money to pay her bills.

In 1906, in spite of her earlier statements that she would rather brave the cannon’s mouth, Annie Taylor began to talk of a second Falls plunge. Now, close to her seventieth year, she still didn’t want to appear as a money-grubbing stunter. She no longer talked of needing funds to support herself or to pay off the mortgage on a ranch somewhere in Texas. Instead, she portrayed herself as a philanthropist, eager to help old friends down on their luck. Later she talked of raising enough money to build a home for the aged and another for homeless young women.

Nothing came of these plans. On July 25, 1911, a new daredevil appeared to rival Annie’s exploit. He was a roistering, British-born tavern keeper named Bobby Leach, and he represented everything the refined Mrs. Taylor loathed. He was a pool shark, a hard drinker, a tough and colourful spinner of yarns who sported a derby hat cocked over one eye, kept a cigar clenched in his teeth, and flaunted a diamond tie pin. He was, in short, a character, who had no trouble getting press coverage and putting Annie Taylor in the shade.

Leach was no stranger to Niagara stunts. Back in 1896 he had twice attempted the rapids successfully in a barrel. Now, in a special steel cask, the forty-seven-year-old high-flyer repeated Annie’s feat while the motion-picture camera whirred. He emerged from the barrel bloodied, battered, and blind drunk, shouting, “Ain’t nobody got anything on me now!”

For Annie, this was the final indignity. Her shining adventure had been profaned by a common roustabout! She pleaded with the press not to associate her name with Leach’s “in any way, shape, or manner.” For her, life had reached its climax in October 1901. After that, it lumbered slowly downhill. She tried to write a historical novel; it failed. She managed to make her way to Europe, only to find that the despised Leach was prospering in the vulgar English music halls. For the rest of her life she was a prisoner of her own exploit. She even tried to reconstruct her story on film – the motion picture having become respectable – but the results were never shown.

She continued to eke out a living based on the fading memories of her famous plunge. Hack drivers pointed her out on Falls Street to tourists – a frail, shrivelled, half-blind figure, her face a mass of wrinkles, still proudly posing with her barrel. By 1919, unable to see properly, she went into business as a clairvoyant. Later she offered to give electric and magnetic treatments – the newest therapeutic fad – to Falls residents. There were few takers.

The press had all but forgotten her. When other daredevils tempted the Falls or the rapids, her feat was recalled as ancient history, but no one checked to see if she was still alive. Only when she entered the county infirmary (the poorhouse) was there a brief flurry. Annie resisted this ignominy until the last. “I’ve done what no other woman in the world had nerve to do,” she told Louis Elmer, commissioner of charities, “only to become a pauper.”

That was in February 1921. She was eighty-three years old but was now stubbornly insisting that she was only fifty-seven and in the prime of life. The terrible pounding she took during the barrel trip, she said, had caused her to age prematurely. Frank Russell emerged to declare his regret that his former client had been reduced to penury. “She had an aversion against going on the stage,” he explained to the Bay City
Times-Tribune
.

A week after her admission to the infirmary, the Niagara Falls
Gazette
rediscovered Annie Taylor and found that she had not lost her sense of the dramatic. “I have crossed the Atlantic Ocean four times,” she said, “the Straits of Florida fourteen times, have made several trips across the continent and visited the Hawaiian Islands.” On she went, talking of trips to Quebec and France, of journeying through Mexico with the widow of a former Mexican president, and, of course, of the famous tumble over the Falls.

She remained to the end what she had always been – resolute, proud, a little snobbish, and always optimistic. “Through misfortune and other people’s dishonesty I lost all of my fortune,” she said. “It is quite a change for me to come here when I have been used to being entertained in senators’ homes in Washington and travelling extensively; but I feel that it is no disgrace and if all my plans materialize, I shall not remain here long.”

Two months later, on April 29, she died. How ironic that she should have been buried in Strangers’ Rest, a section of the Oakwood Cemetery where other Niagara heroes had been laid! For there her body lies, side by side with Carlisle Graham, a man she despised. Her shade was saved from further indignity, however, when Bobby Leach died. He, too, would almost certainly have occupied a neighbouring plot had he not ended life in New Zealand – and in the most mundane and hackneyed manner. He slipped on an orange peel, fell, and succumbed to complications.

Chapter Nine

1
The Canadian connection
2
The people’s power
3
The Second Battle of Niagara
4
The red-headed hero
5
The soaring ambitions of Adam Beck

1
The Canadian connection

In the fall of 1901, when Annie Taylor plunged over the Horseshoe Falls, the exploitation of Niagara’s power was entirely in the hands of Americans. With considerable daring – some might call it recklessness – they had thrust their country into the electrical age and seen that gamble pay off. The power that they drew from the great cataract was, of course, reserved for American industries. Canada, with its small population, was not a lucrative market, nor had the cautious Canadians shown any interest in developing power on their own.

Indeed, for all of the previous decade Canada seemed to have been mired in the past. In 1891, when an American syndicate was already boring its tunnel under Niagara Falls, New York, and exploring the possibilities of hydro power in Europe, the
Canadian Electrical News
was pooh-poohing the idea of long-distance transmission as commercially unsound. In 1892, the year the Americans hired Stanford White to design their generating station, the manager of the Toronto Electric Light Company, J. J. Wright, insisted that alternating current was far too dangerous to be practical.

The majority of Canadian businessmen clung to the idea that steam would always be the main source of power for industry. It was not until April 1900 that the Toronto Board of Trade set up a special committee to get the facts about electricity. Its chairman was Walter Massey, of the famous farm implements firm, himself a progressive entrepreneur. But even at that late date the committee concluded that electricity would remain “a secondary force, a handmaid or servant of steam or some other primary power.” This, in spite of the fact that eleven major industries, all using hydroelectric power, were already operating on the American bank of the Niagara River.

The Americans themselves helped to hold back power development in Canada. For most of the nineties, exclusive rights to develop electricity from the Canadian falls were held by the Canadian Niagara Power Company, wholly owned by Americans. The company made no move to harness the Horseshoe; why go to any expense in Canada until its American parent, the Niagara Falls Power Company, had used up all the available power on the other side? It did not put a spade into the ground until 1901, and when its hydroelectric plant finally went into operation in 1904, all the power was transmitted across the river to American industry.

A second American company, known as the Ontario Power Company, had been incorporated in 1887. It took several years to secure a franchise and did not get around to building a powerplant in Canada until 1903. Another two years went by before it was able to generate electricity. Again, most of the power was transmitted to U.S. customers across the river.

Canadians were shaken out of their torpor in 1902 when the great coal famine struck Ontario industry. Suddenly, the country’s dependence on the United States was brought home graphically. A series of bitter strikes in the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania sent the price of hard coal in Toronto – used extensively for heating – soaring from three dollars a ton to a peak of more than nine dollars. Indeed, there came a time when Canada ran out of hard coal, and even the soft coal used in manufacturing was in short supply. Wood, peat, and coke all proved ineffective. Factories closed, hundreds were thrown out of work, and, as winter approached, ordinary people began to shiver. Even when the famine ended in the fall, coal was scarce because Americans controlled the transportation systems, and American customers got preferential treatment.

The coal famine turned the eyes of Central Canada toward Niagara. As the Berlin (later Kitchener)
News Record
argued, “Niagara Falls is worth serious consideration.” If it were harnessed for Canadians, the Falls would make western Ontario independent of the soft coal fields and provide cheaper power than steam. Berlin, a rising industrial town, became the centre of a growing campaign for public power in Ontario.

The shortage had another result. It stimulated a trio of Canadian businessmen to resolve, at long last, that a Canadian company should also exploit the waters of the great cataract.

The three men who in 1902 formed the syndicate that became the Electrical Development Company were among the most powerful industrialists in Canada. All were in the prime of life; all were experienced financiers and builders. Frederic Nicholls, general manager of Canadian General Electric, would be the technical expert. Henry Pellatt, who ran the Toronto Electric Light Company, and William Mackenzie, who controlled the Toronto Street Railway Company, would be their own best customers.

The eloquent Nicholls had been identified with electrical development in Canada for more than a decade. In 1896 he was elected president of the National Electric Light Association of America – the first and only Canadian to hold that post. A fervent supporter of John A. Macdonald’s National Policy of high tariffs, he was a leading spokesman for the manufacturing interests. Nicholls had published and edited the
Canadian Manufacturer
and also served as secretary of the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association. He and his group had been able to seize control of Canadian General Electric when its American parent ran into financial difficulties. As vice-president and general manager of CGE, the forty-six-year-old Nicholls had the motivation to exploit the power of the Canadian Falls and the drive to get what he wanted. In the assessment of the Toronto
News
, “he was a man of skill, courage and enterprise.”

With his round, pink face, his slightly popped eyes, and his military moustache, Henry Pellatt looked more like a Colonel Blimp than a hard-nosed financier. Actually, he was both. He had started in his father’s brokerage business and took over running it. By 1902 he was up to his armpits in utilities, power, and mining, “the Cecil Rhodes of Canada” as one financier called him. Perhaps the most enthusiastic amateur soldier in Canada, he was lieutenant-colonel of the 2nd Regiment of the Queen’s Own Rifles. And he was such a romantic royalist that he would within the decade erect, on one of Toronto’s most prominent ridges, the fairytale castle Casa Loma, for which he is best remembered.