Pierre Berton - Niagara: A History of the Falls

The Indians hold Niagara
claims its yearly meed of
victims. It may be so. Or does
Niagara thus avenge itself on
the civilization that has
trimmed and tamed its forests
and dressed it up in tinsel
coloured lights?

Lady Mary McDowel
Duffus Hardy, Sketches of an
American Tour, 1881

Copyright 1992 by Pierre Berton Enterprises Ltd.
Anchor Canada edition 2002

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photo copying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Berton, Pierre, 1920
Niagara : a history of the falls / Pierre Berton. Anchor Canada ed.

eISBN: 978-0-385-67365-5

1. Niagara Falls (N.Y. and Ont.)History. I. Title.

FC3095.N5B47 2002 971.339 C2002-902701-2

Published in Canada by
Anchor Canada, a division of
Random House of Canada Limited

Visit Random House of Canada Limiteds website: www.randomhouse.ca

v3.1

The Royal Family

The Mysterious North

Klondike

Just Add Water and Stir

Adventures of a Columnist

Fast Fast Fast Relief

The Big Sell

The Comfortable Pew

The Cool, Crazy, Committed World of the Sixties

The Smug Minority

The National Dream

The Last Spike

Drifting Home

Hollywoods Canada

My Country

The Dionne Years

The Wild Frontier

The Invasion of Canada

Flames Across the Border

Why We Act Like Canadians

The Promised Land

Vimy

Starting Out

The Arctic Grail

The Great Depression

Niagara: A History of the Falls

My Times: Living with History

1967, The Last Good Year

Marching as to War

Picture Books

The New City (with Henri Rossier)

Remember Yesterday

The Great Railway

The Klondike Quest

Pierre Bertons Picture Book of Niagara Falls

Winter

The Great Lakes

Seacoasts

Pierre Bertons Canada

Anthologies

Great Canadians

Pierre and Janet Bertons Canadian Food Guide

Historic Headlines

Farewell to the Twentieth Century

Worth Repeating

Welcome to the Twenty-first Century

Fiction

Masquerade (pseudonym Lisa Kroniuk)

Books for Young Readers

The Golden Trail

The Secret World of Og

Adventures in Canadian History (22 volumes)

Drawn by Geoffrey Matthews

Rendering on pp. ii-iii by Paul McCusker

All illustrations follow .

For illustrations used in this book, grateful acknowledgement is made to their sources as follows: The Metropolitan Toronto Public Library: .

1
Ice and water
2
A prodigious cadence
3
The most awful scene

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.