Niagara: A History of the Falls (10 page)

Such calculations did little to shake the religious faith of the masses. As late as 1834, George Fairholme, a “scriptural geologist,” argued that the Falls was formed “immediately subsequent to the restoration of order after the Mosaic Deluge” and was now no more than five thousand years old.

Those who held that the earth had developed over an enormous span of eons through a series of gradual changes were considered heretics. Others, attempting to justify the Biblical story, theorized that the earth had developed as a result of a series of sudden, and indeed supernatural, shocks in which mountains had been thrust up almost overnight while gigantic tidal waves had destroyed all life. After each death-dealing upheaval, new life had been reintroduced by God himself, improving by stages until modern man emerged. Now the world was complete and perfect, as the Deity intended.

With these various theories Charles Lyell, the author of the three-volume, trail-breaking
Principles of Geology
, had no patience. “Never was there a dogma more calculated to further indolence and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity,” he declared. Always clear-headed, Lyell touched off the revolution in geology that marked the Victorian Age and paved the way for Charles Darwin’s seminal work.

Lyell knew and admired Darwin, and yet when he reached Niagara in 1841, he did not share his friend’s theory of evolution, a theory that had yet to see print. More than twenty years would pass before Lyell came to accept it. But he knew a great deal about the age of the earth, for he had examined fossils, shells, and strata in his wanderings across Europe.
Principles
had already been published. In these volumes Lyell indicated his debt to earlier observers who had studied the geology of the area. As for Fairholme, he had never visited the cataract and never would. Lyell did, and in just ten days neatly disposed of the theses of the Fairholme school, although many people stubbornly continued to believe them.

He was a handsome man, Lyell, with long, ascetic features and the high dome and broad forehead of a savant. He was the eldest of ten children of a bookish family in Scotland. His father had an abiding interest in nature, and young Lyell was a great one for shinnying up trees, hunting for birds’ nests, and collecting butterflies. He was always as much a naturalist as he was a geologist.

Actually, Lyell was trained as a barrister. A sophisticated member of Lincoln’s Inn, he was briefly a regular on the circuit court of southern England. In his spare hours, he played the flute and read a great deal of poetry. Milton was his favourite; no doubt Lyell, who had ruined his eyes poring over law books, identified with the sightless poet. He himself would be nearly blind in the evening of his life. His weak vision and his frail physique did not stop him from scaling cliffs and scrambling down river banks in England and Europe, examining strata and collecting old shells and other fossils from prehistoric seas in an effort to discover the origins of river valleys. On these occasions, it was said, he was insensible to both fatigue and heat.

By 1828, when he set off on a nine-month trip through France, Italy, and Sicily, Lyell had abandoned the practice of law. This was the first of several journeys that brought about a revolution in his thinking and would spark a corresponding revolution in geology. His
Principles
argued that there was a natural – not a supernatural – explanation for every geological phenomenon, that the process of geological development worked so slowly that the earth must be much older than was believed, and that modern geological processes (mountain building, for instance) didn’t differ from ancient ones. In short, there never was a series of divine cataclysms, and the existence of mankind on earth was relatively short.

Darwin drew heavily on Lyell’s methods and style. The
Principles
, Darwin declared, “altered the whole tone of one’s mind.” Even when observing something never seen by Lyell, “one yet saw it partially through his eyes.” It is not too much to say that without Lyell’s pioneer work,
The Origin of Species
might not have been written.

Lyell arrived at Niagara on August 27, 1841, and got his first view of the Falls from a point three miles downriver. The sun was shining full on the cataract and there was no building in view to suggest the presence of civilization – “nothing but the green wood, the falling water, and the white foam.” To Lyell, the twin cataracts were even more beautiful than he had expected, though not so grand. In geological interest, they were “far beyond my most sanguine hopes.” The splendour of Niagara grew on him, as it did on so many others, after several days. “I at last learned by degrees to comprehend the wonders of the scene,” he said, “and to feel its full magnificence.”

He, too, noted with mild asperity the harsh encroachment of industrialization on the ethereal world of the cataract. The steam railway had arrived, and Lyell wrote that “it has a strange effect when you have succeeded in obtaining some view of the Falls … to be suddenly awakened out of your reverie by the loud whistle of a locomotive drawing a load of tourists, and of merchants trafficking between the east and west, who discuss the Falls in three hours between two trains.” On the other hand, “Goat Island is the most perfect fairyland that I know.” He feared that within a decade it would be given over to factories.

Lyell spent his days at Niagara roaming the gorge, climbing the cliffs, and collecting specimens – shells, fossils, and, in one case, fragments of a mastodon skeleton – in order to determine the geological history of the region. His guide, the botanist Joseph Hooker, who had explored Goat Island, told him of the great slabs that had tumbled from Table Rock in 1818 and again in 1828 as the river chewed into the softer strata beneath. Hooker also pointed out an indentation about forty feet long that had been carved in the middle ledge of limestone in the American Falls since 1815.

During the same period, Lyell learned, the river’s erosion had also changed the shape of the Horseshoe Falls, while in just four years Goat Island had lost several acres. Various estimates for the age of the river had been advanced by earlier writers. Robert Blakewell had figured it at ten thousand years – a hypothesis Lyell had accepted in his
Principles
. Others, assuming an erosion rate of a foot a year, calculated that the Falls must have started their retreat from Queenston some thirty-five thousand years earlier. Lyell now tentatively settled on this figure. That presupposed that the erosion rate had been uniform everywhere, but as we know – and as Lyell guessed – it would have been faster at some points, slower at others. Was its current average progress more or less rapid than in the past? That he could not determine.

We can see him now in retrospect, a stooped figure because of his poor eyesight, digging into the shale with his trowel and squinting at the fossils he discovered. With the American geologist James Hall he collected specimens both from the beaches of Goat Island and from the overhanging cliffs above the river. They were, he discovered, remarkably similar. From this he deduced that Goat Island had once been under water (Lake Tonawanda, as we now know) and that a prehistoric river had covered the entire area to a greater depth.

Above the lip of the gorge he found traces of that ancient river bank. The following year he came upon a remnant of the riverbed high up on the Canadian side, a mile and a half upriver from the Whirlpool. Thus he was able to show that the Niagara had once been a broader, shallower watercourse (as it still is above the Falls) and that it had been turned into the turbulent stream at the bottom of a deep and narrow gorge by the advance of the cataract. Evidence of that older, wider river, left behind above the gorge walls, gave Lyell the clues he needed.

Lyell’s companion, James Hall, had pointed out that the Whirlpool was probably connected with a break in the Escarpment at St. Davids, west of Queenston. This led to a spectacular discovery – the so-called St. Davids Gorge, the buried channel of another prehistoric river running northwest from the Whirlpool to Lake Ontario. Lyell, who charted it, realized that the Falls, excavating its way upstream, had encountered the course of this ancient stream filled with the rubble of the ages – sediments from the older river and lake and soil from ice sheets – and dug it out again. This explained not only the ninety-degree turn of the river but also the presence of the Whirlpool. More geological evidence found later proved the theory correct.

Lyell left the study of Niagara and went on to a knighthood and a host of awards, medals, and honorary degrees. He died at the age of seventy-seven while again revising his
Principles
. “The Falls of Niagara,” he wrote, “teach us not merely to appreciate the power of moving water, but furnish us at the same time with data for estimating the enormous lapse of ages during which that force has operated. A deep and long ravine has been excavated, and the river required ages to accomplish the task, yet the same region affords evidence that the sum of these ages is as nothing, and as the work of yesterday, when compared with the antecedent periods, of which there are monuments in the same district.”

There was a time when those thoughts would have been considered outrageously heretical. But the work of Hall and Lyell, both of whom published scientific accounts of their findings, put an effective stopper on further controversy among the savants. Today Lyell’s ideas are so commonplace that he himself has faded into obscurity. Only the devotees of geological history now remember the half-blind barrister who climbed the great gorge and unravelled some of the mysteries of the ages.

3
Spanning the gorge

The railroads transformed Niagara, exploited it, glamorized it, cheapened it, and created on the banks of the gorge what has been called “the centre of a vortex of travel.” By 1845, close to fifty thousand sightseers annually were swarming over the region, a figure that had doubled in just five years. But the onrush had only begun. The promoters of two major lines, Canada’s Great Western and New York’s Rochester and Niagara (the forerunner of the New York Central), had their eyes on the new Mecca. Anybody who could afford a ticket could soon enjoy a spectacle that had once been the exclusive privilege of the upper classes.

What was needed was a bridge suspended across that terrible chasm to join the two lines. Someone figured that it would immediately attract double the number of tourists, who would no longer be held back by the prospect of a a turbulent ride in a small ferry. The someone was a respected civil engineer, Charles B. Stuart, who had worked surveying both lines. If the toll were as little as twenty-five cents a passenger, so Stuart figured, the bridge would return a profit of 1 percent on the investment in the very first year.

Stuart knew very little about building bridges. He wasn’t at all sure that spanning a gorge eight hundred feet wide and two hundred feet deep was practical. He canvassed the leading engineers in Europe and North America and got a negative reception. Only four said it could be done. But within a few years each member of that remarkable and optimistic quartet – Charles Ellet, Jr., John Roebling, Samuel Keefer, and Edward W. Serrell – would himself build a suspension bridge across the Niagara between the Falls and Lewiston.

The first to respond to Stuart’s query was Ellet, impelled by the swift and impetuous enthusiasm that marked his career. Bold, flamboyant, and ambitious, Ellet was fairly dying to be the first man to bridge the river. That had been his hope since 1833 when, after studying suspension bridges in France, he had announced that Niagara offered him his greatest challenge. He did not know, he said, “in the whole circle of professional schemes, a single project which it would gratify me so much to conduct it to completion.”

Now, it seemed, he was to achieve that gratification. His qualifications were admirable. He had trained in Paris at the prestigious École Polytechnique. More important, he had already built a suspension bridge, the first in North America, over the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia. Handsome, dark-eyed, slender, and six feet, two inches tall, he looked like an athlete, and though his health was actually precarious, his energies were prodigious. Now he stood on the brink of a brilliant career that would gain him the title of the “Brunei of America” – a reference to one of the best-known builders of railway bridges in Great Britain who was later the designer of the
Great Eastern
, the biggest ship in history.

He was supremely confident that he could span the river. He had told Stuart that “a bridge may be built across the Niagara below the Falls, which will be entirely secure and in all respects fitted for railroad uses. It will be safe for the passage of locomotives and freight trains, and adapted for any purpose for which it is likely to be applied.”

He also explained that to be successful it would have to be carefully designed and properly constructed. There were, he said, “no safer bridges than those on the suspension principle if built understandingly, and none more dangerous if constructed with an imperfect knowledge of the principles of their equilibrium.” The day would come when Ellet would have rueful cause to remember those words.

That the suspension bridge was both graceful to look at and economical to build was undeniable. Hung on seemingly gossamer cables and curving seductively over a frothing gorge below the Falls, it would be esthetically ideal. Because it required less material than other steel bridges, it would be cheaper. Nor would any other method of construction be practical. Supporting piers would be difficult to construct securely in that treacherous current; worse, they would obstruct both the view and the flow.

The history of suspension bridges, however, was enough to alarm the more conservative engineers – hence the pessimistic response to Stuart’s canvass. Vibrations set up by the feet of marching troops or by droves of cattle had caused several such bridges to collapse, often with fatal results, on both sides of the Atlantic. The experts who pooh-poohed the idea of a suspension bridge at Niagara were convinced it would crumple under the vibrations caused by heavily loaded trains. Yet a suspension bridge it was to be.