Niagara: A History of the Falls (16 page)

It hangs there today, among other nineteenth-century landscapes, in its massive gilt frame, and although it is clear that Church was no Turner, it remains a remarkable and respected piece of work. To the modern viewer it evokes, at first, some of the mixed emotions that troubled the mid-Victorians who first viewed the cataract itself and found it wanting. Like the Falls, it requires contemplation to realize the miracle that Church worked with brush and canvas in the days before colour photography.

Of the hundreds of paintings made of Niagara, before Church and after him, this is by common consent the greatest. Other painters travelled to Niagara, but their numbers diminished. Church had effectively stemmed the flood of artists. To improve upon perfection was, after all, an exercise in futility. Moreover, the emerging science of photography was already changing fashions in art. Six years after
Niagara
was first exhibited in New York, Edouard Manet’s controversial
Le Déjeuner sur Vherbe
, shown at the Salon de Refusés in Paris, heralded a new and less representational way of looking at nature.

Frederic Church had become the best-known American landscape painter of his time, but by the next century he would be all but forgotten. He had helped to banish one word from the lexicon of Niagara. The Falls was no longer “an icon of the American sublime,” in Elizabeth McKinsey’s notable phrase. The terror and mystery were gone and the Falls vanquished. Roebling had bridged the frightening gorge; Church had managed for the first time to capture the awesome power of the cataract. With the funambulists trotting high above the churning rapids on tightropes, could the Falls any longer be called sublime?

Chapter Five

1
The Prince of Manila
2
Farini the Great
3
Farini the flirt
4
The legacy of Niagara
5
Into the maelstrom

1
The Prince of Manila

On a summer’s day in 1858, a year after Church’s painting went on display, Jean François Gravelet, a small, well-muscled Frenchman with flaxen hair and a goatee to match, stood on the lip of the Niagara gorge and remarked to a companion, “What a splendid place to bridge with a tightrope.”

His companion chuckled at the jest, but Gravelet, whose stage name was Blondin, was deadly serious. He later said that had a rope been at hand he would have started at once, and from that moment on, “wherever I went after that, I took Niagara with me. To cross the roaring waters became the ambition of my life.”

The great cataract obsessed him, haunted his dreams that winter, and drove him back to Niagara the following year, where he startled the world by dancing, tripping, mincing, strutting, leaping, and even somersaulting in a variety of costumes – ranging from gorilla to “Siberian slave” – all on a three-inch manila rope, two thousand feet long, stretched 160 feet above the boiling chasm.

The Prince of Manila, they called him, the Conqueror of Niagara. The former epithet is apt, the latter less so. Charles Blondin did not conquer the Falls; he trivialized them. The shimmering cascade became a mere backdrop for a circus act. The thousands who crammed every corner of the gorge that summer did not come to view the Falls; they came to see Blondin defy gravity and joust with fate. The cataract, now only a stage setting, could no longer inspire Gothic terror, but those who glued their vision to the tiny figure trotting with such assurance along that slender filament experienced the same tingle in their spines that earlier visitors had reported when confronted with only the majesty of falling water.

Now the Falls were literally thrust into the background. Although paintings depicted him crossing directly above the thundering Horseshoe, Blondin’s feats were performed more than a mile downstream. Yet in later years he himself appeared to believe the legend, for he talked about “crossing this mighty cataract” as if it had been directly below him. When he returned for a second season in 1860, he gave his performances even farther downstream, beyond the railway suspension bridge. Thus the mass of spectators who chose that vantage point to watch the performance had to turn their backs on the Falls – a symbolic rejection of a natural wonder in favour of a human stunt. It was, as one British observer wrote, rather like shutting your prayer book to go to see a pantomime.

To many, Blondin’s rope dance eclipsed the Falls. One reporter wrote of that first exhibition: “So intensely engaged was the mind in the event, that we have our doubts whether, among the large crowd present, there was one who even heard the roar of the great Cataract, which was thundering on the ear.”

The symbolism was extended to the gorge itself. Blondin had literally caught it in his net. Flung across the chasm was a vast spider web of manila – forty-four guy ropes, measuring twenty-seven thousand feet in all – to keep the tightrope steady, fastened to both banks by means of trees and posts. Over this hempen lattice work the tiny figure in pink tights reigned unchallenged.

Was it the act itself that twenty-five thousand people came to see – or was it their expectation of a darker spectacle? Six days before his first performance, the early birds on the scene had watched in awe as the rope dancer – or “funambulist,” to use the popular term – inched his way two hundred feet along the tightrope in a makeshift cable car to test certain guys. Then, to their astonishment and apparent chagrin, he climbed out of the car, turned a somersault on the rope, and sat down as calmly as if he were in a Morris chair. As the Niagara Falls
Gazette
reported, somewhat ghoulishly, “Everybody is disappointed to see him display such agility and courage.”

Disappointed
. For the first time it dawned on them that Blondin might actually accomplish what he said he would do and not tumble off the rope to his death below. For many had come expecting to witness Blondin’s doom, and now, as he capered above the chasm, they felt cheated. Death, after all, was what the region was infamous for.

It explains why every eye remained glued to the spectacle. Nobody wanted to miss a possible stumble, a terrifying loss of balance. A correspondent for the Toronto
Daily Spectator
told of encountering “a small fellow with a dried-up wizened face who sat in a corner of the enclosure with an opera glass in his hand, which he held fixed to his eyeball from the time Blondin started until he landed.” When someone asked him for a loan of his glass, he retorted, “What! I have come from Detroit every week to see that man fall into the river, and do you think I would lose the chance of seeing it now by lending you my glass, even for an instant?”

Nicholas Woods, correspondent for
The Times
who watched Blondin’s final performance in the autumn of 1860, believed that “one half of the crowds that go to see Blondin go in the firm expectation that as he must fall off and be lost some day or other, they may have the good fortune to be there when he does so miss his footing, and witness the whole catastrophe from the best point of view.” Blondin did not stumble. In 1859 he stood at the head of a long line of daredevils to come, all perfectly prepared to risk their lives for fame and fortune, not to mention the profit of the entrepreneurs who encouraged them.

The greatest natural wonder of all, which had once tantalized the world because of its remoteness in the continental wilderness, was now rendered commonplace by the revolution in transportation. Roebling’s bridge and the arrival of the new railways – Canada’s Great Western and the New York Central – had thrown Niagara open for business on an unprecedented scale. Now there was an instant audience – and a growing one – for performers like Blondin. It was in the interests not only of the railway companies but also of the hoteliers, the souvenir salesmen, the commercial photographers, and the hack drivers to encourage the kind of spectacle that would soon become a regular occurrence at Niagara.

Blondin did not need to hire a theatre in which to perform. He did not need to sell tickets at the entrance of a marquee. The gorge was his theatre and the railways were delighted to act as his agents. They supplied the customers who, having been inspired by the natural spectacle of the cataract, were happy to linger an extra day or so to view an equally absorbing human drama and, at the same time, help fill Blondin’s collection boxes.

The honeymoon was just coming into its own when Blondin walked across Niagara’s gorge. “Honeylunacy,” as it was sometimes called, was scarcely a generation old, having replaced the “wedding trip” of the upper classes, which was really part of the Fashionable Tour. Now, instead of accompanying the newlyweds to the various watering places, cousins, family, and friends bade them goodbye at the railway station and sent them off to Niagara Falls in the privacy etiquette dictated.

Why Niagara Falls? Half a dozen ingenious theories have been advanced, each more implausible than the last. It has been said that honeymooners went to the Falls to lose themselves in a crowd too busy contemplating the cataract to notice the billing and cooing at their elbows; that the sound of the falling water acted as an aphrodisiac; that the negative ions produced by the cascade served as a stimulant for the marriage bed; that moonlight dappling the water provided a lure to the romantic; that cataracts and waterfalls have always been associated with love, passion, obsession (and, one might add, suicide).

These convoluted explanations fail to identify the real lure of Niagara – that it was accessible and comfortable. Much of the North American population now lived within a day’s journey of the Falls where there was pleasant accommodation to suit everybody’s purse. Since almost everyone yearned to visit
Niagara anyway, why not combine the trip with a honeymoon and watch Charles Blondin teeter on his rope above the gorge?

For if consummation was the obverse side of the coin at Niagara, death or the prospect of death was the reverse. Brides and corpses were the Falls’ stock in trade. As Isabella Bird had discovered, the Falls guides loved to recount dreadful stories of unfortunate tourists sucked into the cataract – stories that no doubt gave more than one new bride an excuse to cling more tightly to her groom.

Back in August 1844, a certain Miss Martha Rigg, reaching for a bunch of cedar berries on a low tree on the bank below Table Rock, lost her footing and fell to her death, 115 feet below. The tale was tailor-made for the entrepreneurs. Miss Rigg’s broken body was scarcely in its casket before an enterprising Irishman with a table of souvenirs for sale had set up on the spot a five-foot wooden obelisk with verses recording the tragedy.

Ladies fair, most beauteous of the race
Beware and shun a dangerous place
Miss Martha Rigg here lost her life
Who might now have been a happy wife.

The monument was so successful that a competitor arrived with his own table of wares, which he installed close by. A spirited tussle ensued, with each man trying to move his goods closest to the fatal spot until the original huckster was forced to remove his obelisk each night by wheelbarrow and install it again the following morning.

Before Blondin’s first exhibition, most visitors had been fairly certain he would suffer the fate of the unfortunate Miss Rigg. The
New York Times
thought him a fool who ought to be arrested, while the Niagara
Mail
declared that “Baron Munchausen has evidently come to life again, and has taken up his abode at the Falls.” Peter B. Porter refused Blondin permission to anchor his rope on Goat Island for what he called a dangerous and foolish adventure. But the owners of White’s Pleasure Grounds on the American side and Clifton House on the Canadian were overjoyed to accommodate him and to charge a fee for everyone entering the enclosures. It mattered little to them whether Blondin fell off the rope as long as he didn’t succumb too soon. They need not have worried. He was planning several performances; before the season was out he would engage in eight.

His courage was undoubted. Everyone had heard the story of how on his first trip across the Atlantic, when a fellow passenger tumbled overboard, Blondin had leaped into the ocean and rescued him. But he could scarcely survive in the terrible rapids if, as expected, he fell.

To the astonishment of many, and the chagrin of more than a few, Blondin managed to make his first journey across the swaying tightrope seem as casual and as free of peril as a morning constitutional. He ate a good lunch and turned up at White’s Pleasure Grounds in mid-afternoon, with one thousand paying customers watching from special grandstands and thousands more jamming the banks for half a mile above and below the setting. For reasons best known to himself he wore a dark wig, which he doffed along with a vest of purple plush and a pair of white Turkish pantaloons. Then he stepped onto the tightrope in his flesh-coloured tights and started his long descent down the sagging cable, which, at midpoint, was fifty feet lower over the gorge. There he stopped, dropped a bottle on a piece of twine to the
Maid of the Mist
below, hauled up some Niagara River water, drank it, and resumed his journey – uphill this time – to arrive on the far bank triumphant, though bathed in sweat. He rested briefly, accepted a glass of champagne, performed a little dance on the rope, and trotted back across in the space of just eight minutes.

This astonishing performance produced a gush of hyperbole. The Buffalo
Courier
called Blondin “the most wonderful of Frenchmen.” The
New York Times
said his walk on the rope was “the greatest feat of the Nineteenth Century.” The Lock-port
Chronicle
went the limit. It termed it “the most terribly real and daringly wonderful feat that was ever performed.” Three Lockport boys suffered bone fractures that month attempting to duplicate Blondin’s triumph in their backyards.