Niagara: A History of the Falls (39 page)

He was born with a caul – a membrane covering the fetus – and so, following a mystic tradition, was believed to have second sight. His wife, Beatrice, claimed that he often awoke suddenly in the dark to announce that he would find a body in the morning. More often than not he was right, as he was right about the weather, which he could predict with uncanny accuracy, simply, he said, by listening to the roar of the Falls.

It was once believed that a child born with a caul bore a charmed life. Certainly Red Hill’s life seemed charmed. He took chances and survived. The river had no terrors for him, but then, it is also said that a person born with a caul is in no danger of drowning. Neither flood nor fire fazed him. At the age of nine, when his parents’ home burst into flames, he rushed back barefoot into the inferno to rescue his two-year-old sister, Cora, who had been trapped inside. For that he was awarded his first life-saving medal.

He often skipped school to study the river. Once, after he had been absent a fortnight, the principal tackled his parents. What, he asked, has happened to young Red? Young Red, as it turned out, had spent each day from 8:30 in the morning until four in the afternoon tossing sticks and bits of driftwood over the Falls and into the rapids. All his life, Hill continued the practice, throwing in logs, tin cans, lifebelts – anything that would float – until he could guess the exact spot at which an object would end its journey. As with logs, so with a corpse. Over his long life, Hill would pull 177 bodies from the waters of the Niagara. He got a fee for every one.

No day went by that did not see Red Hill patrolling the river. Beatrice soon gave up trying to keep his evening meal warm for him. He was off at 8:30 a.m., gulping down a cup of coffee before heading for the waterfront. Sometimes he would be away for two or three days, spending his nights in a sheltered nook known as the Cave. No more than ten feet square, it had been worn out of the cliff six hundred yards below the Falls. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he’d tell his wife when he returned. “The river can’t do me any harm.”

He had no steady work. He ran a taxi service for a time and also a souvenir store. He did odd jobs. He bootlegged whiskey from his back door. His real vocation was the river.

He achieved celebrity in 1910 after Bobby Leach, in a new barrel, again successfully tackled the Whirlpool Rapids. Hill swam out to haul Leach to shore and retrieve the barrel. When he returned, somebody bet him two dollars that he didn’t have the courage to take the barrel through the lower rapids, “I’m your man,” cried Red Hill, and, to Leach’s fury, leaped into the barrel and rode all the way to Queenston unscathed.

Now, two years later, on a freezing February day in 1912, he was about to exchange local celebrity for wider fame. Two weeks earlier another great ice bridge had formed on the Niagara, stretching for a thousand yards below the Falls. Red Hill, as usual, had erected his shack not far from two other shanties some distance out from the Canadian shore. From there he peddled coffee, sandwiches, and, of course, hard liquor.

It was bitterly cold. The thermometer stood at zero Fahrenheit, and the mist that usually pillared skyward had turned to sleet. No more than twenty-five people had braved the weather to remain on the ice when, at noon, Hill heard an ominous rumble beneath him. He knew at once that the ice bridge was breaking up.

Calling for everyone to follow, he raced for the
Maid of the Mist
landing on the Canadian shore. Most followed his example, leaping the widening gap of water and slush between the slow-moving mass and the bank. But four people failed to recognize the danger.

Hill called for men and ropes to help these stragglers – two teenagers from Cleveland, Burrel Hecock and his friend Ignatius Roth, and a young Toronto couple, Mr. and Mrs. Eldridge Stanton. The two boys, childhood friends, had arrived that morning and were frolicking on the ice when they encountered the Toronto couple. The Stantons lived in Rosedale, then a new subdivision on the northern edge of Toronto. Eldridge Stanton was well known in musical circles. He sang in the Schubert choir and had taken a leading role in a light opera,
Three Little Maids
, on the stage of the city’s Royal Alexandra theatre. His attractive dark-haired wife, ten years his junior, was a camera enthusiast. The pair had often come to Niagara for sightseeing and to visit friends, and now, as Mrs. Stanton produced her camera, she offered to photograph the two Cleveland boys. The quartet quickly became friends and decided to stay together exploring the hills and valleys of the great frozen mass as they threaded their way back toward the concession shacks.

Suddenly, with a loud cracking sound, the ice bridge, anchored to both shores, shook itself free and began to move down the river. The four found themselves standing on a vast moving floe from which smaller chunks were breaking off. The two youths immediately rushed toward the Canadian shore while the Stantons headed in the opposite direction, only to find a dark channel twenty feet wide barring their way.

Hill dashed across the moving ice, leaping over fissures and rounding great hummocks, calling to the couple to make for the Canadian shore. Stanton grasped his young wife’s hand and followed the riverman. But when they encountered another channel of slush lying off the Canadian shore, the Stantons panicked. Hill urged them on; the slush, he said, was thick enough to take their weight. But they turned back, and the two youths followed them.

The great floe on which all four were marooned was already passing beneath the Upper Steel Arch Bridge. They stood helplessly on the American side of their frozen platform, escape still cut off by the open channel. Firemen from American towns stood ready with rescue lines but could not reach them. Canadian firemen dropped ropes from the bridge, to no avail. Hill and others raced along the Canadian shore, clambering over hillocks and boulders, to keep pace with the moving ice.

As the floe passed the outflow of the Niagara Falls Power Company’s tunnel, its back section broke off and ground to a halt on the American shore. Had the marooned quartet been standing at that end they could have been saved. Now their only hope was to try to return to the Canadian side.

The two youths rushed on ahead, with the Stantons stumbling along behind. Mrs. Stanton fell. “Oh, let me alone!” she said, “let me die now.” Her husband tried to drag her to her feet, and Hecock, hearing his call for help, turned back. In doing so he sacrificed his life.

Roth kept going. The great floe was now some seven hundred yards downstream from the Upper Steel Arch Bridge. Hill threw the youth a rope. Roth seized it and, calling back to his companions to follow, plunged into the slush. Hill leaped from the bank into the water, grasped the youth, and dragged him, half unconscious, his clothes frozen solid, to safety. But the other boy and the man, with a hysterical woman on their hands, remained on the crumbling, drifting floe.

By this time the banks were lined with spectators. The Whirlpool Rapids were only half a mile downstream. The trio would have to escape before the ice plunged into that maelstrom. The block on which all three were standing broke into two pieces, leaving Hecock on one and the Toronto couple on the other.

On the Michigan Central Railroad bridge, members of a repair crew lowered a rope weighted with iron, while another workman fashioned a makeshift line from three coils of insulated telephone wire. Hecock grasped the dangling rope as he passed below it and plunged waist-deep into the water, battered by the ice as the men above tried to yank him free. When at last the lifeline tightened, they began to haul up the numbed Hecock, who, in turn, tried to climb upward, hand over hand. He was dangling forty feet above the water when his strength left him. His frozen hands slipped, and he tried to grip the rope with his teeth. But he could not hold on, and suddenly he was gone, swallowed by the ice-choked river as the crowd above groaned.

Stanton saw it all. His wife, on her knees, weeping uncontrollably, closed her eyes. Then, as the current moved the floe out into midstream, Stanton was able to seize the knotted telephone line dangling from the bridge. He was trying to tie it around his wife when, to his horror, it broke. A second lifeline was dropped, and Stanton tried again to save his wife; but the twenty-mile-an-hour current was too swift. The floe swept beyond the bridge before he could reach the line.

The spectacle of the two, clasped in each other’s arms, then dropping to their knees as if in prayer, would remain with Red Hill all his life. An instant later the rapids overturned their icepan. Their bodies were never found.

Hill received a second life-saving medal from the Royal Canadian Humane Association for his efforts. And for the rest of time, the Niagara ice bridge was declared off limits to everyone, residents and visitors alike.

5
The soaring ambitions of Adam Beck

The chairman of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario was a man obsessed with power – not only the power that the Falls could provide but also the power that he himself could wield. Adam Beck was an autocrat. He wanted no interference from politicians peering over his shoulder. Hydro was his child, and he wanted to run it in his own way, at arm’s length from the Ontario government.

In one sense that was admirable. There would be no political patronage under Beck – no incompetent friends of the government bungling matters, as had happened in the federal government’s Intercolonial Railway in the Maritime provinces. But there was another, darker side to Beck’s personality. He was quite prepared to dissemble, and even to lie, in order to keep the government unaware of his ambitions for Hydro. He was miffed in 1915 when the new premier, William Howard Hearst, appointed an auditor to examine Hydro’s books. The government had received no accurate financial information from Beck since 1909 and wanted some answers. Beck was even more miffed when the auditor came down hard on Hydro for spending four million dollars more than the new legislature had authorized. The auditor declared that there wasn’t even a semblance of legislative control over Beck’s commission and referred to his “seemingly defiant disobedience of the Act.”

In this harsh condemnation shrewder politicians might have seen some hints of what was to come, but Adam Beck, MPP, was riding high with both press and public. His Hydro Circus, a horse-drawn caravan, was travelling to rural communities trumpeting the advantages of electrical appliances and equipment. Beck himself often arrived in his Pierce Arrow automobile to address the crowds. A witty popular song, “Oh! What a Difference Since the Hydro Came,” emphasized the enthusiasm with which the public greeted Beck’s achievement. His white-knight stance as the saviour of the people from the greedy private interests had made him a folk hero to go with the real knighthood he was awarded in 1914.

With his haughty aristocratic features, he did not look like a man of the people. If he was obsessive about public power, it was the single-minded obsession of a fanatic. Beck was like a collector whose energies are channelled into an insatiable desire for rare porcelain or eighteenth-century watches. He couldn’t let go. He wanted more, no matter what the cost, and more was never enough.

His empire was expanding at a furious rate. When Hydro began operation in 1910 it was delivering 2,500 horsepower to ten municipalities. At the outset of the Great War it had already expanded into a network of ninety-five municipalities, requiring 77,000 horsepower. By the end of 1916, with wartime demands increasing, Hydro was delivering 167,000 horsepower to 191 municipalities. The following year, with hundreds of newly constructed munitions factories all demanding power, Hydro was providing 330,000 horsepower.

Hydro had been designed as a middleman that would build and operate the transmission lines while buying its power from private concerns. That original concept had been sold to the municipalities, to the provincial government, and to the public. But Beck wanted more. He did not want to be dependent on others; he wanted to generate his own power.

The idea had been percolating since 1914, when he had approached the ailing premier, Whitney, to gain his support for a mammoth generating plant at Queenston. A year later he asked Whitney’s successor, Hearst, to back the idea. It would cost $10 million, he said, to produce 100,000 horsepower, and take three and a half years to build. Beck apparently pulled the figure out of a hat – the estimates occupied a single sheet of paper. Later, they were revised. In January 1917 the cost was estimated at a little more than $24 million to produce 300,000 horsepower. That was the only estimate the government ever received. The enabling legislation placed before the ratepayers on the January 1916 municipal ballot carefully made no mention of costs or horsepower. It simply asked authorization “to develop, or acquire, through Hydro, whatever works may be required for the supply of electrical energy or power.”

What Beck was planning was a huge project that would take its water from the mouth of the Weiland River at its confluence with the Niagara at Chippawa, above the Falls, and convey it by a long canal to Queenston. The net fall would be 294 feet. With the efficiency of newly designed generators, Hydro at Queenston could develop two to three times as much power as the stations nearer the Falls were producing.

Beck, in the meantime, was casting covetous eyes at the Buffalo-owned Ontario Power Company, which took its power from the foot of the Falls, using no more than the original 170-foot drop. This company had been awarded the major share of the Canadian horsepower allotted under the treaty of 1909. Beck knew that Ontario Power was not using all the water that the international agreement allowed: four thousand cubic feet a second were going to waste. And so Beck “acquired” this potential power source in 1917 for $22 million. At about the same time he accused the Electrical Development Company of “stealing water” – exceeding its legal maximum – a charge that enraged Sir William Mackenzie, who, like Beck, had received a knighthood. Mackenzie wrote to the premier protesting Beck’s “despicable calumny.”