Niagara: A History of the Falls (40 page)

Beck’s ambitions were stimulated by the wartime power crisis. As the demands of the munitions plants increased, he wrapped himself in the flag. He wanted the government to stop the sale of private power to the United States on the grounds that it was needed for the Canadian war effort. His intention was not entirely patriotic. Industry south of the border now paid more for Canadian power than Canadian industries did. By persuading the government to cut off that lucrative source of profit, Beck would weaken his rivals. But Hydro had just become an exporter itself, through its recent purchase of the Ontario Power Company, and Beck had no intention of revoking the contracts with U.S. industries it had inherited. This time, however, Beck didn’t get his way. The United States was also at war and threatening to cut off exports of coal to Canada. Ottawa refused to place an embargo on power exports.

By 1917 Ontario was faced with a shortage of 70,000 horsepower, much of it brought on by Beck’s own sales efforts, which had prompted householders to buy such things as electric irons and heaters. The Canadian government ordered all power interests to develop electricity to the maximum, regardless of their legal restrictions. With power blackouts now a regular inconvenience, Beck had no trouble getting legislative approval for his pet Queenston-Chippawa project. Nobody knew how long the war in Europe would drag on, but it was obvious that more electric power would be needed.

Now Beck’s implacable rival, the dapper Sir William Mackenzie, struck back. He argued that Beck’s plan to divert water from the Niagara River for the Queenston plant contravened an earlier agreement the EDC had made with the commissioners of Queen Victoria Park. Mackenzie’s firm applied for an injunction to stop the project. It failed. Mackenzie tried to get the federal government to disallow the Ontario legislation. That failed, too. The defeated Mackenzie, strapped for cash, was finally prepared to sell out to Hydro.

A long and acrimonious series of negotiations followed, with Beck intransigent as always, refusing even to stay in the same room with Mackenzie’s nominee, R.J. Fleming. W.R. Plewman reported that the premier thought both men were acting childishly “and would have taken pleasure in banging their heads together.” The long-drawn-out arguments cost the taxpayers dearly and did not end until December 5, 1921, when Hydro bought out all of Mackenzie’s interests for $32,734,000 – more than five million dollars above the price that Mackenzie had been prepared to accept in 1918.

During this time, Beck was determined to press on with his new project at any price, but he did not tell his political masters that costs were escalating. Nor, apparently, did they ask. As far as the premier was concerned, the job would be done for about $25 million, a figure that Beck continued to cling to in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

Eight thousand labourers were toiling night and day, blasting an eight-mile tunnel out of solid rock to carry the water from Chippawa to the cliff side at Queenston. Fourteen gigantic shovels were at work, five of them larger than any others in the world. Seventeen million cubic yards of earth and rock had to be moved – an amount five times greater than the volume of the great pyramid of Cheops. Four hundred and fifty thousand cubic yards of concrete had to be poured. Beck, it turned out, was building on a hitherto unprecedented scale, dwarfing the American plants across the river. This would be by far the largest hydroelectric plant in the world, and Ontario Hydro would be the world’s largest power company.

For all of this turbulent period, Beck misled not only the government but also the other members of the commission. Expenditures were running wildly ahead of estimates, but Beck withheld that information. The big shovels were not operating under ideal conditions and could do no more than half the work advertised by their manufacturers. Wartime pressures had escalated wage rates. And the original estimates had been distorted by Beck and his staff, who were eager for official approval and didn’t want to see the project aborted.

Time and again Beck had submitted estimates to the municipalities that he knew were unsound. Sometimes he had persuaded the provincial legislature to approve money for one purpose, then used it for another. He had issued cheques without the sanction or knowledge of the Treasury Board or even of his fellow commissioners, knowing that otherwise they would not be authorized. Beck had had no compunction about misleading the government in which he was a Cabinet minister. He had got approval of his huge project on the basis of a single sheet of paper estimating the cost at about $10 million, later raised to $24 million. The government had no inkling of the real bill until three years after the start of construction.

In 1919, a new political movement, the United Farmers of Ontario, swept into power under its leader, E.C. Drury. Beck himself was out of political office, swamped by the tidal wave. He had had considerable clout with Hearst; he had none with Drury, who after an investigation of Hydro accounts found that construction costs were far out of line. An audit revealed that the cost of the Niagara project would be at least $40 million. Within six months that was revised to $50 million and then to $65 million. Even this figure was low. When all the bills were in, the price had soared to $84 million.

Beck had exceeded his estimates in another way. Instead of producing the original 100,000 horsepower that he had forecast to Whitney in 1914, or the 300,000 horsepower agreed to in 1917, the new plant would produce 550,000 horsepower.

Beck tried to stall Drury off as he had successfully obstructed his predecessors. In October 1921, the premier and his cabinet met with the Hydro chairman to get some explanation of the soaring expenses. Beck promised he’d have it in a week. But two months went by with Beck pleading pressure of business. He finally replied with feeble excuses, blaming “conditions which could not have been foreseen” and “results which could not have been anticipated.”

It was time for that old Canadian standby – a royal commission that would head off a politically embarrassing confrontation between the tough-minded Drury and the resolute Beck. Thus, when the big project finally opened with much fanfare on December 29, 1921, “a pall seemed to hang overhead,” in the words of W.R. Plewman, who was there.

The royal commission, under the chairmanship of W.R. Gregory, produced its report in March 1924, and it was devastating. It came down very hard on the Hydro chairman, who, it said bluntly, “has shown an absolute lack of frankness.” He had recognized no obligation to keep the government informed about costs or expenditures. His estimates had been “inadequate or unsound” and it was clear that he knew it. He had often “been arbitrary and inconsiderate in his dealings with his colleagues and with the government.”

“It seems inconceivable that the Commission should have regarded cost so lightly and that the financing of this great work could have been carried on by it in such a loose way,” the report said. No government, it declared, “should accept with confidence estimates prepared by a promoter of a scheme.” Beck had hoodwinked a successions of premiers, but the premiers themselves were also to blame. They had let Hydro become a law unto itself. The Ontario government, dazzled by Beck’s charisma, had never kept in touch with the work through an independent representative. Beck got money “almost for the asking” not only from the government “but by diverting millions which it [Hydro] held in trust for other purposes.”

The Gregory Commission could not, however, ignore the “inestimable” value to the province of the Queenston-Chippawa plant, no matter what the cost. Some other figures turned out to be wrong – but on the right side. The canal, designed to carry 15,000 cubic feet of water a second, was capable of 18,000, and perhaps more. Beck had planned to develop 500,000 horsepower, but the plant, which had an efficiency of 90 percent, was capable of developing 550,000. That indicated “a fineness of design seldom, if ever, attained in a work of this character. It is, in short, a magnificent piece of engineering.”

That would serve as Beck’s epitaph. By finagling and dissembling, by vague promises and outright lies, the bull headed Hydro chairman had got his way. Would his dream have come true if the government had known early in the game what the final cost would be? Sir Adam Beck clearly didn’t think so. He died in 1925, his name linked forever with the campaign for public power in Canada. When the Tennessee Valley Authority was brought into being in 1933, Ontario Hydro served as a model. Franklin Roosevelt, when he was governor of New York, had been a close student of Beck’s project.

There were other monuments in addition to the one on University Avenue, Toronto. In 1950, Beck’s enormous power-plant was renamed Sir Adam Beck Generating Station No. 1. Two more stations would follow, also carrying Beck’s name. History may not have forgotten the autocrat’s financial legerdemain, but the public has long since forgiven him his flaws. He got the job done, and that, in the long run, is all that seems to matter.

Chapter Ten

1
The riverman’s return
2
The Richest Man in Canada
3
The end of the Honeymoon
4
Young Red’s last ride

1
The riverman’s return

Red Hill came back from the Great War at the beginning of August, 1918, some said to die. A sniper with the 75th Battalion – the “Jolly 75th” as it was known – he had been wounded twice. Worse, his lungs had been permanently damaged in the abortive gas attack on March 1, 1917, a few weeks before the battle of Vimy Ridge. When the wind blew the Canadians’ gas back into their own lines, causing fearful havoc, Hill was one of the victims. The army doctors finally sent him home to recuperate. “I just hope it’s not too damp where you live,” one told him, ignorant of Niagara’s incessant spray. There were those who thought he would be dead before the year was out.

He was scarcely home before something happened to restore his spirits and spur his recovery. It was a call for help, and it won him his third life-saving medal.

On August 6, a huge steel sand scow, used for dredging the hydraulic canal on the American side of the river above the Falls, broke loose from its tugboat and drifted with increasing speed toward the crest of the Horseshoe. Two deckhands were aboard – Gustav Lofberg, a fifty-one-year-old unmarried Swedish seaman, and James A. Harris of Buffalo, a fifty-three-year-old father of five. As the scow hurtled down the rapids, the two men struggled to open the hatches. “We’re going over! We’re lost!” Harris cried. Fortunately, they managed to get the hatches open, water poured in, and the scow settled until it scraped the ledges of rock just above the brink of the cataract. There, as crowds gathered, it caught and teetered precariously. Bystanders rushed to telephones to call the fire departments of both towns and the life-saving station at Youngstown, New York.

It was crucial to get a line aboard, and the men on the scow knew it; they began tearing away timbers to build a crude windlass. Firemen sped to the shore with a small life-saving gun, which sent a five-hundred-foot length of rope arching toward the marooned craft. It fell short. They tried again, but the second line also splashed into the water.

Within half an hour an army truck arrived from Youngstown with a larger gun, which was placed on the roof of the Toronto Power Company’s generating plant below the bank, about 750 feet from the scow. This time the light line reached the scow and was caught by one of the men. A heavier rope was paid out, and then a breeches-buoy was winched across. As it sank into the water under its own weight, the two men struggled with their improvised windlass.

Then the buoy itself – a sling big enough to carry one man – got caught in the current about halfway to the scow and twisted around the rope until the line was hopelessly fouled. By then it was two o’clock in the morning. A call went out for a volunteer to untangle the lines. Red Hill shouldered his way through the crowd and stepped forward.

As the watchers on shore held their breath, Hill hauled himself out to the sling, hand over hand, in the glow of powerful searchlights. Hanging by his legs, he tried to untangle the lines, but it was too dark to see properly. He made his way back to the roof of the powerplant, where a large sign, illuminated by the lights, told the marooned men: “WAIT UNTIL DAYLIGHT.”

At dawn, Hill ventured out again. All five power companies on both sides of the river had used their turbines to keep the water level as low as possible. Hill, floundering in the water on the sagging cable, was close enough to the scow to hear Lofberg, who had once survived a hurricane at sea, tell Harris, “It’s out of our hands. Don’t worry. We only got to die once.”

At last, Hill managed to untangle the lines, and the buoy reached the scow. The men were hauled to shore one at a time in the basket. Harris went first. “You go ahead, Jim,” said Lofberg. “I’ll stay behind and man the ropes because I know how to handle them better than you.” After he hauled himself to shore, Lofberg, who had never lost his nerve, asked for a plug
of chewing tobacco and announced that he was going to go as far back on land as possible and lash himself to a tree. “Then I’ll know I’m safe,” he said. The scow resisted all efforts to dislodge it from the rocks and can be seen to this day, a battered hulk lashed by spray, not far from the old Toronto Power station.

Red Hill went back to his old ways, doing odd jobs, bootlegging, plucking corpses from the river for a small fee, and restlessly roaming the lip of the gorge, examining the currents and passing on the Hill tradition and his own knowledge of the river to his eldest son, William “Red,” Jr. The boy promised he would devote his life to the river. “The river will keep you poor,” the father told all his boys, “but in return it will give you a reward greater than money. I can’t put it into words.”