Niagara: A History of the Falls (44 page)

The Niagara Parks Commission had been concerned about the bridge’s condition for some time before its collapse and was already planning a new structure. The replacement – the Rainbow Bridge – was completed in record time and officially opened on November 1, 1941. Since gasoline was rationed in wartime, traffic was sparse, and horse-drawn vehicles replaced many of the cars and buses. By 1944 the gasoline shortage forced the closing of the bridge on Sundays. Not until the war ended did the real flood-tide of visitors pour in, and only then did the Rainbow Bridge come into its own.

4
Young Red’s last ride

Six months after the Rainbow Bridge opened, Red Hill died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-four. Wartime injuries and the hard life of a riverman had taken their toll. He had recovered 177 bodies from the Niagara River and won four Humane Association medals, the last for his efforts each winter to save the wild swans that were swept over the Horseshoe Falls and onto the ice below. Although the ice bridge was officially off limits, Hill went out in the dark of night in his white flannel nightshirt to rescue the stunned birds from the foot of the cataract. He released those that survived. He and his family ate the rest for dinner.

Red Hill never lost his love for the river; it was his life, his obsession. To him, profit was secondary. He was given a small fee for the bodies he brought out, and he dabbled in various enterprises – his taxi business and souvenir store, not to mention a small bootlegging operation. But the river was his real vocation. His wife, Beatrice, felt otherwise. “I hate the river,” she said. “I’m afraid of it. I begged my children to stay away from it.”

Her pleas had no effect, especially on Red, Jr., who had caught the fever long ago. Stocky, thick-shouldered, and powerful, he asked the press to call him “riverman,” the designation in which his father had gloried. Young Red saw himself carrying on the family tradition. His younger brother Corky, who worked on the
Maid of the Mist
, was often by his side when he scaled ledges to retrieve corpses or rescue a marooned climber. It was his phone that rang now when the police needed help. By 1945, the list of bodies he had recovered from the Niagara numbered twenty-eight.

When his father was dying, young Red had vowed he would raise enough money to build him a proper memorial. True to that pledge, he announced in the summer of 1945 that he would duplicate his father’s feat of riding a barrel down the gorge, through the Whirlpool, and on to Queenston. For sentiment’s sake it would be the same battered barrel that his father had taken in 1931, when young Red had saved his life. This was the barrel in which George Stathakis had met his death; the Hills had had it on display ever since that time.

With the European war over, the big crowds were returning to the Falls. Hill was convinced that a collection taken up among the spectators who lined the bank would be substantial. It would, he hoped, pay for mobile life-saving equipment as well as a monument to his father.

The authorities were now making a serious attempt to stop stunting on the river. To thwart them, Hill had the barrel lowered down the bank at a secluded spot two hundred yards south of the Whirlpool Rapids early on the morning of July 8. A crowd of friends gathered round to mask his movements until he climbed into the red-painted barrel and set off on his perilous journey.

And perilous it was. The unwieldy cask had no sooner entered the Whirlpool Rapids than a gigantic wave caught it and hurled it thirty feet into the air. A crowd of ten thousand lining the bank gasped and groaned as the barrel struck rock after rock. To Hill, crouched in his harness, it seemed as though “a thousand brass bands were playing inside.”

Now the barrel was catapulted into the heart of the Whirlpool. Circling slowly, it was pushed near the shore and then sucked back into the vortex as the crowd groaned again. Round and round it went until a favourable current thrust it again toward the shore. Two of Red’s brothers, Corky and Major, leaped into a boat, reached the barrel, towed it to shore, and bailed it dry of water. Then the journey resumed.

Bobbing and weaving down the chute of the gorge – moving faster, indeed, than the cars on the road above, which were caught in a traffic jam – the barrel plunged northward to its destination. Standing on the bridge at Queenston, an immense crowd, far larger than the one that had greeted Hill’s father, shouted “Here he comes!” as the crimson cask emerged from the white water. A power boat took the barrel in tow. It was so badly battered now that it could not be used again. When Red Hill and his family went out to the cemetery to place a wreath on the grave of Red, Sr., Beatrice Hill was not with them. The excitement over the rescue had caused her to collapse with a heart attack.

Like his father, young Red was no businessman. Unlike the shrewd Farini, he had made no attempt to sell tickets or organize the spectacle for maximum profit. And because the police had infiltrated the area, trying to forestall him, it was difficult for him to arrange a collection. And so, three years later, in September 1948, he determined to try again, using a cigar-shaped steel craft weighing about a thousand pounds. Once again he managed to elude the law and push off secretly from thick woods bordering the river. Once again the waves in the rapids hurled the barrel high in the air – an estimated forty feet this time. Once again the barrel kept circling and slowly filling with water in the heart of the vortex.

The barrel approached the shore two hours after it entered the Whirlpool, and again Hill’s brothers towed it to shore. He was badly battered, for his safety harness had broken and he had been forced to tie himself down, an awkward feat with the barrel rolling and tossing in the waves.

The trip to Queenston took another three hours, and when Red emerged he announced that it had been ten times worse than the previous venture. Recording equipment that he was supposed to use to describe the trip broke loose and smashed into his left knee. He emerged, stunned and bruised, to announce, “I’m all through with stunts like this.”

But, of course, he wasn’t, and neither was his brother Major (his Christian name) Lloyd Hill, who seemed determined to outdo both his brother and his father. In 1949, Major attempted the same trip in another steel barrel, this one equipped with fins worked by levers. These, he said, would allow him to steer himself away from the Whirlpool. They didn’t work. Badly bruised after two hours of circling in the maelstrom, he was finally rescued in the most spectacular fashion – hauled up sixty-five feet to the Spanish Aero Car (built in 1916) hanging on its cable above. As he lay in hospital, Major heard Red announce that he would complete the abortive journey to Queenston. That was too much for Major. He left his bed, walked out of the hospital, and made the journey himself.

It was clear that the two Hill brothers were trying to best each other, partly for the honour of the family but also because each saw himself as the legitimate successor to his father. The following July, the thirty-one-year-old Major, a tall and lanky war veteran, announced he would do something that none of the other members of the family had attempted. He would plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Major attempted to surround the effort with an aura of scientific respectability. He wanted, he said, “to disprove certain theories about the Falls.” He wanted to show that “there’s no rocks in the centre about seventy-five to one hundred feet from the Falls.” A more probable purpose was to underline the family’s charmed life. “The Falls,” said Major, “can’t kill the Hills.”

A vast crowd turned up on the hot afternoon of July 16, 1950. The press estimated half a million spectators, undoubtedly an exaggeration. They left disappointed. At 1:15, Hill started out from a point three miles above the cataract, but the current quickly drew his barrel under the weir of wire mesh that screened the flow of water to the intake of the Canadian Niagara Power Company. Hill’s friends rushed to retrieve the barrel, intending to push it out into the racing stream, but power company employees convinced them the attempt would be dangerous because of large rocks in the current leading to the intake. They hauled Hill from the barrel and, to the disappointment of the throng, sent it plunging empty over the Falls. Major Hill made another rapids trip that summer but did not attempt the Falls again.

Young Red was miffed. His brother had not invited him to take part in the adventure, and he felt the snub keenly. He also felt the family’s honour had been besmirched by Major’s failure to make good on his pledge. For years he himself had been toying with the idea of “taking the big drop.” Now, the Hills’ reputation at stake, he determined to try the stunt himself.

He announced he would go over the Falls in a rubber ball, as his friend Jean Lussier had done. The trouble was that he was broke. A month after his last rapids trip a bailiff had seized his goods and chattels to satisfy his bank, his landlord, and the welding service that had made the new barrel. Strapped for cash, he took his problem to a friend, a local tinsmith named Norman Candler, who devised an inexpensive contraption that Hill dubbed “the Thing.” That was an apt name, for it resembled nothing that had ever entered the Niagara River before.

The Thing consisted of thirteen truck tire inner tubes bound together by webbing and encased in string fish net. “This barrel is not something made on the spur of the moment,” Hill declared stoutly, but it certainly looked it. In fact, Hill’s first reaction on seeing it was one of disappointment. “I thought it would be different,” he said.

He went across the river to see Jean Lussier, who told him, “I wouldn’t even go on the Chippawa Creek in a rig like that.”

“Well,” said Hill with a shrug, “that’s as far as my money would go.”

Its very flimsiness appealed to him, or so he said in what seems to have been a masterpiece of rationalization. “It will ride high and take the knock” was the way he put it.

He had reached the point where he could not back out no matter what anybody said. He had made a public announcement; he had devised a unique craft; and he had the family reputation to consider. One Hill had already backed out of the plunge. This one had no intention of doing so.

Indeed, the prospect of danger seemed to exhilarate him. “I’ve been watching the Falls for years and I know I can take care of them,” he said. At times he seemed to be convincing himself that the journey over the brink would be easy. “There won’t be any mistake. I’ll ride high over the water. I’ll get wet but nothing will happen to me.”

His brother Wes, the youngest of the four Hill boys, tried to talk him out of the stunt. “It’s too light,” he told him. “You’re heavier than it is. You’re going to shoot out of it like a ball out of a cannon. Not only am I not going to help you, I’m going fishing.”

Wes had planned to fish for four days with a group of friends, but he couldn’t bear to abandon his brother. A day after he left, he drove all the night from the fishing camp back to Niagara. “Prepare yourself,” he said to Beatrice Hill. “You’re not going to see him any more.”

A friend suggested that Red fake the trip by sending the Thing over empty. He could then climb into it secretly and make money by exhibiting the device and appearing on radio or on television. Red scorned the idea. “It’s the Falls I want to go over,” he said. “I want that more than the fame or the money.”

His mother pleaded with him to wear a life jacket. He wouldn’t hear of it. “That would take the kick out of the show,” he told her. Yet he seemed in no hurry to make the hazardous trip. “I’ll make her soon enough,” he told a group of cronies who were urging him on. “Don’t get excited.”

The date was set for August 5. Red was sitting in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee when Wes arrived. “I’ll see you later,” Red said as he headed for the Rapids Tavern. “No you won’t,” said Wes, glumly.

Hill left the tavern carrying a paper bag containing two bottles of beer. “FU see you about 2:30,” he told a friend. “I may drop dead before you get back,” the friend replied.

A pickup truck brought him to Usher’s Creek above Chippawa, where the Thing was concealed behind a pile of brush. Hill took his ease in the truck, drinking beer, waiting for the odd craft to be towed to the mouth of the creek. Helpers pumped up the inner tubes and an air mattress in which he was to lie during the journey. An opening had been left at one end that Hill planned to close just before going over the crest of the Horseshoe. “Just when I feel that last dip before she goes over, I’ll jam one of the tubes over the opening and hold it there,” he announced. “Then I’ll just curl up like a good little boy and ride ’er down.”

Hill supervised the final details himself, planning to enter the craft only at the last moment. As he said, “This is my life. I’ll feel safe so long as this is run my way.” He climbed into a rowboat and smiled ruefully back to the knot of friends on the bank as he was rowed to the main channel. When he reached it, he entered the Thing.

Red took with him a variety of good-luck charms that well-wishers had pressed on him – four silver dollars, a four-leaf clover, a chip from the Blarney Stone, some holy medals, a wreath of heather, a tiny doll, and his father’s good luck piece: a small plastic elephant. “I’m not superstitious or religious,” he had said, “but when people give me things like this it shows they think a little something of me.”

Two hundred thousand spectators – twice the usual number for an August weekend – blackened the banks on both sides of the river to watch Hill’s awkward craft dancing, whirling, and shooting through the rapids. It hurtled directly to the crest of the Falls, dropped over in one piece, and vanished in the turbulence below.

A few moments later, two inner tubes that had apparently become detached floated to the surface. Then the rest of the tubes popped up in disarray, “looking like so many doughnuts on a string,” in the words of one witness. Clearly the device had not held together but had been torn to pieces by the terrific force of the water. The crowd stood silent. There was no sign of Red Hill.

“Where is he?” his mother cried out. “Where is he? He’s my oldest boy. I want him back! I want him back!” She collapsed sobbing on the dock.