Pleasures & Pastimes

Pleasures & Pastimes

Falling for Niagara

Cynics have had their field day with Niagara Falls, calling it everything from "water on the rocks" to "the second major disappointment of American married life" (Oscar Wilde). Others have been more positive. Missionary and explorer Louis Hennepin, whose books were widely read across Europe, first described the falls in 1678 as "an incredible Cataract or Waterfall which has no equal." Nearly two centuries later, novelist Charles Dickens wrote, "I seemed to be lifted from the earth and to be looking into Heaven. Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an image of beauty, to remain there changeless and indelible."

Writer Henry James recorded in 1883 how one stands there "gazing your fill at the most beautiful object in the world." And a half-century later, British author Vita Sackville-West wrote in a letter, "Niagara is really some waterfall! It falls over like a great noisy beard made of cotton-wool, veiled by spray and spanned by rainbows. The rainbows are the most unexpected part of it. They stand across like bridges between America and Canada, and are reproduced in sections along the boiling foam. The spray rises to the height of a skyscraper, shot by sudden iridescence high up in the air."

Understandably, all these rave reviews began to bring out the professional daredevils, as well as the self-destructive amateurs. In 1859 the great French tightrope walker Blondin walked across the Niagara Gorge, from the American to the Canadian side, on a three-inch-thick rope. On his shoulders was his reluctant, terrified manager; on both shores stood some 100,000 spectators. "Thank God it is over," exclaimed the future King Edward VII of England, after the completion of the walk. "Please never attempt it again." But others did. From the early 18th century, dozens went over in boats, rubber balls, and those famous barrels. Not a single one survived—until schoolteacher Annie Taylor did in 1901. Emerging from her barrel, she asked, "Did I go over the falls yet?" The endless stunts were finally outlawed in 1912, but nothing stops the determined: in 1985 two stuntmen survived a plunge, and two years later, someone who had conquered the falls mastered the rapids below the falls.

Besides daredevils, the other thing that springs to mind at the mention of Niagara are honeymoons. The first honeymooners arrived in 1803: Jerome Bonaparte (brother of Napoléon) and his bride, the daughter of a prosperous Baltimore merchant. On a grand tour of the Northeast, the newlyweds stayed a week, inaugurating a tradition. By the mid-1800s honeymoons at Niagara had become quite the rage and were a definite status symbol for young couples.