ALL HAIL LIBRARIANS! WITHOUT them, all of civilization—excepting those I Love Lucy episodes still zinging around space and the increasingly bloated compendium of fact, factoids and fakery known as Google’s main index—would surely vanish down the memory hole. I am grateful to a phalanx of librarians, but to no one more so than Maureen Fennie and Linda Reinumagi in the Local History section at the Niagara Falls Public Library, who with wry, crackling wit, kept me good company as I rifled through the Wunderkammer of history. I am extremely grateful to the American Antiquarian Society for a grant to draw on their amazing collection and their even more amazing staff; special thanks to Georgia Barnhill, Joanne Chaison, Thomas Knoles, Marie Lamoureax, Laura Wasowicz and S. J. Wolfe in the library, and to James Moran, Cheryl McRell, John Hench and John Keenum for helping make it all happen. I am also deeply grateful to the MacDowell Colony for a residency fellowship during which a trunkful of notes began to look something like a book.
I have benefited from Niagara’s long—and occasionally daunting—literary legacy. The most widely read popular history is Pierre Berton’s bestseller Niagara (Kodansha, 1992), which I found useful as a map of the standard story. Linda Revie offers a survey of artists’ and writers’ responses to the Falls in The Niagara Companion (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2003). Charles Mason Dow’s giant compendium, Anthology and Bibliography of Niagara Falls (State of New York, 1921), is a necessary desk reference for any Niagaraphile, as are the souvenir volumes Notes on Niagara (R. Lespinasse, 1883) and The Niagara Book (Underhill & Nichols, 1893).
Many folks have written well about tourism and its relationship to national identity; books I found illuminating were John Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1989); Hal Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (University Press of Kansas, 1998); Claudia Bell and John Lyall, The Accelerated Sublime: Landscape, Tourism and Identity (Praeger, 2002); Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Schocken, 1976); and the essay collection So Glorious a Landscape: Nature and the Environment in American History and Culture, ed. Chris Magoc (Scholarly Resources, 2002).
I relied heavily on old histories and especially old guidebooks in the collections of the American Antiquarian Society, the New York Public Library, the Niagara Falls Public Library, by which I mean the one in New York, and the Niagara Falls (Ontario) Public Library: between their collections, I got to read every Niagara tour guide printed in the nineteenth century, and many of the following century’s as well. I will not list them here, but Walter McCausland compiled a list of every guidebook printed prior to 1850 and read it as a paper to the Literary Clinic of Buffalo on January 8, 1945; and Douglas McMurtrie privately printed 200 copies of his American Book Collector article “The First Guides to Niagara Falls” in 1934. The New York Public Library, to their infinite credit, has both bibliographies as well as many of the items in them: send them a donation at once.
ONE: WHITE MAN’S FANCY, RED MAN’S FACT
“If you want to learn about our history, let us tell it,” Neil Patterson, Jr., told me, and I held his words in mind as I tried to tell a story about native and European histories entwining to create a truly new world. In particular, I took myths told to me in person as authoritative, because that’s how the Haudenosaunee see them. I am grateful to Neil, to Joseph Bruchac and to Darwin John for spending generous amounts of time telling me stories, and hope I heard them a little better than the nineteenth-century ethnologists did. Neil Patterson directed me to the Web site sixnations.org, where the Haudenosaunee discuss their own history. Also helpful was his book with Bryan Printup, Tuscarora Nation (Arcadia, 2007).
Daniel K. Richter’s The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (University of North Carolina Press, 1992) was indispensable, not least for its Haudenosaunee-centric approach. My thanks to folks at Ganondagan for bringing it to my attention. Laurence M. Hauptman’s Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State (Syracuse University Press, 1999) was especially helpful on transportation technology, land use and the Iroquois. A good summary of Haudenosaunee relations in the region is Alan Taylor’s “The Divided Ground: Upper Canada, New York and the Iroquois Six Nations, 1783–1815,” Journal of the Early Republic 22:1 (Spring 2002). Richard White’s brilliant book The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region 1650–1815 (Cambridge University Press, 1991) changed my way of thinking about native history, colonial history and the interactions between them. William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (Hill & Wang, 1983) was also worldview-shifting.
Antiquated ethnographic studies of the Iroquois may not tell us much about the Indians, but they say a lot about their times; I used Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Notes on the Iroquois (Bartlett & Welford, 1846) and of course Lewis Henry Morgan, League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee (Sage & Brother, 1851) and The Indian Journals, ed. Leslie A. White (University of Michigan Press, 1959). Information on Haudenosaunee marriage traditions I found in Judith K. Brown, “Economic Organization and the Position of Women Among the Iroquois,” Ethnohistory 17:3–4 (Summer 1970).
“Iroquois myths” turn up in all sorts of places; some more reliable ones are Legends, Traditions and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, by Tuscarora headman Elias Johnson (Union Printing & Publishing, 1881); “Myths and Legends of the New York State Iroquois” by Harriet Maxwell Converse (Ya-ie-wa-noh), published in the New York State Museum’s Education Department Bulletin 437 (December 15, 1908); Iroquois Folklore by Reverend William Beauchamp (Deiler Press, 1922); Legends of the Longhouse by Jesse Cornplanter (J. B. Lippincott, 1938); and Iroquois Stories: Heroes and Heroines, Monsters and Magic by Joseph Bruchac (Crossing Press, 1985). A version of the Canandaigua serpent story also appears in an after-word to James Seaver’s The Life of Mary Jemison (1824), where it is said to be recounted by Horatio Jones, like Jemison a white captive who chose to live out his life as an adopted Seneca.
I am grateful to Robert Emerson of Old Fort Niagara (which I call simply Fort Niagara throughout this text) for sharing his scholarship, as well as discussing the fur trade with me at length while standing in the hot sun in eighteenth-century regimental gear and armed with musket, sword, bayonet and tomahawk. Indian dramas are discussed at length by Priscilla Sears, A Pillar of Fire to Follow: American Indian Dramas 1808–1859 (Bowling Green University Press, 1982) and Eugene Jones, Native Americans as Shown on the Stage 1753–1916 (Scarecrow Press, 1988).
For La Salle, one turns first to the great and fascinating liar Louis Hennepin, A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America, Extending Above Four Thousand Miles Between New France & New Mexico; with a Description of the Great Lakes, Cataracts, Rivers, Plants and Animals (Printed for Henry Bonwicke, at the Red Lion in St. Paul’s Church-Yard: 1699). My La Salle biographies include Anka Muhlstein, La Salle: Explorer of the North American Frontier, trans. Willard Wood (Arcade, 1994); Donald S. Johnson, La Salle: A Perilous Odyssey from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico (Cooper Square, 2002); and the more antiquated La Salle: The Life and Times of an Explorer by John Upton Terrell (Weybright and Talley, 1968). All three authors are pro–La Salle, and none attempts to move beyond the Eurocentric point of view bequeathed by the explorers. Fergus Fleming, Off the Map: Tales of Endurance and Exploration (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), includes a chapter on La Salle.
Although I adore the supercilious style of Francis Parkman in The Conspiracy of Pontiac (Boston, 1870), I learned most about Pontiac’s Rebellion from William Nestor’s Haughty Conquerors: Amherst and the Great Indian Uprising of 1763 (Praeger, 2000). For William Johnson, I was delighted to find the intelligent and fascinating biography by Fintan O’Toole, White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), a great read for lovers of biography or history. I also utilized Milton Hamilton’s Sir William Johnson: Colonial American (Kennikat, 1976).
Toward the end of my researches, I was fortunate to meet scholar Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez, whose book Native American Life-History Narratives (University of New Mexico Press, 2007) brings out many of the problems inherent in reading native ethnographic texts, and whose perceptive comments on this chapter helped me to be more alert to those problems in my own interpretations. What I get wrong is due to my own intransigence and not to her advice.
TWO: THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD
The history of landscape alterations at the Falls has to be pieced together from newspapers, old guidebooks, local histories and visual records such as postcards and stereoscopic views, all of which I found at both the American Antiquarian Society and the Niagara Falls Public Library. An excellent overview of Niagara Falls prints is Christopher Lane’s Impressions of Niagara: The Charles Rand Penney Collection of Prints of Niagara Falls and the Niagara River (Philadelphia Print Shop, 1993). This print collection was recently acquired by the Castellani Art Museum. A comprehensive history of Canadian parks is George A. Seibel, Ontario’s Niagara Parks: A History (Niagara Falls, Ontario: Niagara Parks Commission, 1985), which I discovered at the Weir Collection in Queenston, Ontario, thanks to curator Gary Essar. If you love hydroinfrastructure as I do, you will enjoy Carol Sheriff’s rattlingly good read, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress (Hill & Wang, 1997). Also gripping for the waterworks fan is Peter Bernstein’s Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation (W. W. Norton, 2005). A good discussion of the Porters’ role in the Erie Canal debates is in Dan Murphy’s The Erie Canal: The Ditch That Opened a Nation (Western New York Wares, 2001).
For Porter history, I utilized Hauptman’s Conspiracy of Interests, as well as Merton Wilner, Niagara Frontier: A Narrative and Documentary History (S. J. Clarke, 1931); J. C. A. Stagg, “Between Black Rock and a Hard Place: Peter B. Porter’s Plan for an American Invasion of Canada in 1812,” Journal of the Early Republic 19:3 (Autumn 1999); John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1920); Charles Mulford Robinson, “The Life of Judge Augustus Porter,” Proceedings of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society 7 (1904); and Daniel C. Roland’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Peter B. Porter and Self-Interest in American Politics” (Claremont Graduate School, 1990). Best of all, the Peter and Augustus Porter Papers at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society provided deeds, legal documents and letters that make you feel you’re eavesdropping on the men themselves. I am grateful to librarian Patricia Vergil for helping me navigate that treasure trove.
The story of the pirate Michigan appears in Berton and all of the early tourist literature; I found it most interesting to go back to contemporary newspaper reports. Janet Larkin interprets the event in “Schooner Michigan: a Symbolic Voyage,” Western New York Heritage (Spring 1999).
The opening section quotes are from early guidebooks: “How awful is the scene!” is from C. D. Ferris, Pictorial Guide to the Falls of Niagara: A Manual for Visiters (Salisbury & Clapp, 1842): 128; “Where may the ambitious…this sacred shrine?” is from Burke’s Descriptive Guide; or, The Visitors’ Companion to Niagara Falls (Andrew Burke, 1850): 78. Anna Jameson’s quote is from Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (Wiley & Putnam, 1839): 262.
THREE: SKIPPER THE TWO-LEGGED DOG
The grim façade of the Archives of Ontario belies the historical joy to be found within: I spent many delightful hours there reading old letters, journals and bills. (And when I say many hours, I mean many: to the Canadians’ credit, their libraries stay open late.) All quotes from Sidney Barnett’s journal are from the Archives of Ontario, F 684, Sidney Barnett fonds, which include his sketches as well as many Barnett papers and letters. The fascinating Doctor Douglas can be heard from in Journals and Reminiscences of James Douglas, M.D., Edited by his Son (privately printed in New York, 1910). The history of the fake Poyais colony can be found in David Sinclair, The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Most Audacious Fraud in History (Da Capo, 2004). L. P. Gratacap’s screed “Natural History Museums” appeared in Science 8:184 (July 8, 1898).
British crank George Drought Warburton pronounces on Niagara in Hochelega; or, England in the New World (London, 1847): 129. William Dean Howells is quoted on the five-legged calf in Ronald L. Way, Ontario’s Niagara Parks: A History (Niagara Parks Commission, 1960). Snippets of the history of the Niagara Falls Museum appear in that institution’s publications, but its story is best pieced together from period newspapers. The ones I used most were the Welland Tribune, the Welland Telegraph, the Niagara Falls Review, the Niagara Courier, the Niagara-on-the-Lake Gleaner, and the Kingston Chronicle.
Museum history is discussed in Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge, 1995); Edward Alexander, Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums (American Association for State and Local History, 1979); Ken Arnold, Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums (Ashgate, 2006); and the essays in Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums (Oxford University Press, 1985); and Susan Crane, ed., Museums and Memory (Stanford University Press, 2000). Patrick Mauries unpacks the Wunderkammer in Cabinets of Curiosity (Thames & Hudson, 2002). And I was much influenced by Lawrence Weschler’s sparkling gem of a book, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (Vintage, 1996).
I want to thank Jacob Sherman for graciously sharing his family’s story, Mark DeMarco for giving me a splendid tour of his curiosity cabinet, S. J. Wolfe at the Antiquarian Society for getting me started on Niagara’s mummies, and Harry Mueller, former proprietor of the Houdini Museum, for talking with me about the history of Falls attractions and for feeding me a lovely dinner. And I am extremely grateful to the overgenerous Billy Jamieson for granting me interviews, sharing his papers, giving me access to his collection, making me Bloody Caesars and letting me sit in the electric chair.
FOUR: THE OTHER SIDE OF JORDAN
Blondin and other daredevils at the Falls tend to be ignored by serious historians and scholars, relegated to lighthearted tourist books such as Paul Gromosiak’s Daring Niagara (Western New York Wares, 1998), or salacious accounts of deaths and daring rescues, such as T. W. Kriner’s Journeys to the Brink of Doom (J & J, 1997) and In the Mad Water: Two Centuries of Adventure and Lunacy at Niagara Falls (J & J, 1999). I found all of these fascinating, as well as Dean Shapiro’s biography Blondin (Vanwall, 1989) and Shane Peacock’s The Great Farini (Viking, 1995). Blondin’s contemporary biographer was George Linnaeus Banks, who interviewed both Blondin and Colcord to write Blondin: His Life and Performances (Routledge, 1862), which helped me reimagine Colcord’s trip. Here too, contemporary newspaper accounts were essential, especially the Buffalo Republic, the Buffalo Morning Express, the Eastern Argus, the Essex Register, the Rochester Journal, the Farmer’s Cabinet, The New York Times, the Niagara Falls Gazette and the African-American newspapers the National Era and the Provincial Freeman. Lincoln’s rebuke to his critics was recalled by Frank Carpenter in Henry J. Raymond, The Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln (Derby & Miller, 1865): 752.
For Annie Edson Taylor, there is her autobiography, Over the Falls (privately printed, 1902) and a biography, Queen of the Mist: The Story of Annie Edson Taylor, by Charles Carlin Parish (Empire State Books, 1987).
The history of the Underground Railroad is beginning to be explored in more depth. A recent readable account is Fergus Bordewich’s Bound for Canaan (Amistad, 2005), following on Jane and William Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks’ Search for Freedom, 1830–1861 (University of Illinois Press, 1990). Early accounts include Benjamin Drew’s The Refugee; or, The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada (Boston, 1856) and William Still’s The Underground Railroad (1871; reprinted by Johnson Publishing, 1970). For Harriet Tubman’s story, I went back to her earliest biographer Sarah H. Bradford, who wrote Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (W. J. Moses, 1869), though I should note that in quoting, I dispensed with Bradford’s annoying “negro dialect.” The significance of shackles is discussed by Charmaine Nelson in “Hiram Powers’s America: Shackles, Slaves and the Racial Limits of Nineteenth-Century National Identity,” Canadian Review of American Studies 34:2 (2004). My understanding of blackface minstrelsy as a complex interplay between domination and liberation is shaped by Eric Lott’s brilliant Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford University Press, 1993). I want to thank the curators of the Castellani Art Museum, and especially Kate Koperski, for sharing their time and knowledge with me.
Solomon Moseby’s story has garnered a lot of interest. Anna Jameson’s account is in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. It is also recounted, along with many other stories of Canadian fugitives, in Robin Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (McGill-Queens University Press, 1997) and Byron Prince’s I Came as a Stranger: The Underground Railroad (Tundra, 2004). In addition to the Porter papers at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, I used David Murray, “Hands Across the Border: The Abortive Extradition of Solomon Moseby,” Canadian Review of American Studies 30:2 (2000), and Adrienne Shadd, “The Lord Seemed to Say ‘Go’: Women and the Underground Railroad Movement” in Peggy Bristow, ed., We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up: Essays in African Canadian Women’s History (University of Toronto Press, 1994).
“You can’t dig up a hole, but history is full of them.” I flagrantly stole that delectable line from my friend Mac Wellman, who gives it to Josephine Herbst in his brilliant play Two September. Thanks, Mac.
FIVE: FREE NIAGARA
Charles Mason Dow, an early commissioner, wrote a useful if boosterish history of the park’s early years, The State Reservation at Niagara: A History (J. B. Lyon, 1914). The Niagara Falls Gazette is essential in tracing changes made in the park. My understanding of landscape’s relationship to power was profoundly influenced by Raymond Williams’s classic study, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1973), from which I lifted the phrase “pleasing prospects.”
Frederick Law Olmsted has been written about fairly frequently of late. I used the biographies FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted by Laura Wood Roper (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) and Park Maker: A Life of Frederick Law Olmsted by Elizabeth Stevenson (Macmillan, 1977), as well as the beautiful Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape by Charles Beveridge and Paul Rocheleau (Rizzoli, 1995). George Scheper summarizes the traditional view of Olmsted in “The Reformist Vision of FLO and the Poetics of Park Design,” New England Quarterly 62:3 (September 1989), as does Witold Rybczynski in his speculative A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century (Scribner, 1999). Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosenzweig take issue with Olmsted’s elitism in The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Cornell University Press, 1992), as do Geoffrey Blodgett, “Frederick Law Olmsted: Landscape Architecture as Conservative Reform,” Journal of American History 62:4 (March 1976); and Ross Miller, “The Landscaper’s Utopia Versus the City: A Mismatch,” New England Quarterly 49:2 (June 1976); also useful were the essays in the exhibition catalog The Distinctive Charms of the Niagara Scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Niagara Reservation (Niagara University, 1985). Landscape architect Anne Whiston Spirn argues for a middle ground in “Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, William Cronon, ed. (W. W. Norton, 1995).
Olmsted’s first pronouncement on Niagara is the Special Report of the New York State Survey on the Preservation of the Scenery at Niagara Falls (Charles Van Benthuysen & Sons, 1880). His final report is the General Plan for the Improvement of the Niagara Reservation (Martin B. Brown, 1887). His essay “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns” appears in Civilizing American Cities, S. B. Sutton, ed. (MIT Press, 1971). Jonathan Baxter Harrison’s newspaper essays were collected in The Condition of Niagara Falls, and the Measures Needed to Preserve Them (J. Wilson & Son, 1882).
I used the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers at the Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division. Thanks are due Jeffrey M. Flannery for guiding me through the massive collection. I am grateful to Christine Beauregard at the New York State Library for helping me find Evershed’s map. Special thanks to Louise and Tom Yots for hospitality and conversation. And thanks also to Russell Flinchum, archivist at the Century Club, for digging up materials from their library and letting me use their billiards table as a desk.
SIX: KING OF POWER, QUEEN OF BEAUTY
Power development at Niagara is one of the best-documented parts of its history, having been immediately recounted in the popular and scientific press. Especially useful for the turbine buff is the special “Niagara Power” number of Cassier’s, published as The Harnessing of Niagara in 1895. The Edward Dean Adams two-volume history, Niagara Power (Niagara Falls Power Company, 1927) is also essential. William Irwin’s The New Niagara: Tourism, Technology and the Landscape of Niagara Falls, 1776–1917 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) tells the story of Niagara’s harnessing in its cultural context. David Nye’s sweeping Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (MIT Press, 1990) helped me understand the paradigm shift electrification sparked. Also useful was a Ph.D. dissertation by Gail Edith Evans, “Storm over Niagara: A Study of the Interplay of Cultural Values, Resource Politics and Environmental Policy in an International Setting, 1670s to 1950” (UC Santa Barbara, 1991).
The real estate brochure I quote from is Buffalo and her Wonderful Prospects: A Treatise on Niagara Falls Power as a City Builder, A. E. Richmond, ed. (Niagara Printing Co., 1895). The Buffalo, Niagara and Eastern Power Corporation’s pamphlet is called The Lengthening of Niagara Falls (Buffalo, 1927). H. G. Wells wrote about Niagara in Harper’s Weekly (July 21, 1906).
The Rivers and Harbors bills, treaties and various reports to Congress and the International Joint Commission on preservation of the Falls are all in the public record. The 1931 report I discuss is the Special International Niagara Board’s report Preservation and Improvement of the Scenic Beauty of the Niagara Falls and Rapids (71st Cong. 2nd sess., Sen. Doc. 128). Post-treaty alterations are laid out and discussed—along with excellent diagrams and photos of the working Niagara models—in the International Joint Commission’s 1953 Report on the Preservation and Enhancement of Niagara Falls. Post-treaty power redevelopment and waterfall remediation are outlined in Wallace McIntyre’s “Niagara Falls Power Redevelopment,” Economic Geography 28:3 (July 1952). The waterfall remediations made by the Army Corps of Engineers are described in part in Nuala Drescher’s Engineers for the Public Good: A History of the Buffalo District U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1982). For an opposing point of view, see Gene Marine, America the Raped: The Engineering Mentality and the Devastation of a Continent (Simon & Schuster, 1969).
For the history of Robert Moses and the Tuscaroras, in addition to talking to Neil Patterson, Jr., about the Tuscarora oral history project, I used the Robert Moses Papers in the Rare Book and Manuscripts Division at the New York Public Library. Edmund Wilson discusses the case with his usual insight in Apologies to the Iroquois, first published as a series of New Yorker essays in 1959 and later as a book (Syracuse University Press, 1992). And no one can discuss Robert Moses outside the shadow cast by Robert Caro’s monumental biography The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Knopf, 1974). Caro wrote without benefit of the papers now held by the NYPL, and the biography has its blind spots—most notably Moses’s work outside New York City. While I am skeptical about recent attempts to cast Moses in a rosy light, it may be time for a new biography that grapples with the many contradictions of this complex man—though Caro’s will always be a brilliant character study and a great read.
The pages dedicated to illumining Love Canal would fill the canal itself many times over. The Niagara Falls Public Library in New York has a section dedicated to clippings files, legal documents, information pamphlets, and government studies. In addition, my main resources were Lois Gibbs, Love Canal: My Story (State University of New York Press, 1982) and Love Canal: The Story Continues (New Society, 1998); and Thomas Fletcher, From Love Canal to Environmental Justice: The Politics of Hazardous Waste on the Canada-U.S. Border (Broadview Press, 2003). Fire chief Edwin Foster’s 1964 letter is quoted in Russell Mokhiber’s and Leonard Shen’s essay “Love Canal” in Who’s Poisoning America: Corporate Polluters and their Victims in the Chemical Age, eds. Ralph Nader, Ronald Brownstein and John Richard (Sierra Club, 1981): 273. The Environmental Protection Agency Site Description, Reviews and Records of Decision are available through the EPA’s CERCLIS database at http://cfpub.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/srchsites.cfm. Perhaps the most gripping document is the official New York State report written by Michael Zweig and Gordon Boyd, The Federal Connection: A History of U.S. Military Involvement in the Toxic Contamination of Love Canal and the Niagara Falls Region (Report to the New York State Assembly Speaker, 1981). I am grateful to Ralph Krieger for making me a copy of this report, and to Michael Zweig for talking to me by phone about it.
Many thanks to Paul Gromosiak for his help here and elsewhere. I owe a special debt to Norm Stessing for making sure I understood exactly how his power plant works, though I wish he had agreed to turn the Falls off for me, just for a minute.
SEVEN: SENTIMENT IN LIQUID FORM
There’s one scholarly study of honeymoons at Niagara, Karen Dubinsky’s fun book The Second Greatest Disappointment (Between the Lines, 1999). In the cataract of Marilyn exposés and hagiographies, Sarah Churchwell’s The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe is a beacon of intelligence (Henry Holt, 2004). I also used Ernest Cunningham, The Ultimate Marilyn (Renaissance Books, 1998). Photographer Jock Carroll’s Falling for Marilyn (Friedman/Fairfax, 1996) is an indispensable photographic essay about Marilyn’s trip to the Falls.
The text that launched the idea of femininity as a performance is Joan Riviere’s “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929); central to thinking today is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990).
For the history of honeymoons, I consulted Chrys Ingraham, White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture (Routledge, 1999); Kris Bulcroft, Linda Smeins and Richard Bulcroft, Romancing the Honeymoon: Consummating Marriage in Modern Society (SAGE Publications, 1999); Martha Saxton, “The Bliss Business: Institutionalizing the American Honeymoon,” American Heritage 29:4 (June-July 1978); and Elizabeth McKinsey, “The Honeymoon Trail to Niagara Falls,” Prospects 9 (1984). Rebecca Mead’s incisive One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding (Penguin, 2007) came out as I was editing the book; it deepened my feelings about the commodified nature of the American wedding and honeymoon.
Special thanks to Carol Castelli at the Red Hat Society for making my conference attendance possible, to Sue Ellen Cooper and Linda Murphy for generously granting interviews, and to Constable Allen A. Rodgers, who gave me new respect for the many talents of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. O Canada!
EIGHT: THE BOMB AND TOM BROKAW’S DESK
For the toxic histories of Niagara County sites, I used the Environmental Protection Agency’s very handy online CERCLIS database, which allows you to access site documents about any EPA-listed site. Although as a rule I distrust online research, this resource is fantastic and should be a regular part of your life.
For the history of the Manhattan Project, I used Jeff Hughes, The Manhattan Project: Big Science and the Atom Bomb (Columbia University Press, 2002); and Robert S. Norris, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project’s Indispensable Man (Steerforth Press, 2002). The history of private contractors in the Manhattan Project was detailed in Peter Eisler’s multipart report “Poisoned Workers, Poisoned Places” in USA Today, which began on June 24, 2001. James Maroncelli and Timothy Karpin’s CD-ROM book The Traveler’s Guide to Nuclear Weapons (Historical Odysseys, 2002) was a great resource, as were the authors, to whom I offer many thanks for answering endless queries about atomic history and the workings of nuclear bombs.
The history of the Rochester medical experiments was covered in the media and is surveyed in Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files (Delacorte, 1999). For the history and ongoing remediation of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works and the Niagara Falls Storage Site, I utilized the wall of documents deposited at the Lewiston Public Library by the Army Corps of Engineers. Linde’s letter explaining their decision to dump effluent in shallow wells appears as exhibit 3 in the appendix to The Federal Connection.
Most of all, I want to extend real gratitude to the people who so generously shared their stories, some of whom appear in the chapter and some of whom, for space reasons, do not: thanks to Ralph Krieger for spending an entire day showing me around, to Dan and Harry Wiest for finding time in their busy lives to tell me about themselves, to Reverend Charles Lamb and Lou Ricciuti for discussing environmental issues, to Professor Joseph Gardella at SUNY Buffalo for explaining chemistry to me—or at least trying to—and Professor Joseph Bieron at Canisius College for helping me understand the region’s industrial legacy. I am grateful to Amy Witryol and Vince Agnello, activists, and Bill Kowalewski, Judy Leithner, Joan Morrissey and Bruce Sanders of the Corps of Engineers for discussing the LOOW site with me.
NINE: BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS
Patrick McGreevy’s Imagining Niagara (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994) looks at themes of death and the future at Niagara. Echota is discussed in Leland M. Roth, “Three Industrial Towns by McKim, Mead & White,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 38:4 (December 1979), and in an article by John Bogart in Cassier’s “Niagara Power” issue. For discussion of the transformation of urban planning mid-century, I am indebted to the essays in Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, eds. Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson (W. W. Norton, 2007).
Canadian development of the Niagara Peninsula is surveyed in Niagara’s Changing Landscapes, ed. Hugh Gayler (Carleton University Press, 1994). The Niagara Falls (Ontario) Public Library has a copy of the Urban Strategies, Inc., final report, Niagara Falls Tourist Area Development Strategy. The visitor survey I quote from is the Niagara Falls Visitor Study Final Report by Research Resolutions (1998). Ernest Sternberg’s illuminating paper, “The Iconography of the Tourism Experience” appears in Annals of Tourism Research 24:4 (1997).
The Niagara Falls Public Library is the source for most of the New York side’s master plans; USA Niagara’s plan and updates on its progress can be found at their Web site: www.usaniagara.com.
David Lempert at the Bureau of Labor Statistics provided essential numbers. Chris Schoepflin managed to be both honest and diplomatic. The acerbic yet kind E. R. (Bob) Baxter III offered me a window to the Niagara I never had the chance to see, and kept me apprised of developments on the parkway issue. For the record, I have eaten donuts with him and he did not get crumbs in his beard.
EPILOGUE: THE VOICE OF THE LANDSCAPE
One of the most respected Niagara scholars is Elizabeth McKinsey, whose Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (Cambridge, 1985) traces the development of an American artistic sublime through representations of the Falls. It was useful to me here and elsewhere in the book when considering the waterfall’s history as iconic image. Other books I consulted on Niagara and its images are Anthony Bannon’s The Taking of Niagara: A History of the Falls in Photography (Media Studio, 1982); and Jeremy Ellwell Adamson, Niagara: Two Centuries of Changing Attitudes (Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985). Simon Schama’s quote about landscape comes from his magisterial study Landscape and Memory (Knopf, 1995): 6.
Archives, manuscripts, museums, books and articles in obscure scholarly journals are all essential to understanding a subject as big as Niagara, but they will only get you so far. I could not have written this book without the help and forbearance of countless people. Mark Crispin Miller started me along the road to a book. Richard Fox gave me excellent feedback on an early outline. My agent, Nat Sobel, believed in the book before it was a book. Hal Clifford, friend and editor extraordinaire, helped me figure out what I was saying and why. Heidi Julavits went at one chapter hammer and tongs. At Simon & Schuster, Sydny Miner tirelessly shepherded the manuscript through the publishing process and patiently put up with my angst.
Sarah Zimmerman provided research advice, long conversations about landscape, and moral support, usually straight up with an olive. Anne-Lise François taught me to think harder about nature. Robin Haueter, Lisa Lerner and James Wallenstein generously offered comments. Pawel Wojtasik was both accomplice and muse. Darcy Haylor and Miranda Strand provided first-rate research assistance along with a never-ending stream of salt and vinegar chips and Cadbury bars. And Robert Brown let himself be marched around the Niagara Gorge, lectured at the Power Vista, misted at the Whirlpool Rapids, splattered on the Maid of the Mist, and drenched at the Cave of the Winds. He also bought me a car. Thanks, Bob, and I’m sorry about the gash on the side. But that mural—you’ve really got to see it with me one day.