SO YOU’RE GOING TO Niagara Falls! Maybe you’ve never been before—you feel a little sheepish about that if you’re American or Canadian. Actually, you say, raising your eyebrows in mock disbelief, I’ve never been to Niagara! Then again, maybe you went when you were a child. At least you think so. You have an image of loud falling water in your head—did you visit on that childhood car trip, the one where you threw up at a rest area, and your brother slipped on a toad? Or does your mental image come from the panoramic picture on the wall of your favorite Chinese restaurant? And doesn’t that picture have blinking lights behind it, so the Falls look as though they’re in motion? Never mind, better late than never. The world is packed with natural wonders, but there’s only one Niagara Falls.
Follow the interstate signs, and you’ll skirt Buffalo, zip across Grand Island in the Niagara River (toll 75 cents) and glide up the Robert Moses Parkway past several Superfund sites and a row of chemical factories wafting an acrid, sulfurous smell over the upper river. Keep your windows closed. Or maybe you’ll come into town on Niagara Falls Boulevard, skirting a forest of transmission towers and a mountainous landfill. If you come from the north, you’ll pass by the Tuscarora Nation, advertised by billboards accusing New York State of breaking treaties, and a flashing sign announcing Smokin Joes Trading Post: Gas! Cigarettes! Indian Souvenirs! Tax-Free! Or you could take the Seaway Trail, which enters town at the edge of a huge sheetcake-shaped landfill surrounded by chain link and razor wire. That’s Hooker–102nd Street, the lesser-known end of Love Canal. To your right is a sign: Welcome to Niagara Falls.
However you enter town, head for the riverfront in the spirit of awed anticipation; you are about to experience the sublimity of nature. The blue signs with what looks like Malibu Barbie’s hair will point you the way. A high school kid in sunglasses and an orange vest will try to divert you into a private parking lot by flailing an orange flag at you. Ignore him, even if he blows a whistle. That’s the oldest trick in the book. What you are looking for is Niagara Falls State Park, the nation’s first, opened in 1885 for the purpose of making this sublime spectacle “free to all mankind forever.” You know you are there when you see a vast plain of pavement, two squat toll booths and a sign: Parking $10.
Once you find a parking spot, proceed through the Great Lakes Garden—flower beds laid out in a map—and cross the pedestrian bridge to Goat Island. Veer right at the portable snack and souvenir stand at the end of the bridge. You are now on Goat Island, a little slice of Eden sitting in the Niagara River on the very brink of the Falls. As you enter this pristine parkland, maintained in a state of unspoiled nature, watch out for cars. No doubt you are all eagerness for the vision of wonder that awaits you, and may fail to hear the People Mover roaring by on the recently widened road.
Take time to appreciate the flora and fauna of this magical place. When you see a giant parking lot and a huge bronze seated statue—that’s Nikola Tesla, who harnessed Niagara’s watts—you’re at the visitor center. Veer right to avoid the snack-bar lines, and you will see a large interpretive marker and some quarter-powered telescopes. Here at last the object of your anxious expectation is before you: Niagara Falls!
Slowly you turn. You are overlooking the southern end of the American Falls. Between you and the vast thundering water, a small railing-bound rectangle of land sits in the rapids like a scuttled barge, tourists crowding to its prow. That’s Luna Island, dividing the slender Bridal Veil Falls from the rest of the American Falls. Early guides tell us to note the three profiles that can be traced in Luna’s rocky outcropping. Don’t bother to look for those now: Luna’s face is flat, and flush with the brink. The Army Corps of Engineers blasted off its overhangs to make it safer for tourists below. Early prints show Luna covered with trees. There are nine there now; admire their artful arrangement on the island’s neatly mown lawn.
No doubt you will want to get closer to this natural wonder, so descend the cement staircase and cross the bridge onto the island. Luna once shook with the force of pounding water. You can’t feel this today, because hydro diversion has removed more than half the water, and the Army Corps engineers stabilized the island with drains, bolts, cables and dowels. It’s perfectly safe today, and doesn’t move at all.
Our next stop is the Cave of the Winds. But first, you must be outfitted. Stand in line to be issued your thin plastic poncho, stamped Cave of the Winds, and a pair of souvenir water shoes with nonslip soles. The shoes come stuffed with paper and cardboard, several inches of which covers the floor of the group dressing room. Wade through this and outside to the elevator. Before you go down, you will have the opportunity to have your picture taken in front of a large blue painting of the Falls you are about to see. Remember, there’s no obligation to buy.
At the bottom of the gorge, the elevator ejects you into a long tunnel, from which you emerge onto a sunlit deck. After some introductory words from your guide, proceed along wooden walkways that take you into the spray. Nothing can describe the dread roar with which this deluge pounds down from above. The cliffs hang over you like destiny, frowning with nature’s imposing brow and a huge sign that reads No Smoking. Of course, the overhangs that made the Cave of the Winds cavelike have been dynamited away for safety. The place maintains its early reputation as an excellent fishing spot though: in 1984, on this very walkway, Mr. C. J. Ann of Seoul was hit by a falling salmon (Chinook, 15 pounds!), which he enterprisingly grabbed. We hope he examined the mercury advisories for Lake Erie before eating his prize.
Upon your return to the top of the island, hasten to Terrapin Point. Here, at the American edge of the thundering Horseshoe Falls, you will be impressed most forcefully with the wild majesty of nature. Terrapin Point used to be Terrapin Rocks, a series of stone outcroppings in the rapids just above the brink, connected to Goat Island by wooden walkways. Today we have something far safer: a neatly mown triangle of artificial land extending into what used to be waterfall. The Corps of Engineers built this spot of land to improve your view. A ramp leads down to the railinged sidewalk. At the flank of the waterfall, you can observe the straight-edged stone wall built to make the Horseshoe Falls look nice at their American edge.
Stand still on this spot that used to be waterfall and you will experience the sublime sensation of human smallness. “And what are you?” asks an 1842 guidebook: “an atom in the midst of immensity; a breath of time on the brow of Eternity. How awful is the scene!” The tourists agree with the awful part. When the wind blows mist in their direction, they run screaming up the gently sloped lawn.
You could linger here for hours, but onward you must go, to the Three Sisters, once called the Moss Islands, for their green-blanketed misty glades. Water diversions for power have eliminated this inconvenience. Then onward again, to the upper end of Goat Island, now eight acres larger through the addition of fill, again to disguise the effects of power plant water diversions. What the Indians called the “parting of the waters,” a shallow sandbar that allowed for canoe navigation onto the island, is no more. No need to mourn its passing; a nicely landscaped parking lot now occupies the spot, servicing more modern modes of transport.
Back to the mainland! At Prospect Point, you will enjoy the most panoramic view from the American side: the sweep of the American Falls at your feet and in the distance, the curve of the Horseshoe. How much better the vista since the 1961 opening of a 280-foot tower, with observation deck and four high-speed elevators inside to whisk you to the Maid of the Mist landing. This structure projects into the river gorge like a stuck-out tongue, but the park directors are sensitive to its impact. They recently clad it in green mirrors, so it would blend in better, and lowered it by 55 feet to reduce its imposition on the view.
And now we leave the American side, and visit friendly Canada. Directly across the Rainbow Bridge is the famous view of the American Falls from what used to be Clifton House, now the Sheraton. This scene, which one venerable author calls “lovely beyond all conception,” is now nicely framed by snack-serving pushcarts. The Canadians have also increased its loveliness through the addition of heavy landscaping; they plant 200,000 flowers a year in Queen Victoria Park.
A pleasant ten-minute stroll away, and you are at the famous Table Rock. Of course, Table Rock is no more—the last vestiges of this rocky outcropping were blasted away in 1934, but the Table Rock Restaurant offers a lovely view of the Horseshoe, and Yorkshire puddings too. Hail Britannia! Afterward, you must take part in the longstanding tradition of going down into the gorge from Table Rock House and passing behind the waterfall. “Where may the ambitious, the proud, and the arrogant,” asks an 1851 guide, “so perfectly judge of their own excessive littleness, as in the giant presence of this sacred shrine?” You may experience this divine humility too, especially if, like me, you can’t get the audio headset they give you to work in the echoing tunnel.
How did this happen? How did a landscape heralded as an example of the awesome power of nature come to be so altered and controlled by humans? If you visit the Falls, or read one of the popular histories of Niagara, here’s the explanation you’ll get: Before the Europeans came, Native Americans revered the waterfall as a sacred place. But the inevitable advance of the white man meant that the land around the Falls passed into the hands of the nature-loving, respectful Porter family. These founding settlers left the Falls pristine, and early tourists came to experience Nature in her undiminished beauty. But the family couldn’t fight the forces of trade. After the Civil War, commerce began to impinge on the waterfall. Small-time con men built a honky-tonk carnival of exploitation at the brink of the waterfall, but luckily, a group of high-minded public men formed a movement called Free Niagara to save it. They established the Niagara Reservation, the nation’s first state park, and returned the natural landscape to its former glory. The Falls were saved for posterity.
This story is no more authentic than the rolling lawns of Terrapin Point. The urge to change Niagara Falls—to reshape the landscape to make it safer, prettier, more fun and easier to access—began with the first inklings of tourism. In fact, even as Niagara was being touted around the world as the symbol of American nature, it was being transformed by preservationists and artists no less than industrialists and entrepreneurs into something dollar-able. The real history of Niagara is a history of commerce.
The Europeans who colonized North America were on a sacred mission. They were here to subdue the land. The so-called New World was impressive in its catalog of ready resources—trees, furs, fish, salt, birds, and water just for starters—but its wildness was not admired. William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth Colony, famously described his new home as “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” Taming this savage land was not simply necessary to survival; it was God’s plan. Clearing woods, planting fields, eliminating predators, harnessing rivers, dredging harbors and fencing off land were moral imperatives, equivalent to conquering evil. “What is not useful, is vicious,” declared Puritan minister Cotton Mather, encouraging seventeenth-century settlers to continue the process of subjugating the vast continent.
In this worldview, a giant waterfall, its motive power going to waste, was not inspiring but awful, as made clear in Father Hennepin’s description of the Falls, like Bradford’s wilderness, as “hideous.” Other early visitors agreed. The Baron de Lahontan, Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, called it “the most dreadful Heap in the world.” Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, writing home in 1744, declared that “on whatever side you turn your eyes, you discover nothing which does not inspire a secret horror.”
Horrible, and deadly too. Hennepin points out that the raging river above the cataract “violently hurries down the Wild Beasts while endeavouring to pass it.” He’s not the only one to notice this. Early accounts all tell tales of waterfowl swept over the brink, swans dazzled to death by the spray, even deer and bears hurled down to violent ends, as if the waterfall itself were a vicious predator. The downriver Indians are often reported to reap the benefit of this brutal harvest, eating the dead animals that drift downstream—according to the Baron de Lahontan, “they take ’em out of the river with their canows.” Even the stolidly factual Swedish botanist Peter Kalm, in his “correction” to the exaggerated reports preceding him, tells us that the entire French garrison below the Falls lived on the river’s harvest of waterfowl in autumn, as well as “deer, bears, and other animals which have tried to cross the water above the fall.”
What would cause this awful death machine to become something every American dreamed of seeing? The typical answer to that question is that it was Romantic notions of the sublime: the idea that the things most worthy of admiration were not merely beautiful, but a little bit frightening too. Joseph Addison, writing in The Spectator, famously associated sublimity with the unfathomable: our imagination, he explained, loved “to grasp at any thing that is too big for its capacity.” Too large and powerful to be tamed, too stupendous even to be perceived, sublime objects made us aware of our own puny insignificance. They put us in the right frame of mind to contemplate the Creator. In this way, they weren’t just nice to look at, but ennobling to contemplate. Sublimity was a religious experience. It was beauty plus moral, prettiness with a point.
The idea of the sublime had been kicking around since ancient Rome, but essayists like Joseph Addison and Edmund Burke revived it in the eighteenth century. Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Byron gave poetic voice to sublime landscapes in the early 1800s, and for nearly a century afterward, the English-speaking world was crazy for sublime sights. Niagara—huge, awe-inspiring, unfathomable—fit the bill. By the mid-1800s, it was commonplace to say, as Charles Dickens did in 1843, that the waterfall was a “continual illustration of God’s mighty power.”
But even as a desire for sublime scenery would create the desire to see Niagara, actually seeing the place required the opposite of sublimity. In order for Niagara to be admired for its wildness, it would have to be partly tamed. Niagara’s rise as a tourist site would hinge on “progress”: transportation improvements such as roads, canals and railroads, as well as treaties with the Six Nations that would open western New York to land speculation and settlement. But it would also require an entrepreneurial spirit to transform the raw nature of Niagara into an experience that could be had, or rather, bought.
As you come off the pedestrian bridge onto Goat Island, the chunk of land between the American Falls and the Canadian Horseshoe Falls, three faces frown out at you from an interpretive marker. Augustus Porter, stiff-collared and white-haired, broods beneath a high forehead like the stout, gloomy judge he is; his younger brother Peter, the hothead, has the same pointed nose beneath a tousle of black hair. Below Peter, Frederick Law Olmsted, a glowering, bewhiskered Victorian, leans moodily into his walking stick amid a grove of leaves and flowers. In Niagara County, you can’t escape any of these guys. They are, according to history books, monuments, visitor centers and souvenir guides, the saviors of Niagara Falls.
The Porters come first; they settled the town. After buying Goat Island, they kept it in the family for seventy years, until the state bought it back and turned it into parkland, which means they are universally held up as Niagara’s first champions. Thomas Holder’s Guide to Niagara Falls, 1882, compliments the Porter family for having “refrained from making their splendid property a mere mercenary scheme.” As the interpretive marker on Goat Island declares, the Porters “respected the island’s natural beauty and preserved it as a scenic spot.” Thanks to these prescient conservationists, Holder declared, Goat Island was “found to-day covered with virgin forest and almost in a state of nature.”
This is the story told by every guidebook after 1880: the Porters preserved Goat Island as virgin forest. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Porters set out to subdue Niagara with a zeal Cotton Mather would have loved. They made extensive alterations to Goat Island, catering to both tourists and industry. Far from maintaining the Falls in a “state of nature,” they constantly attempted to alter and monetize their properties, and when they failed, they tried to sell. History has remade them as idealistic lovers of Niagara’s natural wonder, when in fact they were wily entrepreneurs who came to the region with one thing in mind: money. The Porter brothers launched the tradition of altering Niagara in order to sell an experience of nature.
Augustus Porter first laid eyes on Niagara Falls in 1795; he was traveling with a group of surveyors to Ohio’s Case Western Reserve. Once he’d seen the Falls, though, he quickly lost interest in Ohio and focused his attention on western New York. He bought thousands of acres in the state, but his speculative interest was centered on Niagara. What struck him most was its water-power potential. In 1805, he bought the Mile Strip ceded by the Senecas and built a sawmill on the Niagara River. The following year, he moved his family from the town of Canandaigua to the Falls and got down to business, soon adding a gristmill, a ropewalk and a tannery. Having founded the town, he went on to be its leading citizen, its only judge and, for many years, postmaster too. His brother Peter soon joined him and launched his own little fiefdom at Black Rock, a few miles upstream.
In 1811, the Porter brothers tried to get their hands on Goat Island, the wooded hunk of land dividing the Canadian Horseshoe Falls from the American Falls. Augustus wrote to the state legislature declaring that there were too many wolves and bears around Niagara Falls for him to raise sheep. Goat Island, he said, would offer a safe haven for his grazing flock. The state surveyor general reported back that the island might serve well for sheep, providing “that the Indian title to it be first extinguished.” (The Senecas had renounced the earlier land grant to William Johnson.)
Like most land speculators of the time, the Porters had little concern for Indian title. Neither did the State of New York: ultimately they decided not to sell Goat Island to the Porters on the grounds that the state might want it for a prison or an arsenal.
Temporarily foiled in their scheme to get the choicest land for developing Niagara’s water power, Peter and Augustus focused on their portage business. Augustus obtained the lease on what was formerly the Indians’ Niagara portage and built a warehouse at Fort Schlosser, less than two miles upstream of the Falls. Peter built a warehouse at Black Rock. The brothers had a large salt depot and a lively transportation business; as settlement moved westward, the Great Lakes were becoming more and more vital to commerce in the young nation. Controlling the Niagara Falls portage gave them an advantage in the burgeoning Great Lakes transport trade; eventually they would own more than half the ships on Lake Erie. The Porters wanted to make Black Rock the hub between points east and the growing towns on the upper Great Lakes—they planned to be the new keepers of the Western Door.
Recalling Peter B. Porter in his autobiography, Martin Van Buren declared that “the acquisition of wealth was his master passion, to which every other was made subsidiary.” Looking at the man’s political career, it’s not hard to believe. Getting himself elected to Congress in 1809, Peter Porter went to work at once forwarding the family’s entrepreneurial goals: in 1810 he was appointed to the committee to study the feasibility of an inland canal to the Great Lakes. He immediately began proposing strategies that would bolster his Falls portage monopoly. Determined to advance the fortunes of Black Rock at the expense of upstart Buffalo, he got the U.S. Customs House moved there in 1811. But then the looming war with Great Britain offered even better opportunities for profit.
Fifty percent of the casualties in the War of 1812 happened on the Niagara frontier. The Americans expected no difficulty in occupying Canada; Thomas Jefferson claimed it would be “a mere matter of marching.” Canada was expected to join the United States soon anyway; invading them would simply speed up the inevitable. In fact, the opposite happened: defending their nation gave Canadians a new sense of national pride. French Canadians and British settlers forgot their differences in joining to fend off the invading Yanks. If it weren’t for the War of 1812, in other words, the United States today might dominate world hockey, and senior citizens in Ottawa would send away to Mexico for cheap prescription drugs.
An early hawk, Peter Porter was bullish on a Canadian invasion. He wrote a memo in early 1812 arguing that a swift conquest of Upper Canada should start with the taking of forts on the Detroit and Niagara rivers by local militias—never mind that constitutionally, they could not be made to fight abroad. He helped draft the official 1812 declaration of war, then left Washington to become quartermaster general of New York. While using his shipping business connections to source supplies for the American army, he enrolled as a militia officer and more or less told the British to “bring it on,” bragging he would lay out a “war feast” and invite them once the table was set. The Brits responded by lobbing a cannonball into his Black Rock house while he and some guests were eating dinner; it blasted through the chimney and lodged in the ornamental work over the dining room. They went on to burn down the entire Niagara frontier, nearly capturing Peter in his pajamas. His housekeeper tipped him off that the enemy was at the door, and he skedaddled, half-dressed, leaving his breakfast on the table. The Brits finished eating his eggs—not quite the invitation he had issued.
Porter was raked over the coals by the early American press for the “war feast” comment, with some papers pointing out that as quartermaster, he was feasting on the war himself: the government had purchased all the Porters’ ships for the war effort, and Peter was accused of selling supplies to the army at a profit. Worse yet, he had helped mastermind the disastrous first attempt to invade Canada a month earlier. The Americans, with Porter leading a local militia brigade, had mounted a sneak attack on Queenston Heights, the Canadian vantage point at the top of the Niagara Escarpment seven miles below the Falls. It had started out well, with the Americans rowing across in the dark and capturing a small battery below Queenston Heights. British General Isaac Brock, roused from his bed at Fort George, got on his horse Alfred and galloped the seven miles from Niagara-on-the-Lake. Without backup, he charged into battle and was almost immediately felled by a musket ball to the chest. His aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel James Macdonell, took Brock’s horse Alfred and waded into the fray, quickly getting both himself and poor Alfred killed.
But things quickly went sour for the Americans. Rallied, the Canadian troops began raining a hail of grapeshot and musket balls on the landing Americans, and their Mohawk allies started in with scary war whoops. At this point, American militia soldiers still waiting to cross the river had an attack of clarity about the Constitution and refused to cross the river, pointing out that Canada was foreign soil. With no more backup, the American troops in Canada beat a hasty retreat, and many were taken prisoner. After this rousing defeat, Peter Porter had to fight a duel defending the honor of his reluctant troops when an army captain named Alexander Smyth impugned their courage. The duelists missed each other—perhaps another reason for the Americans’ ill luck at battle—and then Smyth’s father stepped in and stopped any further fisticuffs.
Today, Queenston Heights is a war memorial, and General Brock stands firmly on a 185-foot column, caped, booted and sporting a schooner-shaped helmet. He has one arm outstretched toward the vineyards of the Canadian fruit belt, as if asking for a glass of their famed ice wine. At the base of the column, in a huge square plinth bristling with shields, weapons and lions rampant, Brock and Macdonell are buried. On a green below the escarpment, there are two additional monuments, one for the Canadians’ Indian allies and another for Alfred, the horse.
From its 1826 construction, Brock’s Monument was a hit with tourists. The War of 1812 changed the landscape of the Niagara frontier, giving it historic and patriotic significance, and bolstering Niagara’s position as national icon for both countries. Two other Canadian battlefields, Lundy’s Lane in Niagara Falls and Chippawa a few miles upstream, also became popular tourist sites. Peter Porter had the good fortune to be involved in both of those battles, which were—if not outright victories—face-saving fights for the Americans. They also salvaged Porter’s reputation for valor; he and his Iroquois and New York volunteers fought bravely.
Throughout all of it, Porter never seems to have lost his penchant for eating well: the Niagara Historical Society Museum in Niagara-on-the-Lake today proudly displays an elaborate silver serving basket said to have been taken from General Porter’s tent during the Battle of Queenston Heights.
One afternoon at the Niagara Falls Public Library, I decide to ask Maureen Fennie about the Porters. Anyone who does historical research on Niagara Falls knows Maureen. Skirted, bespectacled, and usually sporting a strikingly arty piece of jewelry, she looks like she arrived from central casting after someone ordered up a librarian. That is, until she opens her mouth. A sharp-eyed observer of local affairs, Maureen has a tart way with words belied by her somewhat matronly laugh. She’s responsible for having recovered the Civil War sword of Colonel Peter Augustus Porter, son of Peter B. Porter. The sword was one of many artifacts owned by the Niagara Falls Historical Society. In a saga many see as depressingly typical of the town’s attitude toward its history, the sword ended up in private hands after the bankrupt Historical Society divvied up its items for safekeeping. Someone’s idea of safekeeping was to sell the sword, and it passed to an Ohio auctioneer. The auctioneer called the Niagara Falls Public Library to ask about the sword’s background, at which point Maureen demanded it back. The auctioneer resisted handing over his prize, and eventually, the state attorney general had to be brought in. He pronounced the sword public property, and with much grumbling it was returned to the people of Niagara Falls.
Today the sword sits proudly in a glass case on the second floor of the library. Maureen and the other librarians continue to keep an eye out for missing artifacts. They also actively collect documents of local history; not just books and newspaper articles, but papers and ephemera others consider worthless. When Carborundum, one of Niagara’s most longstanding corporations, closed their regional factory, the librarians went directly to the plant and scooped up all the corporate documents that were sitting around in garbage bins waiting to be shredded. I love this vision: a van pulling up, blue light flashing, three or four librarians in sensible shoes jumping out and racing into the lobby and shouting “Hold it right there, sir! Hands off that company newsletter!” Okay, so maybe it didn’t really happen that way (I could be going too far with the blue light), but it’s a great thing to imagine, and it makes my heart swell with bottomless admiration for librarians and the noble work they do.
I express this admiration by spending a lot of time at the library bugging the librarians. A seventies-style cement cathedral on a run-down stretch of Main Street, the library is surprisingly nice inside, with a bright reading room and a sprawling feel. Local History, on the third floor, has long tables strewn with treats for the Niagaraphile: maps, old guidebooks, obscure histories. There’s a newspaper index, a picture file, closets full of goodies like postcards and glass lantern slides, and shelf after shelf of scrapbooks in which the librarians still paste articles under headings like “Industries,” “Daredevils,” “Hydropower” and “Snakes.” And there’s Maureen, who knows about arcane documents or Ph.D. dissertations on Niagara industries, and who, even in the midst of the apparently endless task of sorting and cataloging the library’s collection, is always willing to stop and chat about things Niagara.
So when I’m reading old journal articles about the Porters and she walks by my table, I call her over.
“Maureen, what do you think of the Porters?” I ask her. “Augustus and Peter B.?”
“Well, Peter B. was a big guy,” she says right away. “An interesting guy, but I don’t really know much about him. Or Augustus really.” She pauses, and I wait silently. This is the critical moment. She has some folders in her hand, but after a minute she sits down at the table next to me and I know I’ve succeeded in distracting her.
“Somebody should write a book,” she says. “They weren’t exactly philanthropists—let’s put it that way.”
When she sees me taking notes, she snaps her mouth shut. I ask her to say more, for the record, but she won’t. She doesn’t want to badmouth the local eminence.
Down at least one piece of tableware, Peter Porter returned to the rubble of his home county after the War of 1812. The war had changed his profile from grasping land speculator to respected patriot, a reputation he has enjoyed ever since. But his actions after the war were even more blatantly self-interested than before. Back at the Niagara frontier, he and Augustus—no doubt eager to get back to entertaining—began to rebuild. Peter entered state politics, where he could forward their causes more effectively. In 1815, he acted as state commissioner for a New York State treaty extinguishing Seneca title to the islands in the Niagara River—a nice way of repaying the Iroquois volunteers who had helped him gain military glory. A few weeks later, he and Augustus tricked the state into handing the islands over to them. They found a man with a “float”: an IOU from the state promising him 200 acres of his choice. The sneaky Porters bought the float and used it to demand Goat Island and the other small islands around it.
In 1816, Peter got himself appointed to the Joint Mixed Boundary Commission to resolve lingering disputes over the U.S.—Canadian border. One of the issues to be resolved was whether the islands in the Niagara River belonged to the United States or Canada. Some members of Congress pointed out that since Peter owned many of those very islands, his appointment to this commission created a teeny-tiny conflict of interest. They were rebuffed. In the subsequent unsurprising report of June, 1822, the commissioners declared that all the Niagara River islands except for Navy Island—which hugs the Canadian shore and was not owned by the Porters—should be considered U.S. territory.
After an unsuccessful run for governor in 1817, Peter married into a fancy Kentucky family—his father-in-law, John Breckenridge, was President Jefferson’s attorney-general—and turned his attention to business. With Black Rock not quite the thriving metropolis they imagined, Peter and Augustus focused on Niagara Falls, which they named Manchester, in hopes of making it a great manufacturing center like its English namesake. Things got off to a promising start: factory-owners saw the water-power potential in the thundering falls, and Manchester quickly added to its industries a woolen factory, a forge-rolling mill and nail factory, and a paper mill.
At the same time, the Porters didn’t ignore the area’s potential for tourism. American hotelier Parkhurst Whitney built a staircase down to the river from his hotel in 1817. Loyalist and ex-con William Forsyth, who fled to Canada after the Revolution and opened the Niagara Hotel near Table Rock, built another. Forsyth and Whitney connected their stairs with a ferry service, launching the tradition that would become the Maid of the Mist. Whitney also built a log bridge to Goat Island and when, in early 1818, it was destroyed by ice, the Porters got into the tourism game by rebuilding it, and instituting a 25-cent toll for passage. In 1821, Augustus constructed a gristmill and private bathing facilities on the little island between the mainland and Goat Island. He also decided to put a hotel on Goat Island and wrote to Peter asking him to draw up the plans.
The hotel scheme languished. At this point, the Porters were still mainly interested in the area’s industrial potential. There were visitors coming to see the Falls, but they were a trickle, not a steady stream. The Niagara frontier was still just that, the frontier. It was dangerous, distant and difficult to reach. In a few short years, all that would change.
If you go to Niagara Falls from New York today, you pretty much follow the same route early travelers took. You roar north on the New York State Thruway along the mighty Hudson River, up which early travelers sailed by steamship. At Albany, you hang a left and head straight west to Buffalo. The Thruway follows the old Iroquois trail up the center of the Mohawk Valley, a broad, statewide plain dotted, now as in the 1800s, with riverfront towns and intermittently hardscrabble farms. Place names are the most persistent sign of the region’s former citizens: Oneida County, Cayuga Lake, Seneca Falls, and my favorite, the Iroquois Travel Plaza. The Mohawk River occasionally slithers up to the Thruway, and at one point a set of stone locks stands high and dry next to the road, reminding the modern-day traveler, zooming along at 83 miles an hour (as officially clocked by the New York State Police to her great chagrin) that this journey, round-trip, once took fifteen days on the Erie Canal.
The Erie Canal opened in 1825. The celebrations marking the end of the eight-year project were grandiose. A cannon was fired in Buffalo, and then every 10 or 15 miles along the canal’s 363-mile route to Albany and down the Hudson, finally reaching the Battery in New York City an hour and twenty minutes later. The cannon signal then returned by the same route. After that, a flotilla of four boats—the Seneca Chief, the Noah’s Ark, the Niagara of Black Rock and the Young Lion of the West—sailed from Buffalo to New York carrying a bevy of dignitaries and a representative sample of upstate natural resources: birds, fish, apples, flour, butter, foxes, raccoons, a bear cub, two eagles, two fawns and two Seneca boys, “all of them,” crowed the newspaper account, “products of the west.” Upon arrival in New York, Governor DeWitt Clinton, with great pomp, poured a keg of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic Ocean to signify the canal’s wedding of ocean and upper Great Lakes. Speeches were made and toasts drunk. Unfortunately, whatever ceremonial use was planned for the Seneca boys was scotched: the Noah’s Ark, weighed down with all that flora and fauna, had bottomed out in the 5-foot-deep canal.
The Porters had opposed the Erie Canal. If barges could travel from the Atlantic to Lake Erie, their portage monopoly would be useless. Peter even drew up an alternate plan for a ship canal that would connect Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, allowing sailing ships to circumvent the Falls and reach the upper Great Lakes. Incidentally, it would also have made Black Rock even more decisively the Western Door. When Congress didn’t go for the ship canal, he lobbied hard to get the western terminus of the Erie Canal located at Black Rock, arguing that the Buffalo harbor was too shallow. Incensed, a group of Buffalo advocates paid to refit the Buffalo harbor at the last minute, and the canal was terminated there. The Porters were still steaming about all of this when the canal opened—so much so that when Peter B. was invited along on the celebratory flotilla, he refused to ride on the Seneca Chief with Governor Clinton, father of the canal. He and some Black Rock buddies commissioned the pointedly named Niagara of Black Rock instead, aboard which they undoubtedly made some toasts of their own.
However, even if it eliminated their portage business, the Erie Canal excited the Porters’ entrepreneurial instincts. It immediately created new possibilities for commerce—western New Yorkers could sell their farm products to the much bigger markets downstate, and could buy goods that hadn’t previously been available to them. And it inflated upstate land values. Royal Navy officer and travel writer Captain Basil Hall reports in his Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828, that “property of every kind has risen in value, as might have been expected, in all those parts of the country through which the canal passes.”
All that sounded good to the Porters. So, right on the heels of the canal’s opening, they attempted once more to sell off Niagara Falls. They issued an “invitation to Eastern Capitalists” to come and develop the region’s water power. “Practically speaking,” they declared in the newspaper ad, “the extent to which water-power may be here applied is without limit.” They pointed out the town’s proximity to the Erie Canal terminus and to Lake Erie, and noted that the area’s extensive forests would provide “a cheap and abundant supply of fuel for manufacturing purposes.” They also envisioned the complete development of Goat Island. The upper half they saw “covered with machinery, propelled by water-power,” and the lower half “converted into delightful seats for the residence of private gentlemen, or appropriated to hotels and pleasure grounds.” They then offered to sell all their land and water rights at Niagara.
It seemed logical to the Porters that the opening of the Erie Canal would inspire further efforts to remake nature to better serve human ends. The canal was heralded by the citizens of New York not only as a new means of transport, but as a triumph of human design over nature’s. With its locks and aqueducts it made ships float up mountains and rivers flow above roads. As a traveler wrote upon seeing the impressive “deep cut” at Lockport, where the canal edged through an artificial gorge and ascended an imposing 60-foot rock formation on two flights of five locks, “Here the great Erie Canal has defied nature and used it like a toy.” Citizens of New York City could now feast on upstate apples, and western New Yorkers could indulge in Atlantic oysters. If a simple ditch so radically remade the world, what might be possible at Niagara, where, as the Porters assured investors, “a thousand mills can be erected and supplied with a never failing water power at a small expense”?
When no buyers came forward, the Porters continued their own industrial development, erecting more factories, building a road on Goat Island and even tapping the sugar maples. But little by little, their interest was shifting to tourism, as the Erie Canal’s effect became clear. Before the canal, passengers en route to Niagara had to suffer fifteen days of jolting and bouncing along bad roads from Albany to Buffalo, often climbing out to help lever their stagecoach out of the mud when it got stuck. Once the canal was finished, packet boats departed on frequent schedules, and the journey took five to seven days at the heady pace of 4 miles an hour. If they were lucky, they’d get a captain willing to risk the $10 fine and kick it up to 5 miles an hour; even then, speeding was rampant. Of course, the era’s travelers loved complaining about the packet boats as much as today’s tourists love maligning air travel. The hot sun broiled them, the fellow passengers annoyed them, the food was dubious and there were frequent low bridges where you literally had to “hit the deck” to avoid being smashed on the overpass like a bug on a Hummer’s windshield. But the trip time had been halved, and the packet boats were a great novelty. Ironically, the ditch that conquered nature made visiting nature easier than ever.
Within a couple of decades, millions of passengers had traveled on what was affectionately called “Clinton’s ditch.” The final destination for most of these early tourists was Niagara Falls, the climactic stop on the “Northern Tour,” America’s answer to the European “Grand Tour.” The precanal trickle of tourism at the Falls was becoming a full-fledged flood. The Erie Canal brought a market economy to the farmlands of western New York, and it brought a new market to Niagara, ready to consume.
When he visited in 1827, Captain Basil Hall took a stroll around Goat Island with a man he describes as “the proprietor”—presumably Augustus Porter. Hall reported that Goat Island’s owner “seemed unaffectedly desirous of rendering it an agreeable place of resort to strangers.” Porter told Hall about the many improvements he had been advised to make: trimming the landscape, clearing the woods, and putting a tavern at the brink of the Horseshoe Falls. Captain Hall says he “expressed my indignation at such a barbarous set of proposals, and tried hard to explain how repugnant they were to all our notions of taste in Europe. His ideas, I was glad to see, appeared to coincide with mine; so that this conversation may have contributed, in some degree, to the salvation of the most interesting spot in all America.”
Porter then asked Hall what alterations might be acceptable to these canons of taste, and Hall suggested adding a gravel walk, “broad enough for three persons to walk abreast,” cutting paths through the woods to the best viewpoints, and installing “half a dozen commodious seats” for visitors to rest on. As for the unspeakable suggestion of a tavern at the Horseshoe, Hall was relieved to find that Porter’s “own good taste revolted at such a combination of the sublime and the ridiculous.” However, he noted pessimistically, such a descent in aesthetics “which we know from high authority and example costs but one step, will be made in the course of time.”
Hall was right. The Porters would begin with roads, walking paths and bridges, and would move on to refreshment stands and pleasure gardens. As their vision of Goat Island half-covered with private homes and pleasure grounds shows, the Porters’ ideal of tourism development was far from being based on the sanctity of the landscape. They weren’t trying to maintain Goat Island in some sort of Edenic state, but to make it accessible and attractive enough to lure toll-paying tourists to town.
In 1827, as they were trying to lure those “eastern capitalists” to the Falls, the Porters took part in a scheme that would get more tourists to Niagara than had ever come at once before. They helped mount the first spectacle to be staged at Niagara: the wreck of the schooner Michigan. The odd undertones of this event demonstrate that the last thing on the Porters’ minds was preserving nature.
The demise of the Michigan appears in every nineteenth-century guidebook; today, it’s almost always left out. When it’s mentioned, it’s usually cast as the opening salvo in spectacle’s attack on the sublime at Niagara—the moment crass commercialism began replacing natural wonder. The show was masterminded by Canadian hotelier William Forsyth, who had replaced his Niagara Hotel with the new, deluxe Pavilion Hotel in 1822. He got his two main rivals in the hotel business, John Brown, owner of the nearby Ontario House, and Parkhurst Whitney, proprietor of the American side’s Eagle Tavern, to collaborate on pulling it off. This binational troika of entrepreneurs came up with a plan to do what Niagara tourism promoters have never ceased trying to do: extend the tourist season beyond the summer months. They scheduled their big show for September 8, 1827.
Posters advertising the event were very specific. The schooner Michigan, once a Lake Erie freighter partially owned by Peter Porter, would be decked out as a “Pirate” and loaded up with a cargo of “animals of the most ferocious kind, such as Panthers, Wild Cats, Bears and Wolves.” The caged animals would be displayed on board the ship at Black Rock, where visitors would have the opportunity to come aboard and check them out, for a “trifling expense.” On the morning of the eighth, the Michigan would be towed by steamship to the foot of Navy Island, a little more than four miles above the Falls. For the hefty sum of 50 cents, visitors could ride with the doomed critters. At Navy Island, the visitors would leave, and Peter Porter’s business associate Captain James Rough, “the oldest navigator of the Upper Lakes,” would tow the ship into the strong currents above the Falls and cut her loose, leaving her creaturely crew to its fate.
The organizers sent a card to the press asserting their belief that many of the animals would survive the descent: “great interest will be added to the closing scene,” they declared, “in seeing them successively rise among the billows in the basin below…and shape their course to the shore.” The New York Sun enthused that the intended spectacle “can hardly be equaled by the combinations of nature and art, in any other part of the world.” They predicted that “the greatest part, and probably the whole” of the animals would survive the plunge without injury and “be seen, after a proper time, emerging from the abyss, and wending their way to the shores from which they were respectively taken”—nature returning to its domain.
Other commentators disagreed. The Eastern Argus declared that “it may be sport to the spectators, but unjustifiable cruelty to the animals,” and then speculated on nature’s potential revenge: “Why should the elements hush their commotion for the safety of men, or the storms forego their sporting, if man is deaf to the cries of things under his subjection?” Still others approved the idea of “a contest between the products of human art and the powers of nature.” Would the ship survive the mighty Falls, proving man’s ability to defeat the waterfall? Or would nature assert her primacy and smash the puny human craft to bits?
Expecting a huge turnout, Peter and Augustus exchanged letters about which boats to pull from regular service and load up with tourists. Augustus urged Peter to send the largest to the American side on what he called “the great day of the 8th.” When the great day came, it was as good as they had hoped. The boats were packed, the roads thronged. Every hotel bed in town was booked, and people slept on tables and floors. Taverns ran out of food and liquor. Estimates of attendance ranged from 10,000 to 20,000 spectators. While they waited for the Michigan to meet her fate, the jostling masses were entertained by a ventriloquist, an astronomy lecturer, a menagerie, a learned pig and a card-playing dog named Apollo. Temperance lecturers railed against the evils of drink, violinists and pipe-players solicited donations, kino and three-card monte experts separated the gullible from their coins, pickpockets worked the crowd.
The hoteliers had been unable to lay hands on the promised ferocious panthers, wildcats and wolves. In the end, the crew consisted of two bears, a buffalo, two foxes, a raccoon, an eagle, a dog and fifteen honking geese. Apparently anticipating misgivings on behalf of the dog, the organizers assured the press that he, at least, deserved to die. He had bitten a reporter.
The ship was also fitted out with a human crew in effigy. A couple of scarecrows were dressed up in suits and labeled AJ and JA to represent recent presidential contenders Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. The 1824 election had been ugly. It was, in fact, the first (but not the last) American election in which the winner of the popular vote did not become president. Andrew Jackson received more votes in both the popular election and the electoral college, but since neither candidate had garnered a majority, the House of Representatives had the final call and they appointed Adams President. Jackson cried foul, alleging that House Speaker Henry Clay had given his vote to Adams after making a deal to be appointed secretary of state.
Peter Porter was a great friend of Henry Clay, and had backed Clay’s own bid for the presidential nomination. Clay was a supporter of the kinds of federally funded internal improvements that would encourage westward expansion and put money in the Porters’ pockets. The ship’s political references indicate a general disgust with a politics where backroom dealings replaced the will of the people, but they also grow directly out of Porter and his allies’ frustrated ambitions. The spectacle even suggests they were still nursing the Erie Canal grudge. Like the ill-fated canal boat Noah’s Ark, the Michigan was loaded with indigenous natural resources—advertised as “Living Animals of the Forests which surround the Upper Lakes.” The ship went to her doom with an American flag on her bowsprit, a Union Jack astern, and flapping atop her mast, a Jolly Roger. The whole episode reeks of sour grapes.
The event went pretty much as planned. Captain Rough cut the ship loose and his men rowed like mad to safety. One bear, seeing the writing on the wall, jumped overboard and swam for shore. The other scaled the mast—an unlucky choice. The ship tossed and rolled as it hit the upper rapids; both masts broke off, water flooded aboard, and the schooner was completely submerged by the time she slipped over the brink and splintered into innumerable small pieces. On the riverbanks below, spectators raced to collect the scraps. Besides the bear who swam ashore before the plunge, the only animal definitely recovered was a one-eyed goose fished out of the river downstream. Both were promptly put on display, though by some accounts, the goose’s stage career soon ended with a farewell performance on the dinner table.
Most contemporary viewers saw the descent of the Michigan as a succinct symbol for nature’s mastery over man’s pathetic creations: waterfall one, ship zero. “The power of the Almighty,” declared the Rochester Telegraph, “was imposingly displayed over the workmanship of mere human hands.” But it was now humans who staged nature’s triumph. Nature’s supremacy was already looking like an act.
Tourism is one of the earliest forms of consumer activity that is about acquiring experiences, not things. After the Michigan incident, more people than ever realized that there were experiences to be had at Niagara. Energized, the Porters got down to the business of providing them. They built walkways out to the Terrapin Rocks and “deflecting piers of logs and stones” to control erosion on the upstream end of Goat Island. In 1833, they erected Terrapin Tower, a stone pinnacle built at the very brink of the Horseshoe. Costing 10 cents to visit, the tower quickly became a popular attraction, and one of the most popular Falls images. Even as some saw it as an imposition on the landscape—British travel writer Anna Jameson declared it “detestably impudent and mal-à-propos…a signal yet puny monument of bad taste”—most visitors seemed to love the little tower; looking half a ruin in its prime, it perched bravely at the brink of the great fall. Like the Michigan, it pitted human art against nature; unlike the Michigan, it held its own—at least until its 1873 demolition.
In the 1830s, the Porters developed another new attraction: the Cave of the Winds. Discovered by three local men in a rowboat in 1834, the cave originally allowed visitors to go behind the downpour of the Bridal Veil Falls—the narrow waterfall separated from the bulk of the American Falls by Luna Island. It wasn’t easy. According to an 1843 guidebook, the Porters went to “considerable expense” and “excavated the rocks, erected steps, and contracted the stream above in such a manner that this cave can now with ease and safety be visited.” By this time, they had also nearly doubled the size of Bath Island with fill, and their three-story mill there was producing 10,000 reams of paper a year.
Peter Porter moved to Niagara Falls in 1838, building himself a mansion across from the International Hotel. In 1839, a guidebook reported that General Porter was improving Goat Island further with a garden, an 8-acre park stocked with deer and other animals, a pond filled with local fish, and a 4-acre poultry yard, sure to please “the traveling gourmand.” To irrigate his waterworks and his gardens, he had built a dam, an embankment and a reservoir, all diverting water from the Niagara River. To top it all off, he was planning to add “a small, but elegant, romantic-like cottage, for occasional summer use.” By 1862, that cottage would be remodeled and turned into a refreshment and ice-cream stand, one of two on Goat Island.
The Porters’ tourist alterations made it possible to sell a carefully arranged experience of Niagara Falls, one that adhered to the pictorial conventions of the picturesque by organizing the wild natural landscape to create the right visual effects. The guidebooks that began to flourish in this period all recommended a standard tour with almost no variation. You followed the Porters’ paths through the quiet glades of Goat Island, and emerged from the lush, sun-dappled woods to cross walkways or climb a tower to stunning, open vistas on the roaring Falls. You got closer to the massive waterfall by going down the staircase and entering the Cave of the Winds. Then you walked back onto the mainland and descended the incline railway to the ferry landing, where you caught the Maid of the Mist and visited Canada’s panoramic views. It was an organized tour that brought disparate effects into artistic counterpoint: far-off vistas with close-up encounters, shady woods with open white water, sylvan charm with impressive, roaring wildness.
The entire experience was meant to induce in the visitor a “correct” set of emotional responses, centered on the experience of the sublime. As the guidebooks explained, the waterfall was “the everlasting altar, at whose cloud-wrapt base the elements pay homage to Omnipotence!” The trip to the bottom of the Falls, or into the spray on the Maid of the Mist, was calculated to inspire a sense of smallness in the face of Creation. But the sweeping vistas achieved from Terrapin Tower and Table Rock on the Canadian side counteracted this with a distant, philosophical perspective. The experience was not all terror and vastness, nor beauty and charm, but a perfect combination of both. Niagara Falls—experienced in the “correct” way—was full of moral meaning. But it was also, in the hands of the Porters, a product that delivered—perhaps better than it ever has since.
General Peter B. Porter died in 1844; Judge Augustus Porter died in 1849. By then, they had been joined by other entrepreneurs who would help shape the tourist experience. The Niagara Falls Museum opened on the Canadian side around 1830, and grand hotels were built in the decade following: on the Canadian side, Clifton House, and on the American, Cataract House. Both featured fine dining, ballrooms, entertainment, billiards and gardens. The 1840s saw pagodas built on both sides of the gorge, and, on the Canadian side, a series of battlefield observation towers. Souvenir emporia and Indian curiosity shops sprang up along the riverfront on both sides, offering “authentic” beadwork and carvings. “Parks” and pleasure grounds—all with entrance fees—offered further access to the views and additional enhancements like restaurants, dancing pavilions, fountains and art galleries.
These antebellum additions to the scenery don’t show up in prints and paintings; artists edited out what they considered unsightly. It isn’t until the advent of photography that the Falls can be seen as they really were. In stark contrast to paintings and prints, photographs from the mid nineteenth century show observation towers, mills and souvenir shops crowding the Falls. There are tollbooths and signs everywhere: one shot from the late 1800s shows a walkway on Goat Island posted with a big sign reading Spare the Trees and Shrubs.
It became common later to badmouth all these additions to the scenery, as Henry James would do in 1871, snobbishly grumbling in The Nation that “the horribly vulgar shops and booths and catchpenny artifices…have pushed and elbowed to within the very spray of the Falls.” James complained that the “importunities one suffers here…from hackmen and photographers and vendors of gimcracks, are simply hideous and infamous.” Father Hennepin’s word for the waterfall was now applied to the human accretions around it.
Frederick Law Olmsted and the “Free Niagara” movement of the 1870s would declare this subordination of Niagara’s scenery to profit a national disgrace. But Free Niagara would not blame the Porters. In fact, the Free Niagara advocates would bolster their cause by claiming that the Porters—Niagara’s only protectors—were about to sell Goat Island, opening it up to horrendous commercial development. The fact that it had been commercially developed for years was conveniently ignored: it didn’t suit the story.
In 1893, Mark Twain wrote a short, hilarious sketch called “The First Authentic Mention of Niagara Falls” for a handsome souvenir volume called The Niagara Book. The sketch purports to be extracts from the diary of Adam as he hangs around in a place he persists in calling “The Garden of Eden.” A “new creature” has recently arrived, however, who has other ideas. Adam makes note in his diary:
Tuesday.—Been examining the great waterfall. It is the finest thing on the estate, I think. The new creature calls it Niagara Falls—why I am sure I do not know. Says it looks like Niagara Falls. That is not a reason, it is mere waywardness and imbecility.
The new creature, Eve, soon renames the place “Niagara Falls Park” and puts up a sign: Keep Off the Grass, which leads mopey Adam to note, “My life is not as happy as it was.” The following week, things have gotten even worse:
Tuesday.—She has littered the whole estate with execrable names and offensive signs: “This way to the Whirlpool.” “This way to Goat Island.” “Cave of the Winds this way.” She says the park would make a tidy summer resort if there was any custom for it.
Twain neatly eviscerates the nineteenth-century guidebooks’ propensity to equate Goat Island with the Garden of Eden. Many authors even quoted Milton’s Paradise Lost when describing it—“Must I thus leave thee, Paradise?/—These happy walks and shades,/Fit haunt of gods?” And yet, as Twain’s Adam makes clear, the transformation of this Garden of Eden into something much more mundane began with the act of naming and labeling it—with seeing it as a summer resort. Nature became a commodity, marketed and sold as if it were a beaded purse, or a shotglass.
Along with Twain’s comic sketch, The Niagara Book includes a section on what to see at the Falls, and it declares Goat Island to be “still covered with original forest.” The author explains why:
That this is so is due no doubt to the fortunate fact that for generations all the Niagara islands, as well as part of the mainland, were owned by the wealthy family of Gen. Peter B. Porter, well known in the War of 1812. A summer hotel on the bank of Goat Island, overlooking the Horseshoe, would have been a source of enormous profit, but the sanctity of the place was always respected.
The Porters never got around to putting their planned hotel on Goat Island, and so history paints them as nobly resisting the temptation. This view of them was no doubt helped along by the fact that the second Peter Augustus Porter, grandson to Peter B., was an enthusiastic amateur historian who frequently wrote about the region, casting a rosy light on his own ancestors. More recent historians have simply followed in the footsteps of this family hagiographer. Pierre Berton, in his bestselling history of the region, Niagara, describes Augustus Porter as “the first conservationist,” and insists that “until Goat Island was taken over by the state as part of a park system, the Porter family resisted all attempts to commercialize it.” Apparently, the toll bridge, the tower, the paper mills, public baths, fish ponds and bird pen for eager gourmands are not commercial. Berton tells us the Porters resisted attempts to build taverns or turn Goat Island into planted parkland, but he doesn’t mention the snack stands, gardens, or other “improvements” they made themselves, or how they tried to sell off the island to folks who would cover it with factories or private homes. Those plans have conveniently slid into the cracks of history. People want to believe, as a recent study commissioned by the Landmark Society of the Niagara Frontier asserts, that when Augustus Porter purchased Goat Island, “his intention was to preserve the thick primeval forest and unique flora on the island from commercial and industrial development.”
Alas for Judge Porter’s sheep. History has consigned them to oblivion.
Every region loves its local heroes. One fine day in late summer, I go to Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls to visit the Porter brothers. I don’t know where they are, but heading down the cemetery’s gravel road, I see one plot fenced off with a black wrought-iron fence. As I get closer, I can see an obelisk bearing the name Porter.
“Can I help you?” calls out a young man from a work shed behind me. I wait for him to catch up to me, and explain that I’m looking for Peter Porter.
“Which one?” he asks.
“Peter B. Porter,” I say. He nods and points to the fenced-off plot.
“The General,” he says knowingly. “I remember reading about him in school.” People in Niagara Falls still call Peter B. Porter “the General,” to distinguish him from his son Peter A. Porter, “the Colonel,” who died a Civil War hero and left behind the squabbled-over sword. The large obelisk belongs to the Colonel, but the cemetery guy confirms that the General is in the same plot. I thank him, but he stands there, surveying the cemetery with the air of an English baronet admiring his lands.
“A lot of history in this place,” he says with a hint of local pride. Then he tells me that Annie Taylor, the first person to go over the Falls in a barrel, is buried in this cemetery too.
As I would have expected, the General’s tomb is the grandest. Its red stone is carved with shields bearing P’s, and decorative fleurs-de-lis; the Porter family traces its lineage to French aristocracy. “Peter B. Porter, General in the armies of America,” reads the tomb’s inscription, “defending in the field what he had maintained in the council.” The other side is even more grandiloquent:
A pioneer in Western New York. A statesman eloquent in the annals of the nation and the state. Honoured and renowned throughout that extended region which he had been amongst the foremost to explore and defend.
The transformation of the Porters from men who were minding the main chance to noble protoenvironmentalists is more than just sentimental nostalgia or local pride. It captures what we want to believe about Niagara: it’s a natural wonder, untouched and untouchable by humans. Its beauty is a sign that, while we sometimes come close to ruining nature, in the end we always see the light. Goat Island today, enlarged and reshaped by fill, is ringed by two recently widened roads, with parking lots at both ends. Asphalt walkways lead from one viewpoint to the next, passing restaurants, snack bars and souvenir shops. Even as we pave paradise and put up a parking lot, we landscape it neatly and call our efforts conservation.
I sit for a while in the Porter plot. Occasionally, there’s the whine overhead from a Niagara sightseeing helicopter. But mostly it’s just birds and the rustle of leaves. In other parts of the cemetery, squirrels scamper up and down trees, noisily shredding the husks of walnuts. But here, as if honoring the great man, the squirrels are oddly silent.