IMAGINE HARRY COLCORD, LOOKING at the rope. He helped string it across the Niagara Gorge. Now it stretches out before him, interlaced with so many guy lines it resembles a giant spider-web. It’s 2 inches thick and slopes downward in such a steep curve it looks as if it dips into the river below. Between Harry and the rope stands a small, muscular man, 5 feet 5 inches tall and around 130 pounds. Harry weighs 136. It’s a hot summer day in 1859.
“All right,” someone says. Harry puts one foot in the leather stirrup hanging from a harness over the man’s shoulder and steps up. His other foot goes in the other stirrup. He puts his arms around the man’s chest. He remembers how he once thought that after whaling, theatrical management would seem tame. He remembers how lucky he thought he was to become manager for the world’s greatest tightrope artist.
“You are dead weight,” the man tells Harry in his thick French accent. “If I sway or stumble, do not try to balance. You are not Colcord. You are Blondin.” Then Blondin pulls his shoulders back to loosen Harry’s grip and steps onto the rope. It’s like jumping off a cliff. There’s a sound, almost like the rustle of wind, as the crowd lining the bank behind them collectively draws its breath. Blondin moves forward, one foot, then the other. The rope sways. Harry thinks of the sea.
Blondin told him not to look down, but he does. Beneath them, 190 feet of windy air, then a rushing river from which no one emerges alive. A tiny boat bobs like a toy on the water below, crammed with faces turned upward, waiting to see them drop. The sound of the wind, the sound of Niagara Falls.
One foot. Then the other foot. Every lift of the foot is like dying; every time it reconnects with the rope is like being saved. Don’t move, Harry tells himself. He concentrates on Blondin’s pole. It weighs 40 pounds; he’s lifted it. When the two of them go right, the pole goes left. Harry stares at the pole and imagines he is that pole, leaning left. It helps him not lean left. The wind picks up, and the tails of his morning jacket flap against the back of his legs. He imagines melting. He can feel a heart pounding against Blondin’s back and he doesn’t know if it’s Blondin’s or his.
After a while, a kind of calm takes over. Harry is entirely focused on one thing: staying limp. One foot, then the other foot. He doesn’t hear the Falls anymore.
And then Blondin stops. “Get off,” he says.
Get off? The stocky man beneath him is the only thing between him and a fatal fall, and he wants Harry off. He needs Harry off. It’s tough work reascending the steep hill to the other bank, even without a man on your back. Harry knows Blondin must rest. He can’t get down. He has to.
Harry slides one foot out of the stirrup and reaches it—toward what? He’s going to step off into nothingness. He can’t breathe. Then his toe taps the rope. It’s vibrating in the wind. He sets one foot on that vibration. His hands clench Blondin’s shoulders. He can feel the aerialist shaking with exhaustion. He slides the other foot out of its stirrup and brings it down next to the first, shifting his weight to his feet. He stares at Blondin’s back, rising and falling. If he loses his nerve, he will die.
After what seems like an endless time, Blondin says, “Get back on.” Harry does and they move forward, one foot, then the other.
This happens five times.
The crossing takes forty-two minutes. It feels like a lifetime. The world has disappeared: the crisp blue sky above, the Falls roaring off to their right, the green river rushing below. After a while, Harry doesn’t see any of it, just Blondin’s back and the beads of sweat on the back of Blondin’s neck. He doesn’t see the dark mass of people lining the banks and nearby bridge until they are almost across the rope. Then he looks up and sees thousands of eyes, wide with something almost like horror, waiting to rush upon him. Some of them hold out their hands.
Blondin stops, and for the first time Harry feels him hesitate. Both men see the danger of the crowd; its eagerness could knock them off the rope at the very end. They freeze, staring at the sea of faces. No one moves.
“What should I do?” Blondin asks.
“Make a rush and drive right through them,” Harry says. He’s surprised to hear his voice sounding so low and calm.
Blondin tightens his grip on his pole. Every muscle in his body locks into place, and then they’re moving fast, shoving through a sea of hands and faces; Harry sees ladies weeping, gentlemen pressing coins into his hand, children lofted above the fray to see him, and he realizes he’s made it, he’s going to be rich.
Now imagine another young man, the same age as Colcord—late twenties—and with a similar physique, small but muscular, well used to hard work. The setting is the same: the Niagara River. This man is crossing in the other direction, from the United States to Canada. This time it is dark. There are no eyes upon him. The person holding his hand is a woman, but she’s such a powerful woman people call her Moses, and some even refer to her as “he.” She and the man are both absolutely silent. They are not on a rope, but on the Suspension Bridge, less than 50 yards downstream from the wire Blondin crosses by day. This man can also feel his heart pounding. If he loses his nerve, he too will die. Not because he will fall, but because Harriet Tubman will shoot him.
Silent and swift, they make their way along the railroad tracks on the upper level of the bridge. The pedestrian roadway is below, on the lower level, but there’s a toll collector there, and Harriet doesn’t know him. She leads the way as she’s done dozens of times.
When they arrive on the other side, the man drops to his knees and puts his hands on the ground, as if he expects it to reach out and embrace him. He’s made it. He’s going to be free.
People are fascinated by Niagara stunters. Whenever I mention my Niagara obsession, people almost inevitably bring up honeymoons or daredevils. “Oh, Niagara, you mean like people going over it in barrels?”
“No,” I usually say, trying not to sound like a snob, “the history.”
Even when I’m at the Falls, I tend to glance only briefly at the daredevils’ commemorative markers, or the models of stunters in wax museums. I have never lingered at the IMAX Theatre’s barrel exhibit the way I lingered over the freakish animals in Billy Jamieson’s collection. I like the cheesy diorama of Father Louis Hennepin in the dusty wax museum on the American side, but the Daredevil Museum that’s really a gas-station-sized souvenir store has always struck me as unbearably tacky. I am the proud purchaser of postcards, View-Master reels and a leather tie rack all bearing pictures of the waterfall, but while I bet you can buy a pen with a miniature Blondin inside sliding back and forth across his tightrope, I have never tried to acquire one.
I know the stories; you can’t miss them. The town is rife with historic markers recounting daredevils and their dubious accomplishments, and the guidebooks are full of them too. Blondin is the most popular. But there’s also Massachusetts millworker Sam Patch, who started it all in 1829, jumping into the lower Niagara from a platform between the Falls. Philadelphia cooper Carlisle Graham survived the Whirlpool Rapids in a barrel he built himself. Unemployed dancing teacher Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to go over the Horseshoe in a barrel, at the age of sixty-three. Maud Willard suffocated in her barrel because her dog stuffed his nose into its airhole; George Stathakis suffocated in his after getting caught in the Whirlpool for sixteen hours. The turtle he took with him survived. Roger Woodward, a seven-year-old boy, was an unwitting daredevil: after a boating accident in 1960, he went over the Horseshoe in a lifejacket and lived. He was the only person to survive an unprotected trip over the brink until 2003, when Kirk Jones, an unemployed salesman of auto industry tools, threw himself drunkenly into the rapids and somehow survived the plunge. Jones hadn’t been intending to put on a show, he said; he’d been trying to kill himself. But his vodka-fueled survival earned him a spot in the long tradition of spectacular performances set against the backdrop of Niagara that began in 1827, with the schooner Michigan’s zooicidal plunge over the Horseshoe.
Niagara histories always treat such performances and stunts with an odd lack of wonder. Of course people want to go over the Falls in a barrel. Of course tightrope-walkers want to dare the Niagara Gorge. Of course thousands of people would turn up to watch a shipload of animals get dashed to bits. And of course, readers want to hear about who succeeded, who failed, and whether the turtle described the barrel ride afterward, as George Stathakis promised it would. (It didn’t.) Daredevil history is everywhere on both sides of Niagara. Annie Taylor exits her barrel in an aging mural on New York’s Niagara Street; little Roger Woodward plunges endlessly over the brink in the taped narration on the Maid of the Mist, and an effigy Blondin stands eternally balanced on a high-wire strung over Ontario’s Victoria Avenue. In the heavy summer traffic, it looks like a perfectly reasonable way to get across.
If you think you detect a superior tone, you’re not far off. I take pride in resisting the allure of the daredevils, and I have to admit it comes partly out of snobbery, that long tradition of insisting that Niagara is gussied up with tawdry spectacle, but one is really interested in the Falls. The claim is akin to the protestations of men who swear they read Playboy for the articles. I don’t avert my eyes when I come upon Mr. Graham’s barrel, but honestly, it doesn’t do much for me. I am interested in meaning, and daredevil stunts don’t have meanings, at least not complex ones. They’re simply about the desire of certain individuals to make spectacles of themselves by challenging nature in what, it has to be said, are some pretty dumb ways. Go over the Falls in a barrel? Who thought that up, anyway?
And yet, these meaningless spectacles carry odd symbolic undertones. The destruction of the Michigan acted out a relationship to nature. Barrel stunts are clustered around moments when humans succeed in further controlling the waterfall, as if the stunters are aping the domination of nature. Even Kirk Jones, the unemployed salesman, had a friend videotaping him as he slid toward his doom. Why would he leave a grisly record of his demise for the nightly news? Maybe he believed that an unemployed auto industry worker being dashed to bits on America’s best-known icon might say something. Maybe he thought it would make a nice metaphor for Detroit’s postglobalism attitude toward the working man. Or maybe, like the wreck of the Michigan, it was 90 percent pure spectacle with 10 percent’s worth of subtext hiding in the wings. But it’s enough to get me rethinking my attitude toward the daredevils. Given Niagara’s propensity for hiding its real history, maybe there’s something in all this stunting I’ve simply missed.
One night at dinner, I quiz my boyfriend, Bob.
“Who was Blondin?” I demand.
“The tightrope guy,” he says right away. “He went across the river at Niagara Falls.” Granted, Bob has an advantage: he’s been dragged to Niagara multiple times, has seen the IMAX film Niagara: Myths, Miracles and Magic at least three times, has been conscripted onto the Maid of the Mist and hauled under the waterfall at the Cave of the Winds, and has suffered through so many long stories at commemorative rocks, scenic vistas and tombstones, he now declines all offers of free trips to Niagara. At home, he managed to muster a fake smile when he unwrapped the waterfall tie rack at Christmas, but after being subjected to dozens of horrible DVDs featuring the Falls, he did a search for Niagara Falls on the Internet Movie Database and banned any resulting films from our Netflix queue.
“When did Blondin cross?” I ask, and Bob looks baffled.
“The turn of the century?” he hazards.
I let the topic drop. Bob looks relieved, though later I find him shuffling through the latest Netflix arrivals with a nervous look, as if one of them might contain a bomb.
Blondin, born Jean-François Gravelet, may very well be the best aerialist who ever lived. His two summers at Niagara held America captive with suspense as he made more than a dozen crossings from the American to the Canadian side of the Niagara Gorge, and then back again. He did somersaults and headstands, drank champagne and cooked omelets, all on the tiny, swaying rope. Thousands of people traveled to Niagara Falls to see him, and newspapers nationwide reported on his every move. He had a truly unmatchable act. But was that really enough to hold the nation spellbound for two summers running? Those summers were 1859 and 1860. The more I read about Blondin, the more I’m convinced his feats over the Niagara River weren’t just spectacular: they plugged right into the national mood. An anxious and divided America, hovering on the brink of war, worried together for a small man walking on a rope. But even more, what spectators were seeing was a succinct reenactment of a national spectacle all the more powerful for being unseen. America was transfixed by a man’s impossible journeys across the very river slaves regularly crossed to freedom.
Performances were on Wednesdays or Thursdays. Around 4 P.M., a magnificent carriage would bear Blondin to an American park called White’s Pleasure Grounds. From there, he would cross the tightrope to Canada, performing tricks and stunts along the way. Upon arriving in Canada, he would be taken by carriage to Clifton House, where he would rest up before his highwire journey back to the States. He would perform a new set of tricks on the return.
The overtones of a man taking a dangerous journey from the United States (White’s Pleasure Grounds, no less!) to Canada had to be clear. For African Americans, Canada was synonymous with freedom. The British Emancipation Act of 1833 had banned slavery in the entire British Empire. But it was pretty much a moot point in Canada by then—abolitionist sentiment was strong, and in 1793 the legislature of Upper Canada—present-day Ontario—had passed a law mandating a gradual phasing out of slavery. By the time of the Emancipation Act, an estimated 12,000 fugitives already lived in Canada. The Canadians even regularly refused to extradite fugitives to the United States.
More than 20,000 blacks lived in Ontario at the time of Blondin’s first performance, many of them emancipated slaves. Travelers to the area often visited their communities, remarking on the settlers’ accomplishments in farming and education, and abolitionists published accounts such as Benjamin Drew’s oral history The Refugee; or, the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, printed in Boston in 1856. In 1858, the year Blondin came to check out the Falls, the radical abolitionist John Brown was in Ontario organizing an abolitionist convention, visiting Harriet Tubman and collecting volunteers for his planned raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
The Niagara region was one of only a handful of places where fugitives could cross the border. There were four main routes into Canada: get on a Great Lakes steamship, cross the Detroit River to Windsor, cross the Niagara River, or hoof it from Quaker farm to Quaker farm all the way to northern Vermont. The route through the Ohio River valley led naturally to Detroit; the route up the eastern seaboard led to Niagara. There at Black Rock and Lewiston, the river narrowed to a manageable width. And in 1848, an even better crossing was completed—Charles Ellet’s Suspension Bridge, the first bridge spanning the Niagara Gorge. It was quickly followed in 1855 by John Augustus Roebling’s Railway Suspension Bridge. The bridge was so well known as a crossing point that Harriet Tubman’s first biographer, Sarah Bradford, simply refers to it as “the Suspension Bridge,” without bothering to name its town.
How many people crossed the Niagara River to freedom is not known; the Underground Railroad worked because it left so few traces. That may be one reason why the history of the Underground Railroad in the Niagara region is far less familiar than the history of stunting. Pierre Berton, in his fat bestseller Niagara, doesn’t mention it at all. Geographer Patrick McGreevy, who analyzes the history of pilgrimage and utopia at the Falls in his book Imagining Niagara, says nothing about it. The official souvenir book from the Niagara Falls State Park mentions La Salle, the fur trade, the Iroquois Confederacy, the Porters, the Erie Canal, the Welland Canal, Frederick Law Olmsted, bridge-building, industrial development and tourism. It has whole chapters dedicated to daredevils and honeymoons but says nothing about the Underground Railroad. In the Niagara Falls State Park, you can find statues and portraits of the Porters, Olmsted, Nikola Tesla and Chief Clinton Rickard, founder of the Indian Defense League, but you can’t find an image of Harriet Tubman.
“There has been slavery in other countries. But there has never been another country in the world that legalized slavery and institutionalized it, and that is a very difficult fact for a lot of Americans to swallow,” Kate Koperski explains.
Kate is part of a recent movement to recover some of the region’s lost history. Curator of folk arts at the Castellani Art Museum at Niagara University, she’s one of the organizers of a new, permanent exhibit on the Underground Railroad there. “We got involved in this grant with Heritage New York because of our initial project with Houston Conwell,” Kate tells me. This was a series of contemporary sculptures called Stations by Conwell and collaborators commemorating local sites on the Underground Railroad. They were unveiled in an early-nineties burst of interest after a local group, the Underground Railroad Committee of the Niagara Frontier, helped spearhead a 2,400-mile walk re-creating the fugitives’ journey from Atlanta to St. Catharines.
Kate has long, straight blond hair, and she wears pearl earrings and a slightly cautious air. The exhibit, called “Freedom Crossing,” was somewhat controversial: some donors weren’t sure their contemporary art museum should be mounting shows about slavery. Aware of this, the museum has worked hard to make a strong connection between the Underground Railroad story and the Niagara region. The walls are painted a half mint, half battleship green that’s meant to reproduce the color of the Niagara River. A glimmering light projection on the floor evokes sunlight on water. And the back wall is filled with a huge, beautiful photograph of woods on the river from John Pfahl’s series Arcadia Revisited, a photographic study of the Niagara frontier.
“We’re trying to create a sense of place,” Kate tells me.
A sense of place is difficult to create for the Underground Railroad, because so many of its actual locations remain mysterious—it was, after all, a highly secretive operation. Records are scarce; photographs are essentially nonexistent. Most sites are identified as such through family lore, and many families, it seems, have a root cellar or a barn they fervently believe was used on the Underground Railroad. I find this easy to believe: I’ve had real estate brokers in New York City tell me a particular apartment building was “a station on the Underground Railroad.” Rents were increased accordingly.
The Stations project did not include any private homes in its list of sites, and Heritage New York lists just one as part of its local Underground Railroad Heritage Trail: Murphy Orchards, a farm near the south shore of Lake Ontario. I ask Kate about verification of Underground Railroad sites and she laughs, shaking her head.
“It’s very difficult to say ‘verified,’” she tells me. “Unless there’s a written record, you cannot say ‘verified.’”
An example of an unverified station is the Tryon house on the river in Lewiston, seven miles below the Falls. The house was known as “the house of the seven basements” for its odd series of descending rooms built into the side of the gorge. Josiah Tryon, a deacon at the local church, is said to have been Lewiston’s Underground Railroad stationmaster, and to have rowed many fugitives across the river there. There’s no written record, so Tryon’s participation can’t be declared official. But Kate tells me when Josiah died, scores of African Americans turned up at his funeral and sang hymns.
One of the few places that can actually be verified as a critical Underground Railroad site is the Suspension Bridge. An enlarged picture looking across it hangs in the Castellani Art Museum’s exhibit. It shows the tollbooth and the road for pedestrians and carriages; trains went across above, on the upper level. The picture is an enlargement of a stereoview—a double photograph that appears 3-D when you look at it in a special viewer. (Today’s View-Master is the stereoview’s direct descendant.) Mass produced by the millions, stereoviews hit stores in the 1850s and quickly became a national craze. In Niagara Falls, they immediately became a top souvenir. Views across the Suspension Bridge were among the most popular images. Looking at that stretch of bridge, were Americans thinking about fugitives, for whom that last quarter mile meant the difference between life and death?
In Sarah Bradford’s Harriet Tubman biography, the bridge is the scene for the longest description of a fugitive’s border crossing. It concerns a man named Joe, whom Harriet is taking across the border by train. Everything is going well, but Joe is filled with anxiety and seems despondent. As they cross the bridge, Harriet tries to get him to look out the window at the Falls, but he has his head in his hands. Only when they are safely in Canada, and he’s told he’s free, does he look up. He races off the train and weeps for joy, declaring he has only one journey left to make, the one to heaven. “You might have looked at the Falls first,” Harriet is supposed to have wryly remarked, “and then gone to heaven afterwards.”
Looking at the landscape is a privilege not easily shared by those in deadly peril. Yet comparatively, Joe had it easy. Not every fugitive had a cushy train ride across the border. Harriet herself often walked her charges across the Suspension Bridge at night, either bribing toll collectors or using the railroad tracks to avoid them.
“They used disguises, they traveled as train passengers, they were hidden on trains in luggage compartments,” Kate tells me. “There’s an exciting account of a wealthy citizen in Niagara Falls who had the fastest horses in town outrunning the police with someone in his carriage. To me that last getting over is where all the tension and suspense are.”
The tension and suspense were also increased by the unique position of Niagara. Long a popular resort for southern gentry, many of whom traveled with enslaved attendants, the area saw many more slaves passing through than a typical northern town. At the same time, it was heavily populated with free blacks and progressive groups; Kate tells me there were 274 antislavery societies in New York State. On the Niagara frontier especially, public sentiment leaned toward liberty: the Niagara County Anti-Slavery Society had 21,000 members in 1837. Emboldened by this progressive environment, African-American hotel and restaurant workers in the area frequently helped fugitives make a dash for it.
As the Niagara frontier became well known as a crossing point for fugitives, it also saw an influx of opportunistic slavecatchers. The result was often fisticuffs. A group of the Cataract House’s African-American employees trying to help a twenty-two-year-old woman escape in 1847 ended up clashing with a white mob. The girl was dragged onto the train, and one hotel employee jumped aboard and rode as far as Lockport, trying unsuccessfully to free her. That night, in Niagara Falls, a rowdy, drunken crowd of white workers destroyed many of the black workers’ homes.
“For many decades the story of the Underground Railroad was the story of enslaved people being helped by virtuous white folks. But the Underground Railroad was started by black people,” Kate tells me. “One of the things we wanted to do in this exhibit was put the black voices forward.”
As an example of how powerful the black community could be, she mentions Solomon Moseby. In May of 1837, Moseby escaped bondage in Kentucky and made it to Niagara-on-the-Lake in Canada, using his master’s horse. His outraged owner, David Castleman, reported the crime, and the Kentucky governor, eager to end the steady stream of fugitives out of his state, issued an extradition warrant for Moseby. A band of slavecatchers headed north. Kentucky and David Castleman had decided to make an example of Solomon Moseby. Instead, they ended up provoking Upper Canada’s first race riot.
“The whole issue of the tension between the slavecatchers and the fugitives is also interesting,” Kate says. “The role of the slavecatcher is still downplayed; it’s very ugly. That’s a piece of the story that can’t be prettified.”
You really can’t prettify the story if, as in Niagara, the slavecatcher happens to be one of your local founding fathers. Not one single historian mentions it—or even seems aware of it—but the go-to guy for slavecatchers in the Niagara region was none other than Peter B. Porter, War of 1812 hero, alleged protector of Goat Island, connoisseur of war feasts and fine tableware.
Porter was intimately involved in the attempt to extradite Moseby. He was friends with David Castleman, Moseby’s former owner, through his Kentucky in-laws, the Breckenridges. So when Moseby disappeared, naturally Castleman wrote Peter to ask his help in arresting him. His letter of early July was written in a breathless, angry tone: he asked Peter to “employ some man in whom you have confidence to decoy him over the line, have him apprehended and confined in jail as a fellon or a fugitive from justice—I will meet whatever expense may be necessary.” Anticipating Canadian resistance, he asked Peter “whether there is any arrangement between the governments” of the United States and Canada for extradition of fugitives, and noted, with further creative spelling, “It would be probably polacy not to speak of him as a slave, but as a fellon.” What was at stake for Castleman was clearly more than the value of one slave, or one horse. “It is important,” he wrote, “that energetic measures should be used to put a stop to these escapes for they are becoming very common.” In fact, Porter’s parents-in-law had also recently lost a man named George Caball; Castleman was looking for him too.
Porter’s friendly response invited Castleman to use his house as a base and advised him to get criminal indictments and extradition requests from the governor, preferably for horse-stealing, not self-stealing. Castleman acted on this advice immediately and wrote on August 13 to announce his imminent arrival with warrants for both men. He even added a third fugitive to his wish-list: a man named Jesse Happy who had fled a friend of Castleman’s a few years back and was also in the Niagara region. “I have no desire to impose on you any further trouble,” Castleman declared, “but if it should come in the way of some person who may be going over to enquire I should be glad to get holt of him.” He promised to observe Porter’s “suggestions about secrecy,” and suggested back that Porter might warn his children against mentioning Castleman’s name. He signed off “Truly your friend.”
Castleman arrived in Canada in late August with three hired thugs and showed his warrants to the local authorities. Moseby was arrested in Niagara-on-the-Lake at once. The African-Canadian community was just as quick in coming to his defense. Led by a local pastor and teacher named Herbert Holmes, a group of black Canadians offered Castleman $1,000 to cover his horse (worth about $150) and his expenses. Castleman refused. They then petitioned the lieutenant governor: 17 African Canadians and 114 whites signed letters testifying to Moseby’s good character and pleading that he not be sent back into bondage.
Meanwhile, the black community began to gather outside the Niagara-on-the-Lake jail. Runners went to nearby towns with the news, and the crowd swelled to hundreds. Living in tents, they kept 24-hour watch on Moseby and his captors. The women, led by a charismatic orator named Sally Carter, sang hymns. The group carefully devised a plan of resistance, agreeing, at the urging of the women, to remain unarmed.
The attorney-general of Upper Canada issued an order for Moseby’s extradition on September 6. Buoyed by this success, Castleman went to Hamilton and filed the necessary papers against Jesse Happy. He too was accused of stealing a horse—four years earlier. Castleman didn’t mention that Happy had left the horse in the United States and had even written his former master, telling him where to find it. Happy was quickly arrested in Hamilton.
After receiving the extradition order, Niagara-on-the-Lake deputy sheriff Alexander McLeod called in extra soldiers from nearby Fort George and notified Castleman to meet him at the Lewiston dock of the Niagara River ferry. On September 12, he attempted to take Moseby to the Canadian ferry dock in order to deliver him up. First, he ordered the crowd to withdraw. They did not. He ordered his soldiers to charge. People shouted “Don’t hurt the poor soldiers!” and the crowd held its position without fighting back. Just then, a reprieve arrived: a letter from Toronto announced that the Executive Council was reconsidering the extradition decision. That letter was shortly followed by another saying that the decision to extradite had been confirmed. McLeod had the Riot Act read to the crowd. Then he and his constables led the handcuffed Moseby out of the Niagara jail and loaded him onto a waiting wagon.
The crowd followed its plan. Believing that soldiers would be reluctant to shoot females, the women charged first. One woman pinioned Sheriff McLeod. Pastor Holmes blocked the transport wagon’s horses and a man named Jacob Green rammed a fence post in its wheels. Moseby took the opportunity to throw himself out of the wagon, leap a fence and flee. (His guards may have assisted by loosening or never fastening his handcuffs.) Enraged, Sheriff McLeod ordered his troops to fire on the crowd. Pastor Holmes and Jacob Green were killed. But Moseby was free. Later, he would make his way to Great Britain.
History has not recorded how the news reached David Castleman, waiting on the Lewiston dock for a delivery that never came. It’s a nice scene to imagine. Perhaps he grumbled his way back to his friend Peter’s that night, and Porter consoled him with a nice dinner. Castleman was doomed to further disappointment: following the riot at Niagara, the Canadian Governor’s Executive Council took a closer look at the case of Jesse Happy. Given the underwhelming evidence of his guilt, they let him go free.
Solomon Moseby’s arrest and escape became a rallying cry for Canadian antiextradition forces: the following year, the British government upheld Canada’s refusal to extradite criminals whose “crimes” were not crimes in Canada. British traveler and memoirist Anna Jameson, who visited the Niagara region in 1839, was miserably disappointed by the Falls, but extremely impressed by Moseby’s story. She especially admired the women, who had insisted on unarmed resistance but hadn’t hesitated to put their bodies on the line.
Peter Porter was less pleased with the outcome. After the escape, he wrote a confidential letter to the governor of Upper Canada, lambasting the Canadians for their handling of the affair, including their refusal to render up Jesse Happy.
“I respect the members of the council for their humanity,” Porter wrote. “I am as much opposed to slavery in the abstract as they are.” But he went on to defend southern slavery on the grounds that a general emancipation would make it “impossible to sustain a moral and wholesome government.” The answer, according to Porter, was not to free the slaves, but to send them back to Africa:
You know something of the frivolous, improvident, reckless and, in extremities, desperate character of the African race. If you do not, the good people of your province seem in a way to become thoroughly and experimentally acquainted with it. The free negroes of the United States are decidedly, as a body, the most licentious, turbulent and worthless part of our population, and we are making, as you must have perceived, great efforts, at great expense, to remove them back to Africa and provide for them all the advantages of freedom that they are capable of enjoying.
Porter himself had already tried to contribute to the repatriation effort: after inheriting around twenty-five slaves as part of Laetitia Breckenridge’s patrimony, he offered these folks their freedom, on the condition that they would scram to Liberia. No one seemed eager to go. Porter brought a few of the younger people to New York, under a state law by which slaves could be brought into the state as indentured apprentices and freed at age twenty-eight. They turned out to be “excellent servants,” Porter told the Canadian governor, at least until “they were fastened upon by the emancipators and free blacks of Buffalo and Canada who persuaded them (with the exception of two only who served out their time) to flee across the river. Several of them are now in Canada and have become as worthless, I fear, as are most of that species of population.”
Climb down into the memory hole, and you never know what you’ll find. Porter’s views—nominally abolitionist yet thoroughly racist—were hardly unusual for his time. That a war hero and town father of the 1840s should spout this rhetoric is not surprising. But that no one should ever mention it—even as Solomon Moseby’s story is frequently retold—is a bit odd. The damning documents are not exactly hidden: they’re in the Peter B. Porter papers at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Library. There, among folder after folder of letters, contracts, deeds and steamship manifests, are the Kentucky governor’s extradition warrants for Jesse Happy and Solomon Moseby.
General Porter is a hard guy to knock off his pedestal. He stays up there in part because slavecatching, like the destruction of nature, is one of those things we’re inclined to sweep under the rug.
For the United States, things were nearing a head in the 1850s. The Compromise of 1850 included the infamous Fugitive Slave Act, which made it a crime, even in northern states, for citizens to help a runaway slave. This made getting to Canada imperative for fugitives. The act also had the unintended consequence of radicalizing abolitionists. Even northerners lukewarm on abolition were outraged at the idea that they were required to help slave-owners hunt down and capture fugitives. For those opposed to the institution, the whole notion of accommodating southern slavery began to seem ridiculous. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, engineered by Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, was meant to defuse conflict by letting new states choose for themselves whether to enter the union as slave states or free states. It only made things worse, polarizing the two sides and bringing violence into the mix as Free-Soilers and slavery advocates raced to settle Kansas. As proslavery sentiment increased, the Underground Railroad increasingly came out of the closet. By the time of the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared that no person of African ancestry could ever be a citizen or sue in a federal court, northern stationmasters were advertising openly in newspapers.
With the radicalization of the 1850s, the plight of the fugitive slave went from hidden ordeal to national drama. Popular newspapers gave extensive coverage to chilling tales such as the 1856 tragedy of Margaret Garner, a fugitive who, on the verge of being recaptured, slit her two-year-old daughter’s throat rather than see her sent back into bondage. (Toni Morrison later based her acclaimed novel Beloved on this event.) Blackface minstrel shows began openly referring to fugitives, performing songs about families torn apart and bondsmen determined to be free. And in a literal staging of the national spectacle, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin burst onto the scene in 1852 and was immediately adapted many times for the theater. Its popularity surpassed even the earlier vogue for Indian dramas.
Such was the state of the nation in 1859, the year Blondin chose to stage his performances. For his setting, he picked an American icon that happened to be a symbol of freedom for slaves, in a town where frequent fugitive escapes were reported with approval in the local paper.
Some historians suggest that Blondin’s high-wire antics gripped Americans because the show gave them respite from ugly public debates and looming violence. Maybe, but descriptions of Blondin’s act hardly make it sound relaxing. Thousands of people crammed the gorge rim and stood paralyzed with anxiety every time he crossed. Women screamed, wept and fainted; men swore and clenched their fists. The performance may have been an instance of mass projection—Americans transferring their anxiety from the nation’s peril to the aerialist’s—but this could only happen because there was something similar about the two.
Niagara chroniclers love describing Blondin’s clever acts. He crossed the rope one day wearing a sack over his head. He pushed a wheelbarrow across, imitating a manual laborer. He crossed with an iron stove, wearing a chef’s hat, and set it up and cooked omelets midway, which he passed down to the Maid of the Mist below. He crossed on stilts as the Prince of Wales watched. Most famously, he carried Harry Colcord over twice. Newspapers all over the nation reported on each new performance, always declaring that Blondin couldn’t possibly surpass the latest feat.
Absent from later accounts is the act’s historical context. But considered within the frame of the increasingly bitter slavery standoff, and in the light of Niagara’s central role in that drama, the performances take on a different tone. When Blondin cooked omelets in a chef’s outfit he had borrowed from “the head cook at the International,” he made people think of the kitchens of Niagara’s hotels—which were filled with black employees. When he crossed with a sack on his head, he looked like a fugitive being dragged back to slavery. When he crossed with Colcord on his back, he was within what we Michiganians call “spittin’ distance” of the very Suspension Bridge across which Harriet Tubman “carried” scores of fugitives. The crowd’s anxiety was all for his passenger: would Blondin get the man across?
The most powerfully suggestive performance was his crossing of the tightrope wearing an iron collar, chains, handcuffs and shackles. This getup was said to be the character of a “Siberian slave,” but it must have suggested cruelties closer to home. If there was a universal symbol for slavery, it was a set of shackles. Abolitionists were often photographed holding broken ones, and abolitionist literature frequently included their image. Some states, like Ohio, even went to the trouble of outlawing shackles. Art historian Albert Gardner called the era’s obsession with chains and shackles a “national mania.” Abolitionists sometimes demonstrated the physical ravages of slavery by having former slaves display backs scarred from whippings. Shackles were a somewhat more genteel way of evoking this same brutality. Today, the one material object in the Castellani Art Museum’s Underground Railroad exhibit is a set of shackles, with a tag neatly engraved, “T. H. Porter, dealer in horses and slaves.”
Blondin never made any public statements about slavery, or any other aspect of American politics. He was a performer, here to entertain folks and make a lot of money. But imagine magician David Copperfield putting on a show somewhere in the desert along the Mexican border. Imagine he gets Regis and Kelly to come and tape segments of the show in which he builds a wall and makes someone disappear on one side of the wall and reappear on the other. Then he has himself straitjacketed, locked in a box, and dropped into the Rio Grande. He has to escape his bonds and swim to the other side. Say he does it when the Senate is hashing out a new immigration bill and immigrants are marching in the streets demanding a path to citizenship. Would people somehow get the idea that his performance meant something?
Blondin performed throughout the summer of 1859. That September, shortly after the aerialist packed up for the season, abolitionist John Brown led eighteen men in a doomed attempt to start a slave revolt by capturing the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. He and two of his accomplices were hanged in December. In April 1860, thousands of protestors, including Harriet Tubman, managed to free a fugitive from federal marshals in Troy, New York. Abraham Lincoln was the Republican party’s nominee for president and war was looking inevitable in June 1860, when Blondin returned for another summer of shows. This year, he moved his tightrope farther from the Falls. He was now directly over the Whirlpool Rapids, water so turbulent the Maid of the Mist could no longer come underneath his rope. To kick off the year he arrived dressed as an Indian chief and danced across his new rope in eight minutes, “with scarcely more effort than another would put forth in going across the Suspension Bridge.”
“On Saturday,” reported the Niagara Falls Gazette on June 13, “twenty-five hundred dollars worth of bone and sinew, in the persons of Hill Burton and John Burt Purnell, two fugitives from Wooster County, Maryland, passed through Rochester en route for Vic’s dominions via Suspension Bridge.” Six days later, Blondin announced in the same paper that he would cross his tightrope that day “blindfolded, and tied up in a sack from head to foot.” On the Fourth of July, he went across in the dark of night.
He had competition this year. On a tightrope closer to the Falls, a new aerialist who called himself the Great Farini was matching Blondin’s antics trick for trick.
Farini and Blondin couldn’t have been more different. Blondin was small and fair; Farini large, with olive skin, black hair and startling blue eyes. Blondin was married with children; Farini was a swaggering womanizer. Blondin was a distinguished Frenchman; Farini, who billed himself as a famed Italian ropewalker, was in fact a Canadian farm boy whose parents, embarrassed by his antics, refused to attend his shows. Blondin made everything he did look easy, but Farini’s performances were a torment to watch. His slack rope pitched and swayed and his tricks pushed his abilities to the limit. He often had to stop and lie down to rest, and frequently caught himself from falling. The Niagara Falls Gazette declared his to be “the greatest slack rope performance on record,” but asserted there was “no pleasure to the beholder” in it.
Throughout the summer, Blondin performed, and Farini tried to out-Blondin Blondin. Blondin cooked an omelet; Farini dressed up as an Irish washerwoman—with washing machine—and washed handkerchiefs on the rope. Blondin went over in a sack that covered his arms and legs; Farini went over in a sack that even enclosed his feet. Then he stood on his head in it. Blondin carried the small-framed Colcord across; Farini carried his friend, the long-legged, 150-pound tailor Rowland McMullen. In the middle of the crossing, Farini went under the rope, passed beneath McMullen, and then reloaded him for a return to the shore where they began.
Farini is famous today because he challenged Blondin, and because, for one magical season, two great circus artists attempted to outdo each other in amazing spectators at the Falls. But his act also served to underscore the perilousness of what both men were doing. Crossing Niagara was dangerous and difficult. Watching Farini, the audience really felt it.
Blondin shared the public stage with attractions other than Farini. In July of 1859 alone, Niagara region audiences could also go and see Sanford’s Opera Troupe, a magician named Love, an equestrian drama, and a moving panorama called the “Panorama of Slavery” by a formerly enslaved minister named Tablos Gross. It was playing at the American Hall in Buffalo. In the wake of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, abolitionist statements were increasingly common in theatrical venues. Was Blondin’s act such a statement, and was it understood that way? The question is beginning to haunt me. It’s time to go back to the Edith Wharton-meets-Homeland-Security atmosphere of the American Antiquarian Society.
It has been months since my last trip to the library, but the frock-coated attendant greets me charmingly by name, and patiently reexplains the tortuous sign-in policy, which I can never seem to keep straight. After you’ve consigned all your contraband to a locker, you sign in twice; once in a big logbook that is kept for all posterity to admire, and then on a sheet of paper. When you leave the library, you have to go and get a pink exit card from the reference desk, like an elementary schooler getting the bathroom pass. You hand the pink card to Frock Coat and sign out, noting the time of your departure. I get out my cell phone to check the time as I sign in, and Frock Coat points to it and says, “You can just turn that off now.”
Back on my hard chair, I page through old newspapers from the Niagara region, looking for descriptions of Blondin’s act. They all seem pretty much the same, even a long one in the National Era, Washington D.C.’s African-American newspaper. The Era praises the performance for its illustration of “the wonderful extent to which the human faculties may be trained,” but like the other newspapers, it makes no claims about the performance’s meaning. All the stories simply report on the spectacle: the size of the crowd, the details of the stunt. There are no allusions to subtexts or references to slavery.
Or are there? After a while, I notice that several newspapers mention the bands set up on both sides of the gorge, and identify the songs they played to accompany Blondin’s journey. Most are what I’d expect: “Hail, Columbia” when he leaves the United States, “God Save the Queen” when he leaves Canada. But there’s one I don’t recognize, and it turns up several times. It’s a song called “The Other Side of Jordan,” said to have been played upon his first return from Canada. The New York Times reports that on the day of the very first crossing, a half-German, half-black band aboard the steamship to the Falls played so badly that “while dozens were under the impression they were ‘doing’ Hail Columbia, all the rest on board would have sworn it was the ‘Other Side of Jordan.’”
Luckily, I’m at the American Antiquarian Society. I look up “The Other Side of Jordan” in the card catalog—there’s a separate set of drawers for music—and pretty soon have several versions of the sheet music in front of me.
The song was popular. There are many versions of it; some are called “The Other Side of Jordan” and some are called “Jordan Is a Hard Road to Travel.” The song itself is a fake spiritual, written by the blackface minstrel Dan Emmett, whose song “Dixie” became a Confederate anthem (allegedly to his dismay; he was a Union man). Written in the era’s “negro dialect,” the first verse goes:
I just arrived in town for to pass de time away
and I settled all my bisness accordin
But I found it so cold when I went up de street
Dat I wish’d I was on de oder side ob Jordan.
And then the chorus:
So take off your coat boys, and roll up your sleeves,
For Jordan is a hard road to trabel
So take off your coat boys, and roll up your sleeves
For Jordan is a hard road to trabel, I believe.
This is a song about fugitive slaves. Participants in the Underground Railroad used spirituals as a code to talk about the flight to freedom. Canaan means Canada; Moses means Harriet Tubman. Jordan meant the Ohio River. Crossing the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky to the free state of Ohio was crossing to freedom, a trip made famous by a dramatic escape across breaking-up ice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet Tubman sang about going to the other side of Jordan as a way of secretly informing her friends and family of her plans to escape to the free states. But after 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act, of course, Jordan had to move north, to the Canadian border. The 1853 version of the song even gets in a joke about Canada’s weather; it’s so cold the fugitive wishes himself back in the United States. In fact, exaggerations about the harshness of Canadian winters were often used by slave-owners to discourage flights north.
The song is an ugly lampoon, and yet it also managed to capture some of the drama of the fugitive. Even an “Ethiopian Banjo Melody” version from 1852, titled “Jordan Am a Hard Road to Trabel,” clearly references the flight north:
I look to de Norf, I look to de East
Holler for de ox cart to come on
Wid four grey horses driven on de lead
To take us to de order side of Jordan.
Ox carts, according to Kate Koperski, were one way to get fugitives across the Suspension Bridge. Certain toll collectors were known to be willing, for a small fee, to forgo inspection of your wagon when you had a load of “southern calico” aboard.
Like the minstrel tradition generally, “The Other Side of Jordan” is an odd amalgamation of racism and revolution. White performers “blacked up” with cork and using fake negro dialect were putting on a degrading spectacle founded on racist humor. But the shows also suggested the slipperiness of racial categories: If white people could be mistaken for blacks, why not the reverse? What does “race” mean, anyway? Minstrel shows bought into unsavory stereotypes, but they also subverted a “natural order” based on racial difference. In its own way, Blondin’s high-wire act suggested the same thing.
In September of 1860, Blondin and Farini both performed for the last time at Niagara. The Prince of Wales was in attendance, and he watched Blondin carry Colcord across the rope once again. At the end the prince remarked, “Thank God it’s all over.” Whether he saw Farini or not is a matter of some dispute, but if he did, it was only in passing. The two men packed up their ropes and left town. Blondin was thereafter known as “The Hero of Niagara,” and Farini, perhaps in one last attempt to claim superiority, dubbed himself “The Champion of Niagara.” Two months later, the American people elected a new president named Abraham Lincoln, and South Carolina promptly announced its secession from the Union.
Lincoln’s win was a foregone conclusion in the four-way race, with the divided Democratic party not even voting for the same candidate in North and South. In August 1860, while the aerialists were still cavorting over the Niagara Gorge, Harper’s ran a cartoon called “The Coming Man’s Presidential Career.” It showed a buff Blondin in tights crossing his wire with neat steps. His grimly determined face is not Blondin’s however; it’s Lincoln’s. His balancing pole is labeled “Constitution” and on the cliffs behind him, a sign with an arrow reads “To the Whirlpool.” On his shoulders, wearing a smile that is half minstrelsy stereotype, half heartrending portrait of hope, is a barefoot black man. The second line of the caption reads: “Motto: Don’t Give Up the Ship.”
History is frustrating. We can estimate the size of the crowd; we can look at catalogs to surmise what they were wearing, at train timetables to deduce how they got there; maybe we can even find bills of fare to tell us what they ate that day. But what they were thinking remains a mystery. Newspapers tell us the crowds were silent, their wide eyes fixed on Blondin, their faces tight with worry. What lurked behind that mask of expectation? Were the abolitionists among them secretly exulting in this coded rhapsody to freedom and the high-wire act it required? Were the southerners in the crowd hoping the Frenchman would fall? Or did everyone engage in a massive willing suspension of disbelief, agreeing for just two summers to pretend the show was nothing more than the crass, sensational spectacle so many critics denounced it for? As the saying goes, you can’t dig up a hole. Unfortunately, history is full of them.
Blondin’s manager Harry Colcord went on to narrate his adventures, including the terrifying trip on Blondin’s back across the gorge. Not satisfied with the story’s inherent excitement, he threw in an attempted sabotage. During their crossing, he claimed, one of the guy lines snapped. This may have happened, but Colcord spiced up the story by claiming that a man was seen yanking on the line and running away. And he added that a visiting group in the audience, the Washington Grays, offered a $10,000 reward for apprehension of the would-be saboteur.
Every subsequent biographer would repeat this tale, though by 1989, biographer Dean Shapiro would have lost its purpose, describing the Washington Grays as a “prominent New York family.” They were no such thing. They were the 8th Regiment of New York’s militia, dedicated to preservation of the Union. Two years after Blondin’s performance, they would swap their gray militia togs for Union blues and go to war for President Lincoln. They would brave the maelstrom; they would not give up the ship.
The Washington Grays did attend one of Blondin’s performances—but it was not the one where he carried Colcord across. Blondin’s biographers all miss what’s interesting about the story: the wily manager clearly wanted to signal his performer’s connection with the Union cause.
The next time I’m in Niagara Falls, I go to the public library and look at everything I can find about Blondin again. No writer even mentions the Civil War, let alone the Underground Railroad, except to note that Blondin’s 1861 departure from the United States was delayed by war actions. No one who writes about Blondin speculates on the meaning of his performance at all. It’s as if his stunts took place in some soundproofed parallel universe, insulated from the hue and cry of the national news.
I wander into the stacks and find Maureen Fennie reshelving boxes in the civil records section.
“Maureen, what do you think of the stunters—the Niagara daredevils?” I ask her.
“Not much,” she replies at once. “There’s no substance there. It’s a few seconds over the Falls. The power, the industry, how they wrecked a beautiful spot; to me that’s the real story of Niagara Falls.”
That’s exactly what I used to think. I ask Maureen if she has ever seen the cartoon with Lincoln as Blondin. Her eyes light up, and the box in her hands goes back onto the metal cart. It’s so easy to distract Maureen.
“I don’t think I have,” she says. We proceed to the flat file of magazine engravings and dig through them unsuccessfully. Then Maureen remembers that there’s a separate file for cartoons. She retrieves that and we page through it.
“There it is,” she says decisively, pointing at a page.
“No, that’s not it,” I say, glancing at it.
“But it’s Lincoln as Blondin,” she says and I look again. Sure enough, it’s a Vanity Fair cartoon from June 9, 1860, drawn by Vanity Fair art director Henry Louis Stephens. It shows Lincoln in tights, crossing the Niagara Gorge on a tightrope so wide it looks like a rotten plank. In his hands, he carries a carpetbag with a doll-sized African-American man inside it. A whiskered fellow behind him is shouting “Don’t drop the carpetbag.” Whiskers is a caricature of New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, a Lincoln supporter and abolitionist who frequently criticized his president for not freeing the slaves soon enough. The cartoon is far less flattering than the Harper’s depiction: unlike Harper’s, Vanity Fair opposed abolition.
When the pirate Michigan crashed to its fate, spectators felt an odd sense of satisfaction. Their understanding of the world had been confirmed. As one newspaper put it, “the power of the Almighty was imposingly displayed over the workmanship of mere human hands.” Daredevils do the opposite. They defy human limitation. They jump canyons, fall from the sky and ride waterfalls, pitting their puny human bodies against everything the earth can throw at them. As the second season of performances began, The New York Times described Blondin on his tightrope as “seeming to defy nature in her very lair, and nature’s laws.” The writer goes on to describe the Niagara River as a serpent and Blondin as “another St. George,” as if his accomplishment drives a sword into the very heart of the landscape. How humiliating for our fearsome Falls serpent, reappearing once more only to be killed, this time not by the Thunder Gods, but by a capering Frenchman in tights! But what the writer is trying to get at is the stunter’s spirit of hubris. He is St. George taking on the dragon, David hurling the tiny stone of himself against the Goliath of nature. Of course, American slavery itself was once seen as part of natural law—theories of “natural” racial superiority made it possible to enslave people based on nothing more than skin color. No doubt many in the crowd on those hot summer days of 1860 watched the small figure on his tightrope with a sense—half-articulated in the Harper’s cartoon—that the whole country was about to climb on Lincoln’s back as he attempted to do what had until then seemed humanly impossible. The laws of nature, Blondin’s act declared, can be rewritten. The world can go out on a wire. It can be stood on its head.
For black Americans, Niagara’s overtones of freedom never died. Encomiums to Niagara Falls turn up in black newspapers and magazines throughout the nineteenth century. And when W. E. B. Du Bois and Mary Talbert decided in 1905 to convene a group of African-American intellectuals and found a civil rights movement to demand suffrage, they first met in Buffalo. Denied a hotel room, they crossed the Niagara River to Fort Erie. There they hashed out a declaration of principles for what they called “The Niagara Movement.” The founders had a photograph made of themselves standing before a backdrop depicting the Falls. They frown out gravely, serious yet hopeful. They too were going out on a wire. The Niagara Movement went on to become the NAACP.
They were not the only ones to see themselves as following Blondin. In 1862, with the war going badly, Lincoln chastised his critics: “Gentlemen,” he declared, “suppose all the property you were worth was in gold and you put it in the hands of Blondin to carry across the Niagara Falls on a rope. Would you shake the cable, or keep shouting out to him ‘Blondin! Stand up a little straighter; Blondin! Stoop a little more; go a little faster; lean a little more to the north; lean a little more to the south?’ No, you would hold your breath, as well as your tongue and keep your hands off until he was safely over!”
Redefining the “natural” is never easy. When it’s done, it tends to be done by visionaries, individuals who remake the world by pitting their beliefs and bodies against its unshakable order. In the end, that’s Blondin’s legacy. If he valorized—intentionally or not—the cause of abolition in the process of expanding the limits of the humanly possible, he also diminished the Falls. Many newspapers repeated the sentiment of the small Port Hope Tri-Weekly Guide, which declared, “The mighty cataract has ceased to be one of the seven wonders of the world—Blondin reigns in its stead.” And Blondin himself, when told by the Toronto Daily Globe reporter that he was now as great as the Falls, is said to have laughed and replied, “You can see that I am even greater.”
After Blondin, there were more tightrope walkers at the Niagara Gorge. Harry Leslie, the “American Blondin,” crossed in 1865, J. F. Jenkins in 1869, Henry Belleni, billed as the “Australian Blondin,” in 1873, Maria Spelterini in 1876, Stephen Peer in 1887, Samuel Dixon in 1890, Clifford Calverly in 1892 and 1893, and James Hardy in 1896. And then there were no more, except for one little-known crossing in 1911 by a man named Oscar Williams. What happened?
In 1895, the meaning of Niagara shifted dramatically. After that year, daredevils at the Falls were focused not on tightrope walking, but on going over in barrels or other contraptions. The first person to succeed was a sixty-three-year-old woman from Bay City, Michigan, a fact that has been a perpetual disappointment to history. Even at the time, newspapers reacted to Annie Edson Taylor’s 1901 trip over the Horseshoe with unabashed dismay. The Baltimore American declared the feat “ought only to excite sorrow and indignation among sensible people”; the Denver Republican sneered that poor Annie “seems to be taking a lot of credit that belongs to the barrel,” and the Washington Post announced that it expected the Falls to write a book one day called “The Fools Who Have Gone Over Me.” It’s an odd comment, since only one fool at that point had done so and lived.
Annie still disappoints people. One recent author chalks up her success to hydro diversion having “subdued” the waterfall’s energy: that a “middle-aged woman” could conquer the brink he declares “an indication of its attenuated power.” Pierre Berton in Niagara just can’t forgive Taylor for robbing some younger, handsomer daredevil’s thunder, calling her “a bulky and shapeless woman of sixty-three, with coarse features and a rasping voice.” Over the course of ten pages, he brands her “flabby and overweight,” “stout and almost shapeless” and “a lumpy figure with a pudding of a face.” I’ve studied pictures of Annie pretty closely; she looks a bit dour, but she’s actually fairly trim for a Victorian matron. Yet Berton is hardly alone in his need to mock her. My favorite date film, Niagara: Miracles, Myths and Magic, depicts her as a nagging, kitten-toting old prude, gabbing nonstop even as her assistants row her out into the rapids. “Remember, I’m forty-three!” she keeps insisting. The boatmen roll their eyes and cut her loose. You can still buy obnoxious caricatures of Annie Taylor on Niagara postcards.
Why was Annie so disliked? The answer is simple. Annie’s triumph, even more than Blondin’s, diminished the Falls. The Buffalo Express sums it up:
We really wanted the great cataract to remain unassailable, unachievable. It is fine to have something at hand which is absolutely master of itself, superior to everything. We thought we had it in Niagara Falls. And now along comes an estimable person—not a mighty athlete, or a wonderful swimmer or anything of that sort, but a quiet, rather matronly fashioned woman—who tucks herself into a barrel and glides over the awful precipice wellnigh as serenely as a decoy duck would bob over a two-foot mill-dam. Could anything—even the impending lectures which the trip has so obviously fitted Mrs. Taylor to deliver—do more to belittle Niagara Falls? The question really becomes serious: Are they any longer worth looking at?
Are the Falls worth looking at? That question would increasingly come to be asked in the early twentieth century. Because the Falls were no longer an unassailable force of nature: in 1895, they were harnessed for electricity. Blondin’s upstaging of nature was completed by Nikola Tesla.
The Buffalo Express saw Annie’s accomplishment as one more win for a technological age: “It is, apparently, an hour in which all the impossible things are getting done,” the editors declared. “Here is the great aeronaut, Santos-Dumont, flying around Eiffel Tower as blithely as a swallow around a church spire…. Here is Alexander Winton doing ten miles in his automobile at a rate so close to a mile a minute we may as well let it go at that.” They didn’t mention the conquest of Niagara by power barons, but that surely underlay their feeling that the great cataract had lost its luster.
After Annie, there was a rush on barrel stunts at the Falls. More people rode the rapids. Bobby Leach went over the Horseshoe Falls in a barrel, and in 1910, Lincoln Beachy buzzed under the Upper Steel Arch Bridge in his Curtiss biplane. It continues to this day, but little by little, stunting has dropped off. Today, if Evel Knievel himself were to show up with a shiny new Cataract-o-cycle, he probably wouldn’t get half as many spectators as Blondin did. Stunting on the Niagara River has grown less interesting as the Falls themselves have been increasingly subjected to human control. Today, on the rare occasions when daredevils do attempt to go over the Falls, the New York Power Authority and Ontario Hydro can dial down the water to stop them. Why challenge a waterfall when its masters can turn it off? We are no longer David. The Falls are no longer Goliath.
In the years between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, the Falls would be completely taken in hand, from the arrangement of trees to the creation of viewpoints to the regulation of the waterfall’s water. Ironically, it all began with a movement called Free Niagara.