The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Niagara River
Title: The Niagara River
Author: Archer Butler Hulbert
Release date: February 7, 2011 [eBook #35194]
Most recently updated: January 7, 2021
Language: English
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By Archer Butler Hulbert
The Ohio River
A Course of Empire
Large Octavo, with 100 Full-page Illustrations and a Map. Net, $3.50.
By express, prepaid, $3.75
The Niagara River
Large Octavo, with many Full-page Illustrations and Maps. Net, $3.50.
By express, prepaid, $3.75
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York London
The Niagara River
By
Archer Butler Hulbert
Professor of American History, Marietta College; Author of "The Ohio River," "Historic Highways of America," "Washington and the West"; Editor of "The Crown Collection of American Maps."
With Maps and Illustrations
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1908
Copyright, 1908
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
TO
HENRY CARLTON HULBERT
IN
APPRECIATION OF ENCOURAGEMENT AND FRIENDSHIP
AND AS A TOKEN OF
ESTEEM
Note
In the endeavour to gather into one volume a proper description of the various interests that centre in and around the Niagara River the author of this book felt very sincerely the difficulties of the task before him. As the geologic wonder of a continent and the commercial marvel of the present century, the Niagara River is one of the most remarkable streams in the world. In historic interest, too, it takes rank with any American river. To combine, then, into the pages of a single volume a proper treatment of this subject would be a task that perhaps no one could accomplish satisfactorily.
Works to which the author is most indebted, especially the historical writings of Hon. Peter A. Porter, Severance's Old Trails of the Niagara Frontier, The Niagara Book, and the writings of the scholar of the old New York frontier, the late O. H. Marshall, and the collections of the historical societies along the frontier, are indicated frequently in footnotes and in text. The author's particular indebtedness to Mr. Porter is elsewhere described; he is also in the debt of F. H. Mautz, Henry Guttenstein, Superintendent Edward H. Perry, whose kindness to the author was so characteristic of his treatment of all comers to the shrine over which he presides, E. O. Dunlap, and many others mentioned elsewhere. He has appreciated Mr. Howells's characteristic conscientiousness when he wrote concerning Niagara, "I have always had to take myself in hand, to shake myself up, to look twice, and recur to what I have heard and read of other people's impressions, before I am overpowered by it. Otherwise I am simply charmed." The author has laboured under the difficulty of attempting to remain "overpowered" during a period of several years. That there have been serious lapses in the shape of lucid intervals, the critic will find full soon!
It has seemed best to treat of modern Niagara under what might have been called "Part I." of this volume. The history of the Niagara region proper begins in Chapter VII., the problems of present-day interest occupying the preceding six chapters.
A. B. H.
Contents
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I. | Buffalo and the Upper Niagara | 1 |
| II. | From the Falls to Lake Ontario | 23 |
| III. | The Birth of Niagara | 52 |
| IV. | Niagara Bond and Free | 72 |
| V. | Harnessing Niagara Falls | 99 |
| VI. | A Century of Niagara Cranks | 123 |
| VII. | The Old Niagara Frontier | 153 |
| VIII. | From La Salle to De Nonville | 171 |
| IX. | Niagara under Three Flags | 196 |
| X. | The Hero of Upper Canada | 231 |
| XI. | The Second War with England | 263 |
| XII. | Toronto | 292 |
| Index | 315 |
List of Illustrations
The Niagara River
Chapter I
Buffalo and the Upper Niagara
The Strait of Niagara, or the Niagara River, as it is commonly called, ranks among the wonders of the world. The study of this stream is of intense and special interest to many classes of people, notably historians, archæologists, botanists, geologists, artists, mechanics, and electricians. It is doubtful if there is anywhere another thirty-six miles of riverway that can, in this respect, compare with it.
The term "strait" as applied to the Niagara correctly suggests the river's historic importance. The expression, recurring in so many of the relations of French and English military officers, "on this communication" also indicates Niagara's position in the story of the discovery, conquest, and occupation of the continent. It is probably the Falls which, technically, make Niagara a river; and so, in turn, it is the Falls that rendered Niagara an important strategic key of the vast waterway stretching from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the head of Lake Superior. The lack—so far as it does exist—of historic interest in the immediate Niagara region, the comparative paucity of military events of magnitude along that stream during the old French and the Revolutionary wars proves, on the one hand, what a wilderness separated the English on the South from the French on the North, and, on the other, how strong "the communication" was between Quebec and the French posts in the Middle West. It does not prove that Niagara was the less important.
The Falls increased the historic importance of Niagara because it limited navigation and made a portage necessary; the purposes of trade and missionary enterprise, as well as those of conquest, demanded that this point be occupied, and occupation necessarily meant defence. Here, from Lewiston and Queenston to Chippewa and Port Day (to use modern names) ran the two most famous portage paths of the continent. Here were to be seen at one time or another the footprints of as famous explorers, noble missionaries, and brave soldiers as ever went to conquest in history.
The Niagara River was important in the olden time to every mile of territory drained by the waters that flowed through it. What an empire to hold in fee! Here lies more than one-half the fresh water of the world—the solid contents being, according to Darby 1,547,011,792,300,000; it would form a solid cubic column measuring nearly twenty-two miles on each side.
The most remote body of water tributary to Niagara River is Lake Superior, 381 miles long and 161 miles broad with a circumference of 1150 miles. The Niagara of Lake Superior is the St. Mary's River, twenty-seven miles in length, its current very rapid, with water flowing over great masses of rock into Lake Huron. Lake Huron is 218 miles long and 20 miles wider than Lake Superior, but with a circumference of only 812 miles. Lake Michigan is 345 miles long and 84 broad and enters Lake Huron through Mackinaw Straits which are four miles in length, with a fall of four feet. In turn Lake Huron empties into the St. Clair and Detroit rivers which, with a total fall of eleven feet in fifty-one miles, forms the Niagara of Lake Erie. This sheet of water is 250 miles long and 60 miles broad at its widest part. The area drained by these lakes is as follows, including their own area:
| Lake Superior | 85,000 sq. m. |
| " Huron | 74,000 " |
| " Michigan | 70,040 " |
| " Erie | 39,680 " |
| ———— | |
| Total | 268,720 " |
Considering this as a portion of the St. Lawrence drainage, we have the marvellous spectacle of a navigable waterway from the St. Louis River, Lake Superior, to Cape Gaspé at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, of twenty-one hundred miles in length, the Niagara River being paralleled to-day by the Welland Canal, and lesser canals affording a passageway around the rapids of the St. Mary's in the West and the St. Lawrence in the East. In a previous volume in the present series[1] it was seen that the improved rivers in the Ohio basin now offered a navigable pathway over four thousand miles in length; how insignificant is that prospect in view of this great transcontinental waterway two thousand miles in length but including the 268,000 square miles in the four great lakes alone! Well does George Waldo Browne in his beautiful volume on this subject, The St. Lawrence River, say:
Treated in a more extended manner, according to the ideas of the early French geographers, and taking either the river and lake of Nipigon, on the north of Superior, or the river St. Louis, flowing from the south-west, it has a grand total length of over two thousand miles. With its tributaries it drains over four hundred thousand square miles of country, made up of fertile valleys and plateaux inhabited by a prosperous people, desolate barrens, deep forests, where the foot of man has not yet left its imprint.
Seldom less than two miles in width, it is two and one-half miles wide where it issues from Ontario, and with several expansions which deserve the name of lake it becomes eighty miles in width where it ceases to be considered a river. The influence of the tide is felt as far up as Lake St. Peter, about one hundred miles from the gulf, while it is navigable for sea-going vessels to Montreal, eighty miles farther inland. Rapids impede navigation above this point, but by means of canals continuous communication is obtained to the head of Lake Superior.
If inferior in breadth to the mighty Amazon, if it lacks the length of the Mississippi, if without the stupendous gorges and cataracts of the Yang-tse-Kiang of China, if missing the ancient castles of the Rhine, if wanting the lonely grandeur that still overhangs the Congo of the Dark Continent, the Great River of Canada has features as remarkable as any of these. It has its source in the largest body of fresh water upon the globe, and among all of the big rivers of the world it is the only one whose volume is not sensibly affected by the elements. In rain or in sunshine, in spring floods or in summer droughts, this phenomenon of waterways seldom varies more than a foot in its rise and fall.
A Glimpse of Buffalo Harbor.
The history of the Niagara is so closely interwoven with that of the great "Queen City of the Lakes," Buffalo, that it would seem as though the famous waterway was in the suburb of the city and its greatest scenic attraction. However true this is to-day, it was very far from the case a century ago, for though the site of Buffalo was historic and important, the city, as such, is of comparative recent origin, coming to its own with giant strides in those last decades of the nineteenth century. Writes Mr. Rowland B. Mahany in his excellent chapter on "Buffalo" in The Historic Towns of the Middle States:
Few cities of the United States have a history more picturesque than Buffalo, or more typical of the forces that have made the Republic great. At the time of the adoption of the Federal constitution, in 1787, not a single white settler dwelt on the site of what is now the Queen of the Lakes; and it was not until after the second presidency of Washington, that Joseph Ellicott, the founder of Buffalo, laid out the plan of the town, which he called New Amsterdam.
On February 10, 1810, the "Town of Buffaloe" was created by act of the State Legislature, a name originally given to the locality by the Seneca Indians, who, we shall see, dominated the old Niagara frontier; it is believed that the name came from the animals which visited the neighbouring salt licks; and the name therefore may be much older than any settlement or even camping site. The village of New Amsterdam was now merged into the town of Buffalo, which boasted a newspaper in the second year of its existence, 1811. The story of the following years falls naturally into that of the disastrous war with England from 1812 to 1814, in which Buffalo suffered severely. As Mr. Mahany suggests, the story of Buffalo is characteristically American, and its phases, as such offer an inviting field, but one too wide for full examination in the present history.[2]
The important position of the city with reference to the Great Lakes was very greatly increased with the building of the Erie Canal from 1817 to 1825. It is interesting to recall the fact that it was in reality fear of the possibility of another war with England that caused the deciding vote for the Erie Canal project to be cast in its favour.[3] In the proper place we shall have impressed upon us the great distance that separated the Niagara frontier from the inhabited portion of the Republic at this early period, the great length of the land route and the difficulty of it; it was said to be far more than a cannon was worth to haul it to the frontier during the War of 1812. All this shows very distinctly the early condition surrounding the rise of the metropolis of the Niagara country, and, from being strange that little Buffalo did not grow faster, it is amazing to find such rapid growth during the first twenty-five years of her life.
With the opening of the canal in 1825 a new era dawned; the work of the great land companies in north-eastern New York drew vast armies of people thither, and the canal proved to be the great route for a much longer migration from the seaboard to the further north-west, to Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as to neighbouring Ohio. All this helped Buffalo. Numbers of travellers arriving at the future site of the Queen City of the Lakes at once decided that they could at least go farther and fare very much worse, and so sat down to grow up with the Niagara frontier. The proximity of the Falls had something to do, of course, with bringing increasingly larger numbers of travellers and transients to the Lake Erie village. But it was slow work, this building up a great city, and no doubt the very fact that the stones of the mighty edifice one finds beside that beautiful harbour to-day were laid slowly accounts for the solidity of the structure; Buffalo was not built on a boom.
From James L. Barton's reminiscences, for instance, we have clear pictures of the early struggle for business in this frontier town, which prove it to have been typically American. Mr. Barton owned a line of boats on the Lakes and canal but found it very difficult to find freight for the boats to carry down the State:
A few tons of freight [he writes], was all that we could furnish each boat to carry to Albany. This they would take in, and fill up at Rochester, which place, situated in the heart of the wheat-growing district of Western New York, furnished nearly all the down freight that passed on the canal. Thus we lived and struggled on until 1830. Our population had increased largely, and that year numbered six thousand and thirty-one. In the fall of 1831, I received from Cleveland one thousand bushels of wheat. . . . The next winter I made arrangement with the late Colonel Ira A. Blossom, the resident agent of the Holland Land Company, to furnish storage for all the wheat the settlers should bring in, towards the payment on their land contracts with the company. The whole amount did not exceed three thousand bushels. . . . In 1833 the Ohio canal was completed, which gave us a little more business. Northern Ohio was then the only portion of the great West that had any surplus agricultural products to send to an eastern market. In 1833 a little stir commenced in land operations, which increased the next year, and in 1835 became a perfect fever and swallowed up almost everything else. Nearly every person who had any enterprise got rich from buying and selling land; using little money in these transactions, but paying and receiving in pay, bonds and mortgages to an illimitable amount.
In 1837 the panic affected the young lake city as it did all parts of the land, but by 1840 the population of Buffalo had swelled to over eighteen thousand. The record of growth of the past century is a matter of figures strung on the faith of a great company of active, enterprising, far-sighted business men, until Buffalo ranks among the cities of half a million population, with a future unquestionably secure and brilliant.
The Niagara River is some nineteen hundred feet in width at its mouth here at Buffalo and forty-eight feet deep; the average rate of current here is under six miles per hour, but when south-west gales drive the lake billows in gigantic gulps down the river's mouth the current sometimes races as fast as twelve miles per hour. Old Fort Erie, built here at the mouth of the Niagara immediately after England won the continent from France, in 1764, was formerly the only settlement hereabouts, Black Rock, now part of Buffalo, at the mouth of the Erie Canal, was not settled until near the close of that century. It is believed that five forts have guarded the mouth of this strategic river, all known as Fort Erie. When the people of the opposite sides of the river were in conflict in 1812, Black Rock was the rival of Fort Erie. The large black rock which formed the landing-place of the ferry across the river here, and which gave the hamlet its name, was destroyed when the Erie Canal was built. Black Rock was formally laid out in 1804 and in 1853 was incorporated with the city of Buffalo.
Lafayette Square.
The upper Niagara with its even current and low-lying banks is not specially attractive. Grand Island, two miles below the mouth, divides the river into two narrow arms. This beautiful island, the Indian name of which was Owanunga, so popular to-day as a summering place, is remembered in history especially as the site selected in 1825 for Major M. M. Noah's "New Jerusalem," the proposed industrial centre of the Jews of the New World, but nothing was accomplished on the island itself toward the object in view.
At Buffalo, however, Noah took the title "Judge of Israel," and held a meeting in the old St. Paul's Church, where remarkable initiatory rites took place. In resplendent robes covered by a mantle of crimson silk, trimmed with ermine, the Judge held what he termed "impressive and unique ceremony," in which he read a proclamation to "all the Jews throughout the world," bringing them the glad tidings that on the ancient isle Owanunga "an asylum was prepared and offered to them," and that he did "revive, renew, and establish (in the Lord's name), the government of the Jewish nation, . . . confirming and perpetuating all our rights and privileges, our rank and power, among the nations of the earth as they existed and were recognised under the government of the Judges." Mr. Noah ordered a census of all the Hebrews in the world to be taken and did not forget, incidentally, to levy a tax of about one dollar and a half on every Jew in order to carry on the project. A "foundation stone" was prepared to be erected on the site of the future New Jerusalem; the following inscription was engraved upon it: