Niagara: A History of the Falls Read Online Free Page A

is a plausible fancy, for Hennepin, by his own account, was shaken by the “dreadful roaring and bellowing of the Waters” and by the spectacle of the fearsome chasm, which he and his comrades “could not behold without a shudder.” Small wonder! At that point, as each second ticked by, 200,000 cubic feet of water – the equivalent of a million bathtubs emptying – was being hurled into the gorge from the precipice.
    These falls were unlike any that Hennepin had seen or heard of. He had probably viewed alpine cataracts in Switzerland, for he had travelled through southern Europe, but this fall defied the conventional image of how a cataract should look. It is its width, not its height, that makes Niagara spectacular. Taken together, the three falls are more than twenty times as wide as they are high. Their massiveness makes them unique. Fifty other waterfalls in the world have more height than Niagara, but of these only Victoria Falls is broader.
    Any falls with which the Father was familiar would have been slender – long, lacy columns of tumbling water bouncing from crag to crag like some sure-footed alpine creature. But here there were no mountains, and that astonished and puzzled Hennepin. The river coursed across a flat, forested plain and then, without warning, split in two and hurled itself over a dizzy cliff. “I could not conceive,” he wrote, “how it came to pass that four great Lakes … should empty themselves at this Great Fall, and yet not drown a good part of America.”
    He could not free himself of the stereotype of the mountain cataract. Europe got its first visual rendering of the Falls in an engraving based on the priest’s description. It shows the Horseshoe Falls twice as high as they are broad, the American Falls three times as high. And there are mountains in the distance! That became the basis for all pictorial representations for the next sixty years. Even as late as 1817, the Hennepin version of the Falls, complete with mountains, was appearing on maps of the region.
    Later, Hennepin made his way down the steep bank of the gorge, struggling over great boulders and slabs of slippery shale, threading his way between fallen trees and through a frozen web of vines and branches, to stand at the edge of the boiling river and to look up, through the veil of mist, at the half-obscured cataract. Here the thunder of the waters was so oppressive that he hazarded the guess it had driven away the Indians who had once lived in the vicinity, existing on the flesh of deer and waterfowl swept over the brink. To remain, Hennepin intimated, was to court deafness.

     
    First drawing of Niagara Falls based on Hennepin’s description
     
    Among those literary wanderers of the day who sought a wide and appreciative audience, exaggeration was the fashion. Tales abounded of strange and exotic sights in the world’s secret crannies – of dragons and devils, half-human creatures, sea beasts, two-headed beings, one-eyed cannibals, and all manner of wild and mysterious fauna. Hennepin was not free of hyperbole. Gazing across at the lesser cataract and watching the sheet of water pouring over the protruding edge of dolostone, he realized it would be possible to walk behind the falling waters. Later, he insisted that the ground under that fall “was big enough for four coaches to drive abreast without being wet.” That was a gross exaggeration.
    It was in Hennepin’s interest, as an ambitious author, to make “this prodigious cadence of water” even more stupendous. In his Description de la Louisiane , he created a waterfall three times the true height, boosting it from 170 feet to 500 – a prodigious cadence indeed. In his later revised description of 1697, he added another hundred feet. The book made his reputation in Europe. In Canada it established him as “un grand Menteur,” a great liar, as Pehr Kalm, a Swedish naturalist, discovered half a century later. Hennepin did not confine this embroidery to