Niagara: A History of the Falls by Pierre Berton Page B

the overhanging cliffs above the river. They were, he discovered, remarkably similar. From this he deduced that Goat Island had once been under water (Lake Tonawanda, as we now know) and that a prehistoric river had covered the entire area to a greater depth.
    Above the lip of the gorge he found traces of that ancient river bank. The following year he came upon a remnant of the riverbed high up on the Canadian side, a mile and a half upriver from the Whirlpool. Thus he was able to show that the Niagara had once been a broader, shallower watercourse (as it still is above the Falls) and that it had been turned into the turbulent stream at the bottom of a deep and narrow gorge by the advance of the cataract. Evidence of that older, wider river, left behind above the gorge walls, gave Lyell the clues he needed.
    Lyell’s companion, James Hall, had pointed out that the Whirlpool was probably connected with a break in the Escarpment at St. Davids, west of Queenston. This led to a spectacular discovery – the so-called St. Davids Gorge, the buried channel of another prehistoric river running northwest from the Whirlpool to Lake Ontario. Lyell, who charted it, realized that the Falls, excavating its way upstream, had encountered the course of this ancient stream filled with the rubble of the ages – sediments from the older river and lake and soil from ice sheets – and dug it out again. This explained not only the ninety-degree turn of the river but also the presence of the Whirlpool. More geological evidence found later proved the theory correct.
    Lyell left the study of Niagara and went on to a knighthood and a host of awards, medals, and honorary degrees. He died at the age of seventy-seven while again revising his Principles . “The Falls of Niagara,” he wrote, “teach us not merely to appreciate the power of moving water, but furnish us at the same time with data for estimating the enormous lapse of ages during which that force has operated. A deep and long ravine has been excavated, and the river required ages to accomplish the task, yet the same region affords evidence that the sum of these ages is as nothing, and as the work of yesterday, when compared with the antecedent periods, of which there are monuments in the same district.”
    There was a time when those thoughts would have been considered outrageously heretical. But the work of Hall and Lyell, both of whom published scientific accounts of their findings, put an effective stopper on further controversy among the savants. Today Lyell’s ideas are so commonplace that he himself has faded into obscurity. Only the devotees of geological history now remember the half-blind barrister who climbed the great gorge and unravelled some of the mysteries of the ages.

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Spanning the gorge
    The railroads transformed Niagara, exploited it, glamorized it, cheapened it, and created on the banks of the gorge what has been called “the centre of a vortex of travel.” By 1845, close to fifty thousand sightseers annually were swarming over the region, a figure that had doubled in just five years. But the onrush had only begun. The promoters of two major lines, Canada’s Great Western and New York’s Rochester and Niagara (the forerunner of the New York Central), had their eyes on the new Mecca. Anybody who could afford a ticket could soon enjoy a spectacle that had once been the exclusive privilege of the upper classes.
    What was needed was a bridge suspended across that terrible chasm to join the two lines. Someone figured that it would immediately attract double the number of tourists, who would no longer be held back by the prospect of a a turbulent ride in a small ferry. The someone was a respected civil engineer, Charles B. Stuart, who had worked surveying both lines. If the toll were as little as twenty-five cents a passenger, so Stuart figured, the bridge would return a profit of 1 percent on the investment in the very first year.
    Stuart knew very little about