Niagara by Pierre Berton

Author:Pierre Berton [Berton, Pierre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-67365-5
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 1992-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

1

Arthur Midleigh’s folly

2

The ice bridge

3

Annie

4

Fame and fortune or instant death

5

Aftermath

1

Arthur Midleigh’s folly

In the dying days of September 1889, the year that saw Edward Dean Adams take over as president of the Cataract Construction Company, a young Englishman named Arthur Midleigh arrived at Niagara Falls, Ontario, disconsolate, bored, and not a little frustrated.

This was the twilight of the Victorian Age, when certain adventurous Englishmen sought fleeting fame in the far corners of the world – assaulting the rapids of the Congo, climbing the Matterhorn, pursuing wild boars in the Punjab, exploring the cannibal islands of the Pacific. Arthur Midleigh caught the fever. One cousin had ascended Mont Blanc. Another had gone after tigers in the jungles of India. Midleigh opted for the life of a cowboy in the American West, lured there by Ned Buntline’s romantic novels of Indian wars and reckless gunfighters. He had gone out to Wyoming in 1888 to work on a ranch, only to discover that Buntline’s Wild West was a fiction. The buffalo had long since vanished; the Indians were depressingly friendly; the bad men had all been shot or – worse – had settled down to a respectable existence.

As for the life of a cowboy, Midleigh found it boring, filthy, and wearisome: to his disgust, he had become nothing more than a common herdsman. After the best part of a year of bunkhouse life, he decided to go back home.

On his way back to England, Midleigh – a dashing figure with his unshorn locks, sombrero, and chaps – decided to stop briefly at Niagara Falls. He had, unwittingly, come to the right place, for he was determined to perform some impossible feat and thus return home in triumph. There were more impossible feats waiting to be performed at Niagara than at any other place on the continent.

The town itself reflected Midleigh’s sombre mood, for here, as in the so-called Wild West, all was anticlimax. The tourist season had ended. The itinerant peddlers had packed away their bead work and knickknacks, folded their tents or shut their booths, and departed. The crowd of tourists was already thinning, and in the newly created Queen Victoria Park, the gravel pathways were yellow with the falling leaves of autumn. As Midleigh discovered, it was no longer difficult to get a room at the Clifton House.

There, in the ornate lobby, he was regaled with tales of derring-do in Niagara’s waters that fired his imagination. It must have seemed to him that the community was crowded with would-be heroes, intent on making a name for themselves by plunging into the rapids, or riding the crest of the waves in a barrel, or even tempting the cataract itself. For some of these, a single deed of daredeviltry was not enough; they had to keep topping their previous feats – or at least pretending to do so. That very month, two of the most famous stunters, Carlisle Graham and Steve Brodie, had faked plunges over the Horseshoe Falls.

Everybody was talking about Graham’s fall from grace.

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