History and Representation in the Falls

We have been here eight days, and I am quite willing to go away, writes Margaret Fuller of her 1843 visit to Niagara Falls (71). The June weather had been cold and Fuller finds the incessant, indefatigable sound and motion of the Falls overwhelming. She acknowledges that in the Falls she has seen what drawings and panoramas and written descriptions have prepared her to see: she has known where to look for everything, and it has all looked she thought it (71-72). On first seeing both the British and American Falls, she has merely felt, 'ah, yes, here is the fall, just as I have seen it in pictures.' She has been so prepared by what she has read and heard about how to react to the Falls that her actual encounter with a place that by the mid-nineteenth century was already turning into over-hyped tourist destination has produced almost a feeling of disappointment (76). If Fuller felt herself over-prepared for viewing the Falls after the Lockport and Niagara Falls railway line (1836) and steamship travel had opened access to tourists, she would have felt even more so after the Civil War when Americans embraced their country's natural resources as images of re-unification and national pride. Fictional and nonfictional accounts of the Falls multiplied as did and panoramas, the most famous being the 1857 seven-foot long painting Niagara by Frederick Church that was exhibited in both the United States and England and was reproduced in thousands of chromolithographs. Yet even as Fuller opens and closes her first chapter of Summer on the Lakes with her exhaustion in the face of a natural wonder that has been turned into a cliche, she embeds within her narrative a description of moments when the Falls have transcended the that images and descriptions have taught her to expect. The Niagara Falls area has inspired in her an undefined dread ... such as may be felt when death is about to usher us into a new existence (72). Her strongest come not from the Falls but from the rapids because she has not been prepared for their sublimity ... by descriptions and by paintings (76). She recognizes the power, also, of the whirlpool below the Falls, finding it fearful ... to know ... that whatever has been swallowed by the cataract, is likely to rise suddenly to light here, whether uprooted tree, or body of man or bird (73). Fuller concludes her description of the Falls, which ironically adds to the growing literature that prepared people for how to feel, envying those who encountered them unspoiled so their feelings were entirely their own (77). In the nineteenth century, Niagara Falls became the most visible of what John Sears has called America's Sacred Places and visitors to the Falls were prepared to feel danger, chaos, and religious awe. (1) But the Falls themselves were not enough. They were popularized with rides on The Maid of the Mist (1846), descents into The Cave of the Winds (stair access opening in 1829), the entertainment of stunt men, access to souvenir shops, and even a museum of curiosities. Competing interests vied for industrial and tourist space until the Free Niagara! movement championed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Frederick Church resulted in the purchase of land from private owners, culminating in the design and building of the Niagara Reservation, America's first state park, which was completed in 1885. Tourism today thrives around a Niagara Falls that includes a protected park with gardens in the form of the Great Lakes and footpaths along the Niagara Gorge and the Falls. The Cave of the Winds and The Maid of the Mist continue to attract tourists as does a scenic trolley ride and aquarium for those who like their nature less raw. Like Fuller, Joyce Carol Oates captures in her 2004 novel The Falls the power of Niagara Falls and its desecration by American industrialism. The word sublime was in the nineteenth century most famously articulated by Thomas Cole, who distinguished it from the harmonious, calm, beautiful and the rough, irregular picturesque by its largeness, its evocation in the viewer of of awe. …