Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies

Americans call Niagara Falls a natural wonder, but the Falls aren't very natural anymore. In fact, they are a study in artifice. Water diverted, riverbed reshaped, brink stabilized and landscape redesigned, the Falls are more a monument to man's meddling than to nature's strength. Held up as an example of something real, they are hemmed in with fakery — waxworks, haunted houses, IMAX films and ersatz Indian tales. A symbol of American manifest destiny, they are shared politely with Canada. Emblem of nature's power, they are completely human-controlled. Archetype of natural beauty, they belie an ugly environmental legacy still bubbling up from below. On every level, Niagara Falls is a monument to how America falsifies nature, reshaping its contours and redirecting its force while claiming to submit to its will.

Combining history, reportage and personal narrative, Inventing Niagara traces Niagara's journey from sublime icon to engineering marvel to camp spectacle. Along the way, Ginger Strand uncovers the hidden history of America's waterfall: the Mohawk chief who wrested the Falls from his adopted tribe, the revered town father who secretly assisted slave catchers, the wartime workers who unknowingly helped build the Bomb and the building contractor who bought and sold a pharaoh. With an uncanny ability to zero in on the buried truth, Strand introduces us to underwater dams, freaks of nature, mythical maidens and 280,000 radioactive mice buried at Niagara.

From LaSalle to Lincoln to Los Alamos, Mohawks to Marilyn, Niagara's story is America's story, a tale of dreams founded on the mastery of nature. At a time of increasing environmental crisis, Inventing Niagara shows us how understanding the cultural history of nature might help us rethink our place in it today.

"With wit and passion, Strand (Flight: A Novel) explores the history of Niagara Falls and shows that the famous natural wonder is in reality a prime example of man's manipulation of nature, constantly exploited to attract tourists. In the 19th century, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, appalled by the crass commercialism of souvenir shops, ugly signs and cheap attractions, pledged to restore Niagara to its natural beauty; instead, he created a fake wilderness. In the 20th century, humans learned to control the falls by harnessing them for electric power, and this led to what is for Strand the most shocking fakery: the water going over the falls is manipulated for greater output in the daytime — to impress visitors — and turned down at night to generate more power. In addition, the capacity to generate large amounts of hydroelectricity has made Niagara Falls a prime spot for industries that manufacture electrochemical products and for nuclear weapons facilities; the author paints a vivid picture of a region awash today in toxic waste and radioactive contaminants. Strand's provocative and iconoclastic book says much about how America has dominated nature, despoiled it and shrouded the offense in myth. 8 pages of color photos not seen by PW." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"This book documents an obsession," writes Ginger Strand in her entertaining study of the exploitation of Niagara Falls, both town and waterfall. Niagara's history, she claims, is fraught with "falsification, prevarication and omission." In "Inventing Niagara," she sets out on a quest to cut through the cultural accretions of centuries and find the fundamental truth about Niagara.

... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) At its most basic, Niagara Falls is a big, green waterfall that straddles the border between the United States and Canada on the strait that links Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. But over time, Niagara has also become a place of kitschy tourism, daredevil stunts, gambling and large-scale industrial development which all too quickly turned into environmental disaster. The waterfall itself has been propped up and rejiggered by feats of engineering in an attempt to prevent it from crumbling under the force of its own water and to maintain its scenic impact despite the diversion of as much as three-quarters of its water to produce electricity.

"Inventing Niagara" begins with Strand debunking the popular legend of the Maid of the Mist, a gorgeous Indian maiden purportedly sent over the falls topless in a canoe to save her village from a plague. But Native Americans in what became western New York never practiced human sacrifice. In a place defined by artifice, Strands writes, "it seems appropriate that its originary myth would be made-up."

Strand touches on a broad array of topics, from the Underground Railroad to the 19th-century romantic view of the sublime, "prettiness with a point." She's a bit hard on Frederick Law Olmsted, who did, indeed, superimpose his own version of nature when he designed the allegedly natural state park at Niagara, but one hesitates to imagine what America would be like today without the designed-to-appear-natural parks that Olmsted created.

Strand's explanation of how the Army Corps of Engineers solved the problem of accommodating massive water diversion for hydroelectric power while maintaining the falls' magnificent appearance is at once complex and accessible. This work, accomplished primarily in the mid-20th century, included the construction of a series of mostly submerged dams to control and even cut the flow of water, as well as the blasting and reinforcing of the rockface. Equally masterful is her presentation of the publicity campaign, dating back to the 1910s and '20s, that convinced the public that "keeping Niagara pretty meant taking more water away."

In writing about Niagara Falls, most likely Strand had no choice but to review the oft-told tales of thrill seekers going over in barrels, of daredevils and tightrope walkers, honeymooners, gamblers and shady entrepreneurs arranging for animals to be sent over the falls for the edification of paying observers. She presents the whole gaudy, tiresome tourist show, and in the process she sometimes lets her tendency to play for the laugh get the better of her.

Strand is strongest when she's filled with indignation. Her denunciation of the terrible excesses of industrial development is especially pointed in her discussion of Love Canal, the toxic waste dumping ground turned residential Niagara Falls neighborhood that literally made its citizens ill. Her sadness is palpable as she shows how the misguided values of Robert Moses helped to destroy the town of Niagara Falls, N.Y., by separating it from the waterfall with a four-lane highway. The final blow was delivered by the unconscionable urban renewal project of the 1960s, which tore down large swathes of the old town in an act of what she calls "municipal citycide."

And yet ... one morning Strand visits the falls and discovers this: "The rapids swirl and crash, and the trees in their brilliant autumn colors have a hallucinatory three-dimensionality. The little glades along the riverbank look like habitations for sprites and dryads, and the burbling river glints like crystal."

Niagara Falls is still a place worthy of obsession.

Lauren Belfer is the author of the novel "City of Light."

Reviewed by Lauren Belfer, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Ginger Strand was raised in Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Her fiction and essays have appeared in many places, including The Believer, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Carolina Quarterly. She has been awarded fiction residencies by Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She lives in New York City.