 | Mark Twain's sketches, new and old |  |
NIAGARA.
NIAGARA FALLS is a most enjoyable
place of resort. The hotels
are excellent, and the prices not
at all exorbitant. The opportunities for
fishing are not surpassed in the country;
in fact, they are not even equalled elsewhere.
Because, in other localities,
certain places in the streams are much
better than others; but at Niagara one
place is just as good as another, for the
reason that the fish do not bite anywhere,
and so there is no use in your walking
five miles to fish, when you can depend
on being just as unsuccessful nearer
home. The advantages of this state of
things have never heretofore been properly placed before the public.
The weather is cool in summer, and the walks and drives are all pleasant and
about a mile, and pay a small sum for the privilege of looking down from a precipice
into the narrowest part of the Niagara river. A railway “cut” through a hill
would be as comely if it had the angry river tumbling and foaming through its
bottom. You can descend a staircase here a hundred and fifty feet down, and
stand at the edge of the water. After you have done it, you will wonder why you
did it; but you will then be too late.
The guide will explain to you, in his blood-curdling way, how he saw the little
steamer, Maid of the Mist, descend the fearful rapids—how first one paddle-box
was out of sight behind the raging billows, and then the other, and at what point it
was that her smokestack toppled overboard, and where her planking began to break
and part asunder—and how she did finally live through the trip, after accomplishing
the incredible feat of travelling seventeen miles in six minutes, or six miles in
seventeen minutes, I have really forgotten which. But it was very extraordinary,
anyhow. It is worth the price of admission to hear the guide tell the story nine
times in succession to different parties, and never miss a word or alter a sentence
or a gesture.
Then you drive over the Suspension Bridge, and divide your misery between the
chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and the chances
of having the railway train overhead smashing down on to you. Either possibility
is discomforting taken by itself, but mixed together, they amount in the aggregate
to positive unhappiness.
On the Canada side you drive along the chasm between long ranks of photographers
standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an ostentatious frontispiece
of you and your decaying ambulance, and your solemn crate with a hide on
it, which you are expected to regard in the light of a horse, and a diminished and
unimportant background of sublime Niagara; and a great many people have the
incredible effrontery or the native depravity to aid and abet this sort of crime.
Any day, in the hands of these photographers, you may see stately pictures of
papa and mamma, Johnny and Bub and Sis, or a couple of country cousins, all
smiling vacantly, and all disposed in studied and uncomfortable attitudes in their
carriage, and all looming up in their awe-inspiring imbecility before the snubbed
are the rainbows, whose voice is the thunder, whose awful front is veiled in clouds,
who was monarch here dead and forgotten ages before this hackful of small reptiles
was deemed temporarily necessary to fill a crack in the world's unnoted myriads,
and will still be monarch here ages and decades of ages after they shall have gathered
themselves to their blood relations, the other worms, and been mingled with
the unremembering dust.
There is no actual harm in making Niagara a background whereon to display
one's marvellous insignificance in a good strong light, but it requires a sort of
superhuman self-complacency to enable one to do it.
When you have examined the stupendous Horseshoe Fall till you are satisfied
you cannot improve on it, you return to America by the new Suspension Bridge,
and follow up the bank to where they exhibit the Cave of the Winds.
Here I followed instructions, and divested myself of all my clothing, and put
on a waterproof jacket and overalls. This costume is picturesque, but not beautiful.
A guide, similarly dressed, led the way down a flight of winding stairs, which
wound and wound, and still kept on winding long after the thing ceased to be a
had begun to be a pleasure. We were then
well down under the precipice, but still considerably
above the level of the river.
We now began to creep along flimsy bridges
of a single plank, our persons shielded from
destruction by a crazy wooden railing, to which
I clung with both hands—not because I was
afraid, but because I wanted to. Presently the
descent became steeper, and the bridge flimsier,
and sprays from the American Fall began to
rain down on us in fast-increasing sheets that
soon became blinding, and after that our progress
was mostly in the nature of groping.
Now a furious wind began to rush out from
behind the waterfall, which seemed determined
to sweep us from the bridge, and scatter us on
the rocks and among the torrents below. I
remarked that I wanted to go home; but it was
too late. We were almost under the monstrous
wall of water thundering down from above, and
speech was in vain in the midst of such a
pitiless crash of sound.
In another moment the guide disappeared
behind the deluge, and bewildered by the
thunder, driven helplessly by the wind, and
smitten by the arrowy tempest of rain, I followed.
All was darkness. Such a mad storming,
roaring, and bellowing of warring wind and
water never crazed my ears before. I bent my
head, and seemed to receive the Atlantic on
my back. The world seemed going to destruction. I could not see anything, the
of the American cataract went down my throat. If I had sprung a leak now, I
had been lost. And at this moment I discovered that the bridge had ceased, and
we must trust for a foothold to the slippery and precipitous rocks. I never was so
scared before and survived it. But we got through at last, and emerged into the
open day, where we could stand in front of the laced and frothy and seething world
of descending water, and look at it. When I saw how much of it there was, and
how fearfully in earnest it was, I was sorry I had gone behind it.
The noble Red Man has always been a friend and darling of mine. I love to
read about him in tales and legends and romances. I love to read of his inspired
sagacity, and his love of the wild free life of mountain and forest, and his general
nobility of character, and his stately metaphorical manner of speech, and his
chivalrous love for the dusky maiden, and the picturesque pomp of his dress and
accoutrements. Especially the picturesque pomp of his dress and accoutrements.
When I found the shops at Niagara Falls full of dainty Indian bead-work, and
stunning moccasins, and equally stunning toy figures representing human beings who
carried their weapons in holes bored through their arms and bodies, and had feet
shaped like a pie, I was filled with emotion. I knew that now, at last, I was going
to come face to face with the noble Red Man.
A lady clerk in a shop told me, indeed, that all her grand array of curiosities
were made by the Indians, and that they were plenty about the Falls, and that they
were friendly, and it would not be dangerous to speak to them. And sure enough,
as I approached the bridge leading over to Luna Island, I came upon a noble Son
of the Forest sitting under a tree, diligently at work on a bead reticule. He wore
a slouch hat and brogans, and had a short black pipe in his mouth. Thus does
the baneful contact with our effeminate civilization dilute the picturesque pomp
which is so natural to the Indian when far removed from us in his native haunts.
I addressed the relic as follows:—
“Is the Wawhoo-Wang-Wang of the Whack-a-Whack happy? Does the great
Speckled Thunder sigh for the war path, or is his heart contented with dreaming
of the dusky maiden, the Pride of the Forest? Does the mighty Sachem yearn to
drink the blood of his enemies, or is he satisfied to make bead reticules for the
ruin, speak!”
The relic said—
“An' is it mesilf, Dennis Hooligan, that ye'd be takin' for a dirty Injin, ye
drawlin', lantern-jawed, spider-legged divil! By the piper that played before
Moses, I'll ate ye!”
I went away from there.
By and by, in the neighborhood of the Terrapin Tower, I came upon a gentle
daughter of the aborigines in fringed and beaded buckskin moccasins and leggins,
seated on a bench, with her pretty wares about her. She had just carved out a
wooden chief that had a strong family resemblance to a clothes-pin, and was now
and then addressed her:
“Is the heart of the forest maiden heavy? Is the Laughing Tadpole lonely?
Does she mourn over the extinguished council-fires of her race, and the vanished
glory of her ancestors? Or does her sad spirit wander afar toward the hunting-grounds
whither her brave Gobbler-of-the-Lightnings is gone? Why is my daughter
silent? Has she aught against the
paleface stranger?”
The maiden said—
“Faix, an' is it Biddy Malone ye
dare to be callin' names? Lave this,
or I'll shy your lean carcass over
the cataract, ye sniveling blaggard!”
I adjourned from there also.
“Confound these Indians!” I said.
“They told me they were tame; but,
if appearances go for anything, I
should say they were all on the war
path.”
I made one more attempt to fraternize
with them, and only one. I
came upon a camp of them gathered
in the shade of a great tree, making wampum and moccasins, and addressed them
in the language of friendship:
“Noble Red Men, Braves, Grand Sachems, War Chiefs, Squaws, and High Muck-a-Mucks,
the paleface from the land of the setting sun greets you! You, Beneficent
Polecat—you, Devourer of Mountains—you, Roaring Thundergust—you, Bully Boy
with a Glass eye—the paleface from beyond the great waters greets you all! War
and pestilence have thinned your ranks, and destroyed your once proud nation.
Poker and seven-up, and a vain modern expense for soap, unknown to your glorious
ancestors, have depleted your purses. Appropriating, in your simplicity, the property
of others, has gotten you into trouble. Misrepresenting facts, in your simple
forty-rod whisky, to enable you to get drunk and happy and tomahawk your families,
has played the everlasting mischief with the picturesque pomp of your dress, and
here you are, in the broad light of the nineteenth century, gotten up like the ragtag
and bobtail of the purlieus of New York. For shame! Remember your ancestors!
Recall their mighty deeds! Remember Uncas!—and Red Jacket!—and Hole in
the Day!—and Whoopdedoodledo! Emulate their achievements! Unfurl yourselves
under my banner, noble savages, illustrious guttersnipes”—
“Down wid him!” “Scoop the blaggard!” “Burn him!” “Hang him!”
“Dhround him!”
It was the quickest operation that ever was. I simply saw a sudden flash in the
air of clubs, brickbats, fists, bead-baskets, and moccasins—a single flash, and they
all appeared to hit me at once, and no two of them in the same place. In the next
instant the entire tribe was upon me. They tore half the clothes off me; they
broke my arms and legs; they gave me a thump that dented the top of my head
till it would hold coffee like a saucer; and, to crown their disgraceful proceedings
and add insult to injury, they threw me over the Niagara Falls, and I got wet.
About ninety or a hundred feet from the top, the remains of my vest caught on
a projecting rock, and I was almost drowned before I could get loose. I finally
fell, and brought up in a world of white foam at the foot of the Fall, whose celled
and bubbly masses towered up several inches above my head. Of course I got
into the eddy. I sailed round and round in it forty-four times—chasing a chip
and gaining on it—each round trip a half mile—reaching for the same bush on the
bank forty-four times, and just exactly missing it by a hair's-breadth every time.
At last a man walked down and sat down close to that bush, and put a pipe in
his mouth, and lit a match, and followed me with one eye and kept the other on
the match, while he sheltered it in his hands from the wind. Presently a puff of
wind blew it out. The next time I swept around he said—
“Got a match?”
“Yes; in my other vest. Help me out, please.”
“Not for Joe.”
When I came round again, I said—
“Excuse the seemingly impertinent curiosity of a drowning man, but will you
explain this singular conduct of yours?”
“With pleasure. I am the coroner. Don't hurry on my account. I can wait
for you. But I wish I had a match.”
I said—“Take my place, and I'll go and get you one.”
He declined. This lack of confidence on his part created a coldness between
us, and from that time forward I avoided him. It was my idea, in case anything
happened to me, to so time the occurrence
as to throw my custom into the
hands of the opposition coroner over
on the American side.
At last a policeman came along,
and arrested me for disturbing the
peace by yelling at people on shore for
help. The judge fined me, but I had
the advantage of him. My money
was with my pantaloons, and my
pantaloons were with the Indians.
Thus I escaped. I am now lying in
a very critical condition. At least I
am lying anyway — critical or not
critical. I am hurt all over, but I cannot
tell the full extent yet, because
the doctor is not done taking inventory. He will make out my manifest this evening.
However, thus far he thinks only sixteen of my wounds are fatal. I don't
mind the others.
Upon regaining my right mind, I said—
“It is an awful savage tribe of Indians that do the bead work and moccasins for
Niagara Falls, doctor. Where are they from?”
“Limerick, my son.”
| Mark Twain's sketches, new and old | |