Most of the literary accounts of Niagara Falls in the nineteenth century spoke raptures about the cataracts as awe-inspiring and transcendent. Charles Dickens, who visited in 1841, even described the waterfalls as “angels’ tears” with “drops of many hues.”
Count on Mark Twain to poke fun at all the pretentious writings, as well as the hucksterism and trumpery that surrounded the falls themselves.
Twain visited Niagara Falls around 1871, when the falls were perhaps the most famous tourist attraction in the country, despite the fact that all the viewing sites around the falls were privately owned, and people had to pay not only to go on Goat Island, but even to view the falls from the mainland. There was also a proliferation of polluting mills and factories along the river shoreline, and on the islands above the Falls.
Complaints about the degradation and exploitation of Niagara Falls led New York state to buy the private properties and establish the first state park, the Niagara Reservation, in 1885. But when Twain visited, Niagara Falls was already infamous as a tawdry tourist trap.
In his short story, “Niagara,” Twain aimed his mocks at the tourists and hucksters. Of the “papa and momma, Johnny and Bub and Sis” who posed for photos before the falls, he wrote, “There is no actual harm in making Niagara a background whereon to display one’s marvelous insignificance in a good strong light, but it requires a sort of superhuman self-complacency to enable one to do it.”
The narrator of the story approaches “Indians” selling handmade beads and wares; they all speak with Irish accents. Ultimately, after he barely survives being thrown over the Falls after they mug him, the hapless tourist learns that all the “Indians” came from Limerick.
Twain had to endure Niagara Falls as ” the snubbed and diminished presentment of that majestic presence whose ministering spirits 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 [humans] 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.”
Despite his barbs at human frailty and venality, Twain was impressed by Niagara Falls. He may have thought it was too magnificent to be wasted on the paltry human race. In another short story, “The Diary of Adam and Eve,” he placed Niagara Falls in the Garden of Eden. He called the waterfalls “the finest thing on the estate.”
You can download a copy of the short story, “Niagara,” here: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/niagara.html thanks to the good folks at the University of Virginia.