Old Trails on the Niagara Frontier Part 13

From morn to night here noise and riot reign; From night to morn 'tis noise and roar again.

Not a flattering picture, truly, and yet no doubt a trustworthy one, of this period in Oswego's history.

But we must hurry along with the poet to his destination, although the temptation to linger with him in this part of the journey is great.

Indeed, "The Foresters" is a historic chronicle of no slight value.

There is no doubting the fidelity of its pictures of the state of nature and of man along this storied route as seen by its author at the beginning of the century; while his poetic philosophizing is now shrewd, now absurd, but always ardently American in tone.

Our foresters undertook to coast along the Ontario sh.o.r.e in their frail "Niagara"; narrowly escaped swamping, and were picked up by

A friendly sloop for Queenstown Harbor bound,

where they arrived safely, after being gloriously seasick. It was the season of autumn gales. A few days before a British packet called the Speedy, with some twenty or thirty persons on board, including a judge advocate, other judges, witnesses and an Indian prisoner, had foundered and every soul perished. No part of the Speedy was afterwards found but the pump, which Wilson says his captain picked up and carried to Queenston.

Wilson had moralized, philosophized and rhapsodized all the way from the Schuylkill. His verse, as he approaches the Mecca of his wanderings, fairly palpitates with expectation and excitement. He was not a bard to sing in a majestic strain, but his description of the falls and their environment is vivid and of historic value. As they tramped through the forest,--

Heavy and slow, increasing on the ear, Deep through the woods a rising storm we hear.

Th' approaching gust still loud and louder grows, As when the strong northeast resistless blows, Or black tornado, rus.h.i.+ng through the wood, Alarms th' affrighted swains with uproar rude.

Yet the blue heavens displayed their clearest sky, And dead below the silent forests lie; And not a breath the lightest leaf a.s.sailed; But all around tranquillity prevailed.

"What noise is that?" we ask with anxious mien, A dull salt-driver pa.s.sing with his team.

"Noise? noise?--why, nothing that I hear or see But Nagra Falls--Pray, whereabouts live ye?"

This touch of realism ushers in a long and over-wrought description of the whole scene. The "cras.h.i.+ng roar," he says,

---- bade us kneel and Time's great G.o.d adore.

Whatever may have been his emotions, his adjectives are sadly inadequate, and his verse devoid of true poetic fervor. More than one of his descriptive pa.s.sages, however, give us those glimpses of conditions past and gone, which the historian values. For instance, this:

High o'er the wat'ry uproar, silent seen, Sailing sedate, in majesty serene, Now midst the pillared spray sublimely lost, Swept the gray eagles, gazing calm and slow, On all the horrors of the gulf below; Intent, alone, to sate themselves with blood, From the torn victims of the raging flood.

Wilson was not the man to mistake a bird; and many other early travelers have testified to the former presence of eagles in considerable numbers, haunting the gorge below the falls in quest of the remains of animals that had been carried down stream.

Moore, as we have seen, denounced the country for its lack of

That lingering radiance of immortal mind

which so inspires the poet in older lands. He was right in his fact, but absurd in his fault-finding. It has somewhere been said of him, that Niagara Falls was the only thing he found in America which overcame his self-importance; but we must remember his youth, the flatteries on which he had fed at home and the crudities of American life at that time. For a quarter of a century after Tom Moore's visit there was much in the cra.s.s a.s.sertiveness of American democracy which was as ridiculous in its way as the Old-World ideas of cla.s.s and social distinctions were in their way--and vastly more vulgar and offensive. Read, in evidence, Mrs.

Trollope and Capt. Basil Hall, two of America's severest and sincerest critics. It should be put down to Tom Moore's credit, too, that before he died he admitted to Was.h.i.+ngton Irving and to others that his writings on America were the greatest sin of his early life.[80]

Like Moore, Alexander Wilson felt America's lack of a poet; and, like Barlow and Humphreys and Freneau and others of forgotten fame, he undertook--like them again, unsuccessfully--to supply the lack. There is something pathetic--or grotesque, as we look at it--in the patriotic efforts of these commonplace men to be great for their country's sake.

To Europe's sh.o.r.es renowned in deathless song,

asks Wilson,

Must all the honors of the bard belong?

And rural Poetry's enchanting strain Be only heard beyond th' Atlantic main?

Yet Nature's charms that bloom so lovely here, Unhailed arrive, unheeded disappear; While bare black heaths and brooks of half a mile Can rouse the thousand bards of Britain's Isle.

There, scarce a stream creeps down its narrow bed, There scarce a hillock lifts its little head, Or humble hamlet peeps their glades among But lives and murmurs in immortal song.

Our Western world, with all its matchless floods, Our vast transparent lakes and boundless woods, Stamped with the traits of majesty sublime, Unhonored weep the silent lapse of time, Spread their wild grandeur to the unconscious sky, In sweetest seasons pa.s.s unheeded by; While scarce one Muse returns the songs they gave, Or seeks to s.n.a.t.c.h their glories from the grave.

This solicitude by the early American writers, lest the poetic themes of their country should go unsung, contrasts amusingly, as does Moore's ill-natured complaining, with the prophetic a.s.surance of Bishop Berkeley's famous lines, written half a century or so before, in allusion to America:

The muse, disgusted at an age and clime Barren of every glorious theme, In distant lands now waits a better time, Producing subjects worthy fame.

Westward the course of empire takes its way, ...

I have found no other pilgrim poets making Niagara their theme, until the War of 1812 came to create heroes and leave ruin along the frontier, and stir a few patriotic singers to hurl back defiance to the British hordes. Iambic defiance, unless kindled by a grand genius, is a poor sort of fireworks, even when it undertakes to combine patriotism and natural grandeur. Certainly something might be expected of a poet who sandwiches Niagara Falls in between b.l.o.o.d.y battles, and gives us the magnificent in nature, the gallant in warfare and the loftiest patriotism in purpose, the three strains woven in a triple paean of pa.s.sion, ninety-four duodecimo pages in length. Such a work was offered to the world at Baltimore in 1818, with this t.i.tle-page: "Battle of Niagara, a Poem Without Notes, and Goldau, or the Maniac Harper. Eagles and Stars and Rainbows. By Jehu O' Cataract, author of 'Keep Cool.'" I have never seen "Keep Cool," but it must be very different from the "Battle of Niagara," or it belies its name. The fiery Jehu O' Cataract was John Neal.[81]

The "Battle of Niagara," he informs the reader, was written when he was a prisoner; when he "felt the victories of his countrymen." "I have attempted," he says, "to do justice to American scenery and American character, not to versify minutiae of battles." The poem has a metrical introduction and four cantos, in which is told, none too lucidly, the story of the battle of Niagara; with such flights of eagles, scintillation of stars and breaking of rainbows, that no brief quotation can do it justice. In style it is now Miltonic, now reminiscent of Walter Scott. The opening canto is mainly an apostrophe to the Bird, and a vision of glittering hors.e.m.e.n. Canto two is a dissertation on Lake Ontario, with word-pictures of the primitive Indian. The rest of the poem is devoted to the battle near the great cataract--and throughout all are sprinkled the eagles, stars and rainbows. Do not infer from this characterization that the production is wholly bad; it is merely a good specimen of that early American poetry which was just bad enough to escape being good.

A brief pa.s.sage or two will sufficiently ill.u.s.trate the author's trait of painting in high colors. He is a word-impressionist whose brush, with indiscreet dashes, mars the composition. I select two pa.s.sages descriptive of the battle:

The drum is rolled again. The bugle sings And far upon the wind the cross flag flings A radiant challenge to its starry foe, That floats--a sheet of light!--away below, Where troops are forming--slowly in the night Of mighty waters; where an angry light Bounds from the cataract, and fills the skies With visions--rainbows--and the foamy dyes That one may see at morn in youthful poets' eyes.

Niagara! Niagara! I hear Thy tumbling waters. And I see thee rear Thy thundering sceptre to the clouded skies: I see it wave--I hear the ocean rise, And roll obedient to thy call. I hear The tempest-hymning of thy floods in fear; The quaking mountains and the nodding trees-- The reeling birds and the careering breeze-- The tottering hills, unsteadied in thy roar; Niagara! as thy dark waters pour One everlasting earthquake rocks thy lofty sh.o.r.e!

The cavalcade went by. The day hath gone; And yet the soldier lives; his cheerful tone Rises in boisterous song; while slowly calls The monarch spirit of the mighty falls: Soldier, be firm! and mind your watchfires well; Sleep not to-night!

The following picture of the camp at sunset, as the reveille rings over the field, and Niagara's m.u.f.fled drums vibrate through the dusk, presents many of the elements of true poetry:

Low stooping from his arch, the glorious sun Hath left the storm with which his course begun; And now in rolling clouds goes calmly home In heavenly pomp adown the far blue dome.

In sweet-toned minstrelsy is heard the cry, All clear and smooth, along the echoing sky, Of many a fresh-blown bugle full and strong, The soldier's instrument! the soldier's song!

Niagara, too, is heard; his thunder comes Like far-off battle--hosts of rolling drums.

All o'er the western heaven the flaming clouds Detach themselves and float like hovering shrouds.

Loosely unwoven, and afar unfurled, A sunset canopy enwraps the world.

The Vesper hymn grows soft. In parting day Wings flit about. The warblings die away, The sh.o.r.es are dizzy and the hills look dim, The cataract falls deeper and the landscapes swim.

Jehu O' Cataract does not always hold his fancy with so steady a rein as this. He is p.r.o.ne to eccentric flights, to bathos and absurdities. His apostrophe to Lake Ontario, several hundred lines in length, has many fine fancies, but his luxuriant imagination continually wrecks itself on extravagancies which break down the effect. This I think the following lines ill.u.s.trate:

... He had fought with savages, whose breath He felt upon his cheek like mildew till his death.

So stood the battle. Bravely it was fought, Lions and Eagles met. That hill was bought And sold in desperate combat. Wrapped in flame, Died these idolaters of bannered fame.

Three times that meteor hill was bravely lost-- Three times 'twas bravely won, while madly tost, Encountering red plumes in the dusky air; While Slaughter shouted in her b.l.o.o.d.y lair, And spectres blew their horns and shook their whistling hair.

There are allusions to Niagara in some of the ballads of the War of 1812, one of the finest of which, "Sea and Land Victories," beginning

With half the western world at stake See Perry on the midland lake,--

appeared in the Naval Songster of 1815, and was a great favorite half a century or more ago. So far, however, as the last War with Great Britain has added to our store of poetry by turning the attention of the poets to the Niagara region as a strikingly picturesque scene of war, there is little worthy of attention. One ambitious work is remembered, when remembered at all, as a curio of literature. This is "The Fredoniad, or Independence Preserved," an epic poem by Richard Emmons, a Kentuckian, afterwards a physician of Philadelphia. He worked on it for ten years, finally printed it in 1826, and in 1830 got it through a second edition, ostentatiously dedicated to Lafayette. "The Fredoniad" is a history in verse of the War of 1812; it was published in four volumes; it has forty cantos, filling 1,404 duodecimo pages, or a total length of about 42,000 lines. The first and second cantos are devoted to h.e.l.l, the third to Heaven, and the fourth to Detroit. About one-third of the whole work is occupied with military operations on the Niagara frontier. Nothing from Fort Erie to Fort Niagara escapes this meter-machine. The Doctor's poetic feet stretch out to miles and leagues, but not a single verse do I find that prompts to quotation; though, I am free to confess, I have not read them all, and much doubt if any one save the infatuated author, and perhaps his proof-reader, ever did read the whole of "The Fredoniad."

No sooner was the frontier at peace, and the pathways of travel multiplied and smoothed, than there set in the first great era of tourist travel to Niagara. From 1825, when the opening of the Erie Ca.n.a.l first made the falls easily accessible to the East, the tide of visitors steadily swelled. In that year came one other poetizing pilgrim, from York, now Toronto, who, returning home, published in his own city a duodecimo of forty-six pages, ent.i.tled "Wonders of the West, or a Day at the Falls of Niagara in 1825. A Poem. By a Canadian." The author was J.

S. Alexander, said to have been a Toronto school-teacher. It is a great curio, though of not the least value as poetry; in fact, as verse it is ridiculously bad. The author does not narrate his own adventures at Niagara, but makes his descriptive and historical pa.s.sages incidental to the story of a hero named _St. Julian_. Never was the name of this beloved patron saint of travelers more unhappily bestowed, for this _St.

Julian_ is a lugubrious, crack-brained individual who mourns the supposed death of a lady-love, _Eleanor St. Fleur_. Other characters are introduced; all French except a remarkable driver named _Wogee_, who tells legends and historic incidents in as good verse, apparently, as the author was able to produce. _St. Julian_ is twice on the point of committing suicide; once on Queenston Heights, and again at the falls.

Just as he is about to throw himself into the river he hears his _Ellen's_ voice--the lady, it seems, had come from France by a different route--all the mysteries are cleared up, and the reunited lovers and their friends decide to "hasten hence,"

Again to our dear native France, Where we shall talk of all we saw, At thy dread falls, Niagara.[82]