Читать книгу The Niagara River - Archer Butler Hulbert - Страница 5

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The Strait of Niagara, or the Niagara River, as it is commonly called, ranks among the wonders of the world. The study of this stream is of intense and special interest to many classes of people, notably historians, archæologists, botanists, geologists, artists, mechanics, and electricians. It is doubtful if there is anywhere another thirty-six miles of riverway that can, in this respect, compare with it.

The term "strait" as applied to the Niagara correctly suggests the river's historic importance. The expression, recurring in so many of the relations of French and English military officers, "on this communication" also indicates Niagara's position in the story of the discovery, conquest, and occupation of the continent. It is probably the Falls which, technically, make Niagara a river; and so, in turn, it is the Falls that rendered Niagara an important strategic key of the vast waterway stretching from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the head of Lake Superior. The lack—so far as it does exist—of historic interest in the immediate Niagara region, the comparative paucity of military events of magnitude along that stream during the old French and the Revolutionary wars proves, on the one hand, what a wilderness separated the English on the South from the French on the North, and, on the other, how strong "the communication" was between Quebec and the French posts in the Middle West. It does not prove that Niagara was the less important.

The Falls increased the historic importance of Niagara because it limited navigation and made a portage necessary; the purposes of trade and missionary enterprise, as well as those of conquest, demanded that this point be occupied, and occupation necessarily meant defence. Here, from Lewiston and Queenston to Chippewa and Port Day (to use modern names) ran the two most famous portage paths of the continent. Here were to be seen at one time or another the footprints of as famous explorers, noble missionaries, and brave soldiers as ever went to conquest in history.

The Niagara River was important in the olden time to every mile of territory drained by the waters that flowed through it. What an empire to hold in fee! Here lies more than one-half the fresh water of the world—the solid contents being, according to Darby 1,547,011,792,300,000; it would form a solid cubic column measuring nearly twenty-two miles on each side.

The most remote body of water tributary to Niagara River is Lake Superior, 381 miles long and 161 miles broad with a circumference of 1150 miles. The Niagara of Lake Superior is the St. Mary's River, twenty-seven miles in length, its current very rapid, with water flowing over great masses of rock into Lake Huron. Lake Huron is 218 miles long and 20 miles wider than Lake Superior, but with a circumference of only 812 miles. Lake Michigan is 345 miles long and 84 broad and enters Lake Huron through Mackinaw Straits which are four miles in length, with a fall of four feet. In turn Lake Huron empties into the St. Clair and Detroit rivers which, with a total fall of eleven feet in fifty-one miles, forms the Niagara of Lake Erie. This sheet of water is 250 miles long and 60 miles broad at its widest part. The area drained by these lakes is as follows, including their own area:

Lake Superior	85,000 sq. m.
" Huron	74,000 "
" Michigan	70,040 "
" Erie	39,680 "
	————
Total	268,720 "

Considering this as a portion of the St. Lawrence drainage, we have the marvellous spectacle of a navigable waterway from the St. Louis River, Lake Superior, to Cape Gaspé at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, of twenty-one hundred miles in length, the Niagara River being paralleled to-day by the Welland Canal, and lesser canals affording a passageway around the rapids of the St. Mary's in the West and the St. Lawrence in the East. In a previous volume in the present series[1] it was seen that the improved rivers in the Ohio basin now offered a navigable pathway over four thousand miles in length; how insignificant is that prospect in view of this great transcontinental waterway two thousand miles in length but including the 268,000 square miles in the four great lakes alone! Well does George Waldo Browne in his beautiful volume on this subject, The St. Lawrence River, say:

Treated in a more extended manner, according to the ideas of the early French geographers, and taking either the river and lake of Nipigon, on the north of Superior, or the river St. Louis, flowing from the south-west, it has a grand total length of over two thousand miles. With its tributaries it drains over four hundred thousand square miles of country, made up of fertile valleys and plateaux inhabited by a prosperous people, desolate barrens, deep forests, where the foot of man has not yet left its imprint.

Seldom less than two miles in width, it is two and one-half miles wide where it issues from Ontario, and with several expansions which deserve the name of lake it becomes eighty miles in width where it ceases to be considered a river. The influence of the tide is felt as far up as Lake St. Peter, about one hundred miles from the gulf, while it is navigable for sea-going vessels to Montreal, eighty miles farther inland. Rapids impede navigation above this point, but by means of canals continuous communication is obtained to the head of Lake Superior.

If inferior in breadth to the mighty Amazon, if it lacks the length of the Mississippi, if without the stupendous gorges and cataracts of the Yang-tse-Kiang of China, if missing the ancient castles of the Rhine, if wanting the lonely grandeur that still overhangs the Congo of the Dark Continent, the Great River of Canada has features as remarkable as any of these. It has its source in the largest body of fresh water upon the globe, and among all of the big rivers of the world it is the only one whose volume is not sensibly affected by the elements. In rain or in sunshine, in spring floods or in summer droughts, this phenomenon of waterways seldom varies more than a foot in its rise and fall.