Читать книгу Toronto Sketches 12 - Mike Filey - Страница 9

June 10, 2012

If all goes as planned, next Friday all eyes will be on, or should I say above, the Canadian Horseshoe Falls as daredevil Nik Wallenda performs his spectacular tightrope walk (an activity also known as funambulism) from Goat Island on the American side to Table Rock on our side. This will be the first time this particular route across the river has been attempted.

Historically, crossing the Niagara River was first attempted by French showman Jean Francois Gravelet, who performed as The Great Blondin more than a century and a half ago. But that event, and the dozens of similar tightrope crossings that followed, were all done across the river well north of the American and Horseshoe Falls and close to the whirlpool where the river bends and the gorge is approximately 275 metres wide.

Interestingly, among the many people who successfully crossed the river on a rope or wire were four young men from Ontario. The first was Port Hope’s William Leonard Hunt, who as Signor Farini performed the feat in early September 1860. Exactly thirty years later, on September 6, 1890, Sam Dixon, one of our city’s pioneer photographers and a frequent wire walker at the Hanlan’s Point Amusement Park on Toronto Islands, became the first Torontonian to repeat Farini’s exploit. He told the newspaper reporters covering the event that his crossing would be the first of many he planned to make over the next few years. Unfortunately, Dixon drowned the following year while swimming in Wood Lake near Bracebridge in Muskoka.

Another year passed, and on October 22, 1892, twenty-two-year-old Clifford Caverley became the second Torontonian to cross the gorge. Described in the newspapers of the day as “unmarried and weighing a mere 138 lbs,” Caverley made several walks that day, one of which he accomplished in a record-setting 6 minutes, 32.5 seconds.

The third in the trio of Toronto funambulists was James Hardy, who had also perfected his talents at Hanlan’s Point. He performed his Niagara River crossing on Dominion Day, 1896. He went on to cross the Montmorency Falls in Quebec a total of seventy-four times before travelling to England, where he performed wire walking performances in front of cheering crowds.

Hardy died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-four while shopping in a Queen Street West store. In his obituary that appeared in a Toronto newspaper, he was quoted as having once said, “when your time comes you’ll get it whether you are 50 feet in the air or supposedly safe on the ground.”

Both Hardy and Dixon are at rest in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Torontonian Samuel Dixon is shown in this rare photograph crossing the Niagara River on September 6, 1890, at a location not far from the Whirlpool Rapids. He drowned in a Muskoka lake the following year. The bridge in the photo is the old Michigan Central Railway cantilever bridge that was built in 1883 and replaced in 1925 by the present Michigan Central steel arch railway bridge. Two other Toronto boys, Clifford Caverley and James Hardy, crossed the river at this same location in 1892 and 1896, respectively.