Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

I will repeat here what an American gentleman at Washington said to me on the subject of letters of introduction. ‘We Americans,’ he remarked, ‘are a busy people. We have not time to attend to general introductions. We gladly do what we can, but we cannot do what costs time. Still, however, if the letter is brought to us by one who has ideas, and who has the power of making us feel the magnetism of his ideas, we will give to him our time, and everything we have to give.’

Niagara is seen to advantage in a severe winter. It is impossible for ice to accumulate in front of the Canadian fall; but as vast masses are formed all about the American, the contrast between the two becomes far greater and more striking than in summer. According to the figures usually given, the American is only one third the width of the Canadian; but this measurement gives no idea of the difference between the two, which lies chiefly in the fact that the sheet of water which comes over the former is so thin that it is everywhere broken, and white with foam; while in the Canadian fall it comes over in so deep and solid a mass, that it is green throughout the whole Horse-shoe. It is perfectly smooth, and there is not a bubble visible upon it. Every piece of wood that comes over seems to glide down its surface; the water itself being so unbroken as to appear almost as if it were stationary and had no movement in it.

I do not know any other grand object of nature where the interest felt at the moment in what is seen is so much heightened by what is not seen, as in these great falls. They are grand in themselves to the eye; but how much grander does the sight become, when it is accompanied by the thought that what you see is the collected outflow of all those vast lakes it has been taking you so many days to steam over and along, lakes on all of which you lost sight of the land, just as if you had been on the ocean itself, lakes larger than European kingdoms. Here you have before you, gliding over that precipice, all the water these great seas, fed by a thousand streams, are unable to retain in their own basins.

Niagara.

And behind you, in the seven miles from Queenston, you have in the deep perpendicular-sided trough, cut in the solid limestone rock, a measure of the excavating power of this descending flood, which has been for so many ages, just like a chisel in a carpenter’s hand (the Horse-shoe fall is now a gouge), chipping out this deep and wide channel. When one reflects on the enormous weight of the falling water, surprise is felt at its not working at a greater rate than, as is supposed, that of twelve inches in twelve months.

When I was at Niagara there was what is called an ‘ice bridge’ a few yards below the falls, and which, as it requires a continuance of severe weather for its completion, does not occur, I was told, more frequently than once in every nine or ten years.

I stayed at an hotel on the American side of the Suspension Bridge, which is about a mile and a half from the falls. I was there three days, and during that time I met two Canadians who had all their lives been in the neighbourhood of the falls, and an American in business at the place where I was staying, who had not yet seen the great sight, and who felt no desire to see it.

I may here mention, that if we ought to pronounce Indian names in the Indian fashion, we shall cease to talk about the falls of Niāgăra. It was their practice to accent not the ante-penultimate, but the penultimate syllable. For instance, they talked of Niăgāra, and Ontărīo. In Ohīo, and Potōmac, if they are real Indian words, the true Indian pronunciation has been retained.

I have already mentioned that during the time I was in the United States I never found it uncomfortably cold. Nothing, however, of this kind could be said of my experience of the climate of Canada. The only ferry of those I had to cross, which had become impassable on account of the accumulations of ice, was that into Canada at Detroit. This was a bad beginning, and by it I lost a place I had paid for in an hotel car. We had not gone far on Canadian soil before some of the iron-work of the engine broke, in consequence of the intense cold of the morning. At Niagara I was detained a day by a snow-storm. It was so violent a storm that it put an end to all traffic for twenty-four hours. The train I had intended using was to have left at 6.30 A.M. I struggled to the station, through the snow, that had drifted during the night to the depth of three feet, only to find that I had come to no purpose. During the whole of the day you could not see ten yards before you, the snow was driving and drifting so thickly. The next morning when I left for Toronto, the thermometer was standing at twelve degrees below zero; on the following morning, at Toronto it was nineteen degrees below zero. I left Toronto for the east by the first train that had been over the rails in that direction for some days. While I was at Kingston there came on a second gale of wind, but this time accompanied by blinding rain, every drop of which as it fell froze on the zero-cold ground and snow. I was staying with the Bishop of Ontario, and was to have been taken over the schools of the place, but the day was such that the scholars were not able to leave their homes. This rain continued all the next day, and, being a warm rain, it at last turned the snow, which was unusually deep, into such an amount of slush as one must see to believe. At last, after daily delays of many hours each, and several mishaps on the road, to be attributed to the mismanagement of the authorities of the bankrupt Canadian railway companies, I reached Montreal at the end of the week, when the weather suddenly, as in its other changes during the previous part of the week, became calm, bright, and warm. But when I mention the changes I experienced at the close of the winter in a single week, I must not omit an instance of unchanging persistence the weather had exhibited during the earlier part of the same winter. There had been forty-five days at Montreal (but I was told that there was no record of any other equal spell of cold), during which the markings of the thermometer had been continuously below zero. This winter, however, of 1867-68 will be memorable for its severity. In Minnesota thirty-six degrees, and in Wisconsin thirty-one degrees below zero had been reached.

A Snow-bound Party.