Shoulder-Straps: A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862

by Henry Morford

The dark and rugged Canadian shore was full in view on the other side of the river, with the Clifton House and the Museum glimmering brightly in the morning sunlight, and the red-cross flag waving sluggishly from both as if in defiance of the great nation that lay so near and yet could not possess the little patch of land over which it floated. The Horse-Shoe Tower stood as of old, still unconquered by the fierce rapids striving to undermine it; and around base and balcony swarmed visitors who seemed like pigmies not so much on account of the distance as because they were dwarfed and belittled in the presence of the immense and the immeasurable. All these things lay broadly in sight of the journalist on that glorious Sunday morning, and perhaps at another time he might have seen and attempted to describe them; but not then. He for the moment failed to see what was before him, and he saw something else not revealed to every eye.

Tom Leslie was either the master or the slave of a powerful imagination. Some who knew him said the one, and some the other. But all agreed as to the possession of the faculty; and it was not always that his soberest and most conscientious relations (in type) were received without a shade of suspicion on that account. It may have been that the loneliness of the night before had not quite worn away, and that it left him sadder and more impressible than usual; and it may have been that the one element before wanting in his nature, that of earnest and undivided human love, had changed him when it was supplied. At all events, there was a something in that wondrous scene, that came to him that morning as he had never before known it—something that came to him from dream-land, and made the sight of his eyes only the exercise of a secondary faculty. He saw, with this peculiar sight, all the features of the scene that we have noted, and another and one strikingly unusual, in a shipwreck in the rapids.

Two days before, on the Fourth, and in honor of the day, a knot of gay fellows had procured an old schooner, hoisted white streamers at the tops of her stripped masts, and sent her down the river into the rapids from Chippewa Creek, expecting to enjoy the rare pleasure of seeing her leap over the Falls and emerge in little fragments and splinters of timber in the river below. Thousands had gathered on the Canadian shore, and on Goat Island, to witness a prank never matched in audacity since the British "guerrillas" from the other side, in the time of the Canadian rebellion, seized the steamer "Caroline" at Schlosser, set her on fire, and sent her down the Falls—an act which almost lit the torch of war so effectually between the two countries, that all the waters which overwhelmed the "Caroline" would not have been enough to quench it.

But with reference to the old schooner, sent down from Chippewa Creek on the Fourth of July. She had only shown that human calculations are not infallible, even when they presage disaster. The thousands assembled to witness the destruction, had been doomed to disappointment. The current had swept the boat well over on the Canadian side, and there some unknown eddy had seized and driven her between two sunken rocks, where she lay as safe from any danger of the Falls as if she had been ten miles below them, instead of half a mile above. She lay, bow up the river, inclined lengthwise, as if she had been caught when shooting down the Lachine Rapids, and the white streamers on her bare masts fluttering out to the winds as signals of distress that would have been—ah! so hopeless and useless with human life on board and in peril.

At the first moment of beholding the old wreck, Tom Leslie found her a prominent feature in the spectacle, and his reflections took a shape which may have been taken by those of many sojourners at the Falls, who saw her during the season:

"There she lies to-day, and there she may lie for many a long month, gradually weakening and breaking apart from the action of the rapids surging around her, until some night when the wind comes fiercely down the river, and heavy storms have increased the volume of water as well as loosened the last bolt that yet holds her securely together,—then, when there is none to witness the death-throe of wood and iron, she will heave and labor and at last break apart. The two fragments will go sweeping down, whirled over like playthings—touching the points of the rocks and giving out groans and shrieks like those which precede dissolution; then for one moment there will be a dark mass poised on the edge of the Fall, and the next there will be one more deafening crash added even to the thunder of the waters. A few broken splinters will go sweeping away down the dark river, and all will be over."

But what was it that Tom Leslie saw, more than is revealed to the natural eyes, looking on that scene when he had contemplated it for a few moments? This and only this—but quite enough to make the memory of that moment immortal. He saw it applied to the human heart and human life. The water pouring over the Horse-shoe Fall ceased for the moment to be the falling water of this real world, and became some weird stream falling thunderously and in white glory through the land of dreams. The dark misty gulf into which it poured below was not the physical abyss over which the natural man must stand with a shudder, but the unfathomed pit of woe and sorrow into which, in nightmare dreams, man has been ever falling yet never destroyed, since the first visions of early childhood. The tower ceased to be a palpable mass of wood and stone, and became human hope and energy, with the clear blue sky of God's providence above, beaten by storms and undermined by fierce currents every moment threatening it with destruction, but standing yet through all. And the old wrecked schooner above had ceased to be a mere material wreck of plank and timber and iron—it was one of those unreal but sadder wrecks of a human life and a human soul, stranded for the moment on the rock of some great calamity, and eventually to be swept away and engulfed by the inevitable.

There had been a slight veil of haze shrouding the sun for the previous half hour; but as Tom Leslie partially awakened from his dream and listlessly descended the stairs cut in the bank, towards the bridge leading to the Tower, the mist rolled away, the sun broke forth in the glory of high-noon, and out of the darkness below sprang an arch of light that almost made the journalist, who was too old and too world-hardened for such exhibitions, clap his hands and cry: "The rainbow! the rainbow!" Of old he had seen the rainbow spanning the eastern heaven when looking out at early evening from the home of his childhood, and when the thunder-storms of summer were dying away over the Atlantic; but here it was, a thing of arms' reach, and at his feet! At one moment it merely glimmered up through the mist from the bed of the river, a little broken space of the arch, and the colors dim and indistinct; anon the sky grew brighter and the column of mist rose higher; and now it formed more than the half circle, the top a little above the level of the Fall,—and the blue, and gold, and green, and orange, and purple, painted so brightly on the retina of the eye that they seemed to be a part of the very air the observer was inhaling. How near he stood, impressible Tom, at that moment, to the eternal mystery!—how near to the workshop in which seem to be flashed out from eternal forges the beauties of the sunshine and the storm! Climbing down from the bridge to the end of the rock, leaning tremblingly over and looking down into the misty gulf below with that Jacob's Ladder of faith set therein—it is not strange that the journalist for one moment wished for a line and plummet to drop into that reservoir of golden glory and bring up some memento of what seemed so near to the celestial;—just as one wishes, sometimes when the midnight heaven is darkest and the stars are burning most purely there, to be able to stretch forth a hand among the stellar lights and bring it back bathed with that radiance which is so fearfully beautiful.

Leslie had no intention of ascending the tower that day—other days would be his at Niagara, and something must be saved for each. Besides, he had breakfasted lightly and an unromantic call for lunch was being made on faculties quite as delicate as his mental perceptions. He had accordingly just turned again and ascended the stairs to the bank in front of the Pavilion, when the fates (ever kind to him in this regard, as to every other true lover of nature) vouchsafed him one moment's glimpse of a spectacle often wished for and seen but seldom. Turning for one last glimpse as he walked away, at that instant his eye was resting on the sharpest point of the curve of the Horse-shoe Fall, where the volume of water is evidently deepest, and where from that depth it makes one broad unbroken sweep of amber green as it plunges over, without one fleck of foam to mar it. He was just scanning for an instant that calm depth, and saying that there was after all the majesty of Niagara—there, where the great green flood approaches the awful precipice, impelled by a resistless force from above, but unruffled and untroubled by the approaching fate—bends gracefully and proudly at the verge, as some dusky Antoinette might do her proud neck when the axe of the executioner was impending—then, still without a ripple or a tremor takes the last long plunge as Curtius may have done when the gulf was open in the Forum and he rode down the Aventine and spurred out into thin air to fulfil the omens of the augurs and save the perilled life of Rome,—he was just feeling and saying this, when a dark speck appeared at the very edge of the green. It was a log, perhaps fifteen or twenty feet in length, over the Fall!—a mere log, nothing in another place, but everything in the place it for that moment occupied. For one instant he saw it hang trembling on the verge, then for another its dark outlines were thrown into clear relief against the bright green water with the sunshine glimmering through; and then down, down it was hurled, rushing like an arrow's flight into the feathery foam of the broken water below, and at last (so far as human eye could ever know) into the blinding mist at the bottom of the cataract. What a reed upon the brook had been that log, that might have required the strength of a dozen men to lift it from the ground!—what is the might with which the elements make playthings of what seem to mortal strength dense and immoveable—even as the great Power that is equally above nature and above man, "holdeth the mountains in the hollow of his hand, and taketh up the isles as a very little thing!"

"By George!" said Leslie. "What a lucky dog I am! I have known a thousand people who wished for just such a view, and I have had it all alone, after all!" He was not in the habit of holding conversations aloud with himself; but he had been so impressed as to speak aloud involuntarily, in this instance.