We are accustomed to call those who crossed the plains and the Rocky Mountains for the gold-fields of California nearly two centuries later (in 1849) the Argonautae; but the first American Argonauts went from France, and they built their Argo on what is now Lake Erie, on the edge of the Field of the Bulls, near a place, grown into a beautiful city, which now bears the very name of the wild bull, the "buffalo," and within sound of the roaring of the dragon that had frightened all earlier explorers. So accurately do the details of the story of Jason's adventure become realities to-day! Champlain and others had heard only at a distance the thunder of the great cataract that was some day to become not only as docile as the dragon under Jason's taming but as useful as a million harnessed bulls.
La Salle gathered his ship-carpenters and his ship furniture between his journeys to Rouen (the place of his birth) and elsewhere for the means of purchase. But before the winter had come in Normandy his messengers were out amid the snows and naked forests of Canadian winters in continuance of that voyage toward the western Colchis.
In the autumn of 1678 a Franciscan friar, Hennepin, set out with two canoemen, the first solitary figures of the expedition—a gray priest from the gray Rock of Quebec, in a birch canoe, carrying with him the "furniture of a portable altar"—a priest who professed a zeal for souls, but who admitted a passion for travel and a burning desire to visit strange lands. He relates of himself that, being sent from a convent in Artois to Calais at the season of herring fishing, he made friends of the sailors and never tired of their stories. "Often," he says, "I hid myself behind tavern doors while the sailors were telling of their voyages. The tobacco smoke made me very sick at the stomach, but nevertheless I listened attentively…. I could have passed whole days and nights in this way without eating." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 133. Hennepin, "A New Discovery of a Large Country in America," ed. Thwaites, 1:30.]
Along the way up the St. Lawrence he stopped to minister to the habitants —too few and too poor to support a priest—saying mass, exhorting, and baptizing. Early in November he arrived at the mission of Fort Frontenac, which he had two or three years before helped to establish in the wilds. Soon La Salle's lieutenants, La Motte and Tonty, appeared with most of the men, and while some were despatched in canoes to Lake Michigan to gather the buffalo-hides and beaver-skins against the coming of the ship, whose keel had not yet been laid, the rest (La Motte, Hennepin, and sixteen men) embarked for the Niagara River, by which the upper lakes empty into Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence. After a tempestuous voyage up and across the lake they reached this river, whose torrent fury, gathered of "four inland oceans," stopped even the canoes. Then, led of the priest, they toiled up the cliffs called the "Three Mountains," because, I suppose, of the three terraces. (Having climbed up the face of the cliffs in winter, with a heavy camera for my portable altar, and having broken the great icicles formed by the trickling stream over one of the terraces, in order to make my way across a narrow ledge to the top of the precipice, I am able to know what the journey must have meant to those first European travellers.) Once upon the upper plateau, they marched through the wintry forest and at length, in "solitude unprofaned as yet by the pettiness of man," they beheld the "imperial cataract"—the "thunder of water," as the Indians called it—or, as Hennepin described it, that "vast and prodigious cadence of water which falls down after a surprising and most astonishing manner, insomuch that the universe does not afford its parallel, those of Italy and Switzerland being but sorry patterns." To this priest, Hennepin, we owe the first description and picture of Niagara, [Footnote: "Four leagues from Lake Frontenac there is an incredible Cataract or Waterfall, which has no equal. The Niagara river near this place is only the eighth of a league wide, but it is very deep in places, and so rapid above the great fall that it hurries down all the animals which try to cross it, without a single one being able to withstand its current. They plunge down a height of more than five hundred feet, and its fall is composed of two sheets of water and a cascade, with an island sloping down. In the middle these waters foam and boil in a fearful manner. They thunder continually, and when the wind blows in a southerly direction the noise which they make is heard for more than fifteen leagues. Four leagues from this cataract, or fall, the Niagara river rushes with extraordinary rapidity especially for two leagues into Lake Frontenac."—Hennepin, "Description of Louisiana," pp. 71-73.] probably now more familiar to the world than any other natural feature of this continent. He has somewhat magnified the height of these falls, making it five hundred feet in the edition of 1683, and raising it to six hundred in 1697; but they are impressive enough to acquit him of intentional falsification and powerful enough to run virtually all the manufacturing plants in the United States, if they could be gathered within its easy reach.
As it is, less than 9 per cent of the water that overflows from the four upper Great Lakes into the lower lake, once known as Lake Frontenac and now as Ontario, is diverted for utilitarian purposes; it supplies the Americans and the Canadians almost equally between the two shores five hundred thousand horse-power. [Footnote: "Under a treaty between the United States and the British Government only about 25 per cent of the theoretical horsepower of Niagara Falls can be developed. The estimate of the minimum amount of power that can be developed on the Niagara River above and including the Falls is 5,800,000 h.p., and the assumed maximum is 6,500,000 h.p. The treaty, therefore, limits present possible minimum development on both sides of the Falls to 1,450,000 h.p. Under the treaty only five-fourteenths of the power made available thereby belongs to the United States, its share being reduced by the diversion of water from Lake Michigan into the Drainage Canal at Chicago. There is thus left at Niagara Falls only about 518,000 h.p. that can at present be developed on the American side." About one-half of this total is now developed.—United States Commissioner of Corporations. Report on water-power development in the United States. 1912.]
What the conversion of the strength of this Titan (for ages entirely wasted and for a century after Hennepin only a scenic wonder) means, or may mean, to industry in the future is intimated in some statistics, furnished by a recent writer on the Great Lakes, showing the relative cost per month of a certain unit of power in a number of representative American cities. [Footnote: "Assuming the maximum power used to be one hundred horse-power, the number of working hours a day to be ten, and the 'load factor,' or average power actually used, to be seventy-five per cent of the total one hundred, the cost per month in the cities named is as [above]."—Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 135.]
Boston $937.50
Philadelphia 839.25
New York 699.37
Chicago 629.43
Cleveland 559.50
Pittsburgh 419.62
Buffalo 184.91
Niagara Falls 144.17
These figures are more significant as one contemplates the diminishing supply of coal in coming centuries, if not decades. According to the estimate of a reliable authority the available and accessible coal supply of the United States will be exhausted at the present rate of exploitation by the year 2027, and the entire supply by the year 2050.
Such statistics intimate the advantage possessed, perhaps beyond any other site in America, by the strip of shore on which La Salle's men, from the banks of the Seine, and Hennepin, the priest from Calais, that December night in 1678 encamped, building their bivouac fires amid the snows, three miles above the falls—and so opening to the view of the world a natural source of power and wealth more valuable than extensive coal-fields or rich mines of gold or silver.
It was but a great waterfall to La Salle and Tonty and Hennepin—an impeding, noisy, hostile object. And to the half-mutinous, quarrelsome workmen (French, Flemings, Italians) it was a demon, no doubt, whose very breath froze their beards into icicles. It was, in reality, potentially the most beneficent single, incarnate force bounded by any one horizon of sky, in that new world, developed by the tipping of the continent a little to the eastward after the upper lakes had been formed and the consequent emptying of their waters into the St. Lawrence instead of the Gulf of Mexico.