Prospect Point - Niagara Falls, NY - American Guide Series on Waymarking.com

PROSPECT POINT, at the very brink of the ledge, offers a magnificent view of the American Falls, about 1,000 feet wide, the Canadian Falls, with its curved crest of about 2,500 feet, and Goat Island, which separates the two cataracts. The 'Thunderer of Waters,' as the Indian name for the Falls is translated, pours 205,000 cubic feet of water a second over the ledge and plunges with an energy of about 4,000,000 horsepower. Six per cent of the flow passes over the American Falls, the remaining 94 per cent over the Canadian Falls. The white, broken waters of the American Falls seem to hesitate momentarily, then roar over the brink and hit the rocks 157 feet below with a reverberating crash. The Canadian Falls, because of their distance, seem to descend in a smooth, noiseless sheet of water that gently bursts into an immense mass of surf and spray in the cauldron below. Both falls are tinted by rainbows and surmounted by mists that rise in pillars, then separate into lacy, floating clouds. In the evening, colored floodlights are trained on the falling waters. In the winter the freezing spray builds mountains of ice on both sides. Thrill-seekers walked from shore to shore over the ice bridge until tragedy befell a man and his wife in February 1912, when the ice bridge broke apart.

Daredevil stunts have been numerous. In 1829 Sam Patch leaped twice from a platform about 100 feet high into the gorge at the foot of the falls. In 1859 and 1860 Blondin, French tightrope walker, crossed and recrossed on a rope several times, once with his manager riding on his back. In the eighties several people navigated the rapids in barrels; in August 1886, William J. Kendall, a Boston policeman, passed through the rapids protected only by a cork life-preserver; in September 1889, Steve Brodie went over the falls in an India-rubber suit heavily padded and protected by steel bands. The first woman to go over in a barrel was Mrs. Annie Edson Taylor, a schoolteacher, in October 1901. Bobby Leach, an Englishman, went over Horseshoe Falls in a steel barrel in July 1911, and then spent 23 weeks in the hospital recuperating. Jean Laussier shot over the Falls in July 1928, and came out smiling, thanks to a rubber ball of his own construction. Several publicity seekers have lost their lives.

At the close of the Ice Age, the Niagara River plunged over the truncated edge of a dolomite formation into Lake Ontario. At the foot of the fall, the swirling water in time eroded the soft shales from under this massive rock. Blocks of the dolomite, thus undermined, broke off and caused a recession of the crest of the waterfall. As the fall receded, it formed the gorge. This action is still going on; it is estimated that the fall has moved southward from the southern shore of Lake Ontario to its present position at the rate of about one foot a year. If the fall reaches Lake Erie it will disappear. Steps are being proposed to arrest the process and to hold the fall to its present location.

At the Prospect Point parking area, elevators lead to the foot of the falls, close enough to the plunging water for one to become soaked with spray and mist and deafened by the roar of Niagara. A small steamer named Maid of the Mist bobs on the rushing currents and pierces the billowing spray beneath the cataract.