Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies - Softcover

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Ginger Strand was raised in Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Her fiction and essays have appeared in many places, including The Believer, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Carolina Quarterly. She has been awarded fiction residencies by Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She lives in New York City.

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One

WHITE MAN'S FANCY,
RED MAN'S FACT

MOST NIAGARA BOOKS BEGIN in the clear light of geology: sunlight glinting off glaciers, water chiseling a gorge. We'll start in the half-light of myth.

A long time ago, the Indians who lived at Niagara Falls were uffering a devastating plague. People were dying in droves. Hoping to end the carnage, they made sacrifices to the gods. They began with fruits, flowers, the choicest morsels from the harvest. They sent meats and tobacco in canoes over the Falls. Nothing appeased the angry gods. Finally, they decided to sacrifice the most beautiful young maiden in the village. The girl, Lelawala, was packed into a white canoe with a cornucopia of other tasty treats and sent crashing down to her doom. But wait! Instead of hitting the water below, she was caught by the powerful Thunder Beings who live behind the waterfall. There, she learned the cause of the deadly plague that was killing her kinsfolk: a noxious-breathed serpent was poisoning the water. She returned to her village with the news that they must vacate the toxic town. They packed up and left, but the giant snake pursued them, so village warriors -- with some help from the Thunder God -- killed it. Its body, squirming in its death throes, formed the brink of the Horseshoe Fall.

This "legend" used to be told by the recorded audio on the Maid of the Mist tour boats as they nosed their way into the spray below the Falls. It appeared in guidebooks, picture books and regional histories. It found its way into movies about the Falls and was depicted on T-shirts, coffee mugs and shot glasses. To this day it's plastered all over the Web, and postcards showing the Maid are still a staple of Niagara souvenir stands. They usually show a wellformed Indian maiden, often topless, standing up in a canoe as it plunges over the brink. She looks noble and nubile at the same ime. In some early versions, the Indian maiden forms a diptych with a naked water sprite writhing in the misty water, apparently meant to personify the Falls. The pair is labeled "White man's fancy; red man's fact."

By 1996, Native Americans had had enough of white man's fancy passing for red man's fact. The region's Senecas, they pointed out, had never practiced human sacrifice. Nor had any of the Iroquois Confederacy's six nations, who call themselves the Haudenosaunee, nor any other Native American people known to have lived in western New York. So why would they have included it in their folktales? The story was clearly a fake. And it was not just inauthentic; it was offensive.

"We're portrayed as savages," Bill "Grandpa Bear" Swanson, executive director of the state American Indian Movement, told the Buffalo News. "This has got to stop." Allan Jamieson, director of Nento, a native arts and culture group, called the story "racist ropaganda," and Richard Hill, an artist and American studies professor, declared it "a racial stereotype." A group of Indians announced they would begin picketing the Maid of the Mist tour boats unless the fake legend was dropped.

The Maid of the Mist Corporation objected. "To accuse us of racism is outrageous," said Christopher Glynn, a vice president. He explained why the corporation didn't want to drop the story: "We are not real anxious to change what we've been doing for a hundred years."

The protesters held their line. If the tour boat operator would not ax the fake myth, they would picket the boat launch in two weeks. Their timing was perfect. It was September, and Regis and Kathie Lee were headed to town, scheduled to shoot their popular morning talk show at the Falls. Faced with the vision of a flood of bad press swamping their boats, the Maid of the Mist Corporation decided to jettison the Maid. James Glynn, company president, was dispatched four days later to announce the corporate change of heart.

"We are very sensitive to the concerns of Native American people and want to ensure that we do not portray their heritage in an inappropriate manner," he told reporters. The legend was struck from the recorded audio.

All myths are in some sense fictions, of course, but this one is a fake even as myth. The history of Niagara is a history of elisions, artifice and outright deception, so it seems appropriate that its originary myth would be made-up. As the poet Wallace Stevens wrote, a mythology reflects its region. And yet, the more I think about the Maid of the Mist, the more I begin to feel that somehow this odd, obnoxious, prurient fake legend gets something about Niagara exactly right. It has much of Niagara's story in it: the community in crisis, the displaced Indians, the power in the Falls, the poisoned water, even the sacrificial victim for a dying town -- these may not be Indian themes, but they are some of the deepest and most continuous Niagara themes. Could there be -- despite Indians' protest to the contrary -- a Native American kernel in this spurious tale? At some point, I become convinced that if I can untangle the threads of the fake myth, I'll have a key that will unlock a storehouse of hidden history.

I should stop here and admit that I have a bit of a problem dropping things. In the course of looking into, say, the history of a museum at Niagara, I will hear from a librarian that the museum's collection has been bought by a Toronto art dealer. I will start calling and emailing that art dealer until he agrees to let me come and visit his collection, at which point I will drive the nine hours to Toronto and spend two days at his house -- to his great surprise -- reading all of the letters he's written and received about the collection. And while I'm there he will show me an electric chair he believes was looted from the Auburn State Prison, though the Auburn Prison electric chair is said to have been destroyed in a 1929 riot, and I will drive nine hours home and the very next day crash my computer downloading newspaper articles off LexisNexis that have accounts of the riots at Auburn Prison with maps that might potentially show the extent of the damage and whether the chair could have been salvaged.

I haven't yet figured out the truth of the chair, but the New York State Archives has some prison account books I'm planning on taking a look at the next time I happen to be passing through Albany.

In any case, this is what happens with the Maid of the Mist story. I keep digging deeper into the fake myth, and I keep finding further levels of fakery. Which means that I have to keep going. Eventually, I find myself at the American Antiquarian Society, looking into Native American history at Niagara.

The American Antiquarian Society is an institution as adorably uptight as it sounds. Founded by Isaiah Thomas, Revolutionary printer of the Massachusetts Spy, it's a private library incorporated to "encourage the collection and preservation of the antiquities of our country, and of curious and valuable productions in Art and Nature that have a tendency to enlarge the sphere of human knowledge." I love the "art and nature" bit -- in addition to books and papers, the Antiquarian Society used to have a natural history collection: rocks, minerals, shells, butterflies, taxidermied animals. They offloaded it years ago, when it became no longer correct to conflate the works of man with the works of the natural world. This is something that happened at Niagara too, but I'll get to that later.

A Palladian brick building on a hill in Worcester, Massachusetts, the Antiquarian Society's collection comprises miles of rare books, diaries, letters, sheet music, postcards, prints and other assorted detritus (they call it "ephemera") of everyday life in America from Columbus through 1876. They have handbills, advertisements, school certificates and even a paper-doll...