Lake Erie, as everybody knows, and as we have indicated in the ideal section of the St. Lawrence and its lakes (Fig. 3), fills a shallow basin eroded in a plateau 333 feet above the level of Lake Ontario, and 565 feet above the ocean. The surface of Lake Michigan is 600 feet above tide-level, and, as the lake is 1,000 feet deep, its bottom is 400 feet below the level of tide-water. Lake Superior is 900 feet deep, and its surface about 20 feet above that of Lake Michigan. The Niagara, from Buffalo to the head of the Rapids, has a fall of 15 feet. The fall from Lake Michigan to Goat Island is 50 feet—just equal to the slope of the Rapids. A barrier 15 feet high, stretching across the plateau at the head of the Rapids, would throw the river back on Lake Erie, and such a barrier, 50 feet high, would hold back the waters of Lake Michigan.
We can see the significance, now, of a few features of topography about the Falls.
The reader will turn to the map of Niagara River, which we have drawn, with some modifications, from the official maps of the Boundary Commission. He will see that, from the foot of Grand Island to the Falls, the course of the river is almost due west. At the Falls it makes an elbow, and extends thence, with no abrupt winding except at the Whirlpool, northward to Lake Ontario. At Schlosser Landing, about a mile above the Rapids, a stream called Gill Creek empties into the river. It is not more than six miles long, and its course is parallel to that of Niagara below the Falls. Its source is a swamp about two miles east of the river, and nearly the same distance north of Old Fort Gray. We have the anomaly of two streams flowing side by side, within two miles of each other, in opposite directions, and through an apparently level country. Gill Creek, flowing southward, has a fall in six miles, of 60 feet. Its source is 60 feet higher than the surface of Niagara at Schlosser Landing. This high land is not a hill, but a ridge—an anticlinal axis extending from northeast to southwest across the Niagara channels. Before it was broken through and eroded, it formed a barrier a few feet higher than the surface of Lake Michigan. Then Niagara was not, and the upper lakes sought the ocean through a great river, sections of whose channel, as we have seen, can still be traced from Chicago to the Illinois.
We have lingered long in the past. What of the future? The intelligent tourist who stands by the great cataract cannot allow the beauty, the grandeur, the vast magnificence of the scene, to bear down his imagination and bind up all his powers in the present. He looks and listens, and, while he stands overpowered by the falling torrent and rising spray, and thunderous pounding of torrent on fallen torrent, his imagination breaks the spell, and his thoughts wander away into the past and the yet to be. Are future ages to see this wonder, and find it as great as our eyes see it?
Mr. Hall, in his report on the Fourth District, and Sir Charles
