In October 2007 the Washington Times Culture section carried a pastor’s sermon on faith that began like this:
“Many years ago a crowd gathered at Niagara Falls to watch the Great Houdini walk across the falls pushing a wheelbarrow. He crossed in one direction and then returned pushing the wheelbarrow. People were astounded and his amazing feat was met with resounding applause. The Great Houdini then posed the question: ‘Now that you have witnessed what can be done, who will be the first person to let me push them across the Niagara Falls?’ Nobody replied.”
With Christian charity we forgive the reverend for his confusion, but of course Houdini never joined the ranks of the Niagara Falls daredevils, and his only connection to the border city or its Wonder of the World was through “The Man from Beyond”, the movie he made featuring a scene where he rescues a damsel from the brink of the falls (he was lashed to the shore by a strong cable) and the museum founded on the Canadian side in his name.
The allusion was doubtless intended to be to the Great Blondin — Frenchman Jean Francois Gravelot, aka Charles Blondin — who on June 30, 1859, became the first of many tightrope walkers to cross the Falls.
Choose “not”: Ripley confuses a stunt that Houdini set up for one of his movies with an actual performance.
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Blondin not only trekked across the abyss, at midpoint he lowered a bottle to the Maid of the Mist tour boat, where it was filled with river water, hauled it up and had a drink, completed his journey in 20 minutes, had a rest with a glass of champagne, did a little dance on the rope and walked back again, this time in eight minutes.
In subsequent performances above the cataract he crossed on a bicycle, on stilts and at night, swung from the rope by one arm, turned somersaults, stood on his head on a chair, pushed a stove in a wheelbarrow and cooked an omelet, sat a table balanced on the tightrope and ate cake and drank champagne, crossed blindfolded in a heavy sack and carried his manager across on his back.
Blondin died in 1897, just three years after our Harry was born, and meanwhile more than a dozen other daredevils duplicated his tightrope feat. Intriguingly, all of them have made the crossing over the river well downstream from the Horseshoe and American Falls, but in 2008 New Brunswick native Jay Cochrane wants to be the first to walk a rope over the brink of the 55-metre Canadian falls.
If the Niagara parks commission will let him (and the politicians appear to be on his side), the sexagenarian who thrills the tourists with twice-daily strolls across a wire strung from the Skylon Tower will earn his place in history and then talk the city into memorialising his feat with a green laser beam forming a virtual tightrope across the Falls, carrying a 3-D hologram of himself!
I’d say this modern daredevil (a term he doesn’t like because he’s proud of the precautions he takes) would deserve the permanent tribute, because he also walked above China’s Yangtze River in 1995, setting a distance record, and has been on the wire above the St Louis Arch and Shanghai’s Pearl of the Orient Tower as well. You don’t see this sort of thing much anymore.
He may also deserve it for greeting the tourists in Niagara Falls with the shout from his highwire, “Welcome to Canada!” Perhaps some of them will think this is what Canadians must do all the time, along with playing hockey, of course.
The real Blondin above the Niagara gorge.
The notion that Houdini was among the daredevils of Niagara won’t rest. In a great article for the San Diego Reader in August 2008, Jeff Smith outlined the amazing life of stunt pilot Lincoln Beachey, “one of America’s first superstars”.
Here’s an excerpt:
On June 27, 1911, approximately six months after he learned to fly, Beachey garnered national attention. A joint US-Canadian International Carnival had been planned at Niagara Falls. Harry Houdini would walk a tightrope. Bobby Leach would go over the falls in a barrel. Beachey would dive over them and, if he dared, for an extra $1,000 in gold would fly under the steel-arched International Bridge just 400 yards from the cataracts.
It had drizzled all day. Beachey paced back and forth before his plane, parked at a baseball field on the American side. The rain prevented Houdini from performing. Around 3.30pm Leach’s eight-foot steel drum got stuck at the base of Horseshoe Falls. Tons of water per second pinned it down. He broke both kneecaps and fractured his jaw.
Despite warnings, Beachey took off at about 6pm. He sped across the American Falls and “did a swan dive over the brink of Horseshoe Falls”, disappearing into the mist, then re-emerged 30 metres above the rapids and headed for the international suspension bridge, beneath which he flew with his nose wheel catching the whitewater.
The next day 300,000 spectators came to see Beachey and Harry Houdini perform. Two-thirds of the way across the falls, Houdini got marooned for 30 minutes on a slick tightrope.
Beachey did another drop toward the river, though, rocking in near-gale-force winds, and “out-Houdini’d Houdini”, but swore he’d never try again.
I asked Jeff Smith about his source and he cited the New York Times. Its report on June 29, 1911, was headlined “Whirled for hours by Niagara rapids” with the subhead “Houdin marooned on wire”.
“Houdin,” said the Times, notably dropping the letter “i”, “was within a hundred feet of the American shore on the wire on which he slid from Canada when he was marooned. The wire was too slack to allow him to reach the shore. There he stayed until hauled ashore by ropes. Houdin made a similar trip at last year’s carnival and was marooned in the middle of the wire for 45 minutes.”
Smith notes that both the Niagara Falls Gazette and Cataract Journal also reported on the 1911 daredevil event the same day and both identified the tightrope walker as “Houdin”.
My immediate reaction, especially because of the missing “i”, was that Houdini was once again being confused with Blondin the Great, but of course Blondin’s last stunt at the Falls was in 1860.
The riddle is solved at NiagaraFrontier.com’s Thunder Alley, which dates English circus stuntman Bobby Leach’s appearance to July 25 and Beachey’s to June 28.
Also on the 25th, it says, “Oscar Williams (aka Oscar Wilson) who called himself ‘The Great Houdini’”, attempted to perform the “Slide for Life” near the Upper Suspension Bridge.
He pushed off from the American side and “skidded along an ascending wire cable” toward Canada. Right in the middle, though, the cable’s looseness did him in — he got stuck in the sag for 30 minutes until he could be lowered by rope to the Maid of the Mist cruise boat on the river.
Bobby Leach, by the way, was quite a story too. He’d already parachuted off the Upper Steel Arch Bridge (the fourth person to do so) prior to the 1911 stunt extravaganza and inadvertently ridden his barrel through the rapids too — the anchor was severed during a test. But he’d made three other successful trips through the whirlpool, even if a couple of attempts to swim across the Niagara River had to be aborted.
Leach died in 1926 after slipping on an orange peel while out walking. His fractured leg became infected and was amputated … with fatal results.
