Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 October 1883 — The Niagara Whirlpool as Depicted by W. D. Howells. [ARTICLE]

The Niagara Whirlpool as Depicted by W. D. Howells.

To one who has looked awe-struck upon the whirlpool at Niagara, the foolhardiness of the man who would deliberately commit himself to its deadly embrace is wholly incomprehensible, if not incredible, Not even tlie cataract itself makes the spectator grim and uxvfiil dejitif into Av’iiicli'the ' swimmer Webb went to his death. Mi*. Howells, in the “Wedding Journey,” speaks of the whirlpool as “the most impressive \ feature of the whole prodigious spectacle of Niagara,” and liisylescript on of it is worth quoting now: “Here, within the compass of a mile, those island keas of the North, Superior, Hiuun, Michigan, Erie and the multitude of smjaller lakes, all pour tlieir floods, where they swirl in dreadful vortices, with resistless under-cur-rents boiling beneath the surface of tliatVhghty eddy. Abruptly from this scene of secret power, so different from the thunderous splendor of the cataract itsel/, rise lofty cliffs on every side, to a liiglit of 200 feet, clothed from their wafer’s edge almost to their crests with dark cedars. Noiselessly, so far as your senses perceive, the lakes steal out of the whirl-pool, tlieu dtunk and wild, with brawling rapids roar away to Ontario through the narrow channel of the river. Awful as the sefene is, yon stand so far above it that you do not know the half of its terribleness, for those waters that look so smooth are great ridges and rings, forced by the impulse of the current twelve feet higher in the center than at the margin. Nothing can live there, and with what is caught in its hold the maeltrom plays for days, and whirls and tosses round and round in its toils with a sad, maniacal patience. The guides tell ghastly stories, which even their telling does not wholly rob of ghastliness, about the bodies of drowned men carried into the whirlpool and made to enact upon its dizzy surges a travesty of life, apparently floating there at their pleasure, diving and frolicking amid the waves, or frantically struggling to escape from the death that has long since befallen them.” Petroleum stands fourth on the list of California exports, amounting to 600,060,000 gallons yearly.