Describes Niagara Falls in the wintertime. Transcription: below, blurring out half the fall from view. No beautiful Iris-bow to-day, not even for a moment. Table Rock yawns out fearfully, long icicles depending there from. The little shanties, the show-places, are all deserted on the Canadian shore, the huge Clinton Hotel closed and untenanted, and not a human-being is in sight. Wild birds of the gull kind skim athwart the breakers below. The little ?ǣMaid of the Mist ? has disappeared with the Summer time; and Niagara plays on in wintry majesty to us twain alone. (By the bye, the first white
Describes Niagara Falls in the wintertime. Transcription: below, blurring out half the fall from view. No beautiful Iris-bow to-day, not even for a moment. Table Rock yawns out fearfully, long icicles depending there from. The little shanties, the show-places, are all deserted on the Canadian shore, the huge Clinton Hotel closed and untenanted, and not a human-being is in sight. Wild birds of the gull kind skim athwart the breakers below. The little ?ǣMaid of the Mist ? has disappeared with the Summer time; and Niagara plays on in wintry majesty to us twain alone. (By the bye, the first white man who set eyes upon it, is said to have been [Samuel de] Champlain, the French priest, who found his way northwards from the Mississippi. The word ?ǣNiagara ? is Indian Equivalent for ?ǣWonderful.) We stay an hour or so, despite ice and sleet, then descend and busy ourselves in picking up shells from the water-covered rocks at the edge of the Cataract. (I secured five or six pretty ones but had them lost or stolen afterwards at the little boarding-house.) Retracing our steps, we resolve to descend the Biddle Staircase, to the base of the great mass of rock that divides the two falls. Part of this proves a horribly hazardous proceeding as we have to descend an inclined plane, short indeed, but so glazed with ice, that only careful crawling sufficed to bring us to the commencement of Title: Thomas Butler Gunn Diaries: Volume 5, page 128, January 5, 1853 . 5 January 1853. Gunn, Thomas Butler, 1826-1903
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