Niagara Falls. From Guide to Niagara Falls and Its Scenery, George W. Childs, Philadelphia, 1865. Internet Archive.
JULY 1865
On a windy afternoon in mid-summer, George Coppin stood and waited for a man to walk over Niagara Falls.
The man was a tightrope walker named Harry Leslie.1 ‘America’s Blondin’, the press called him, a nod to the famous Frenchman who had traversed Niagara Gorge in June 1859.2 Monsieur Charles Blondin worked without a net and made his famous crossing on a light rope, not even an inch thick. Mr Leslie’s cheer squad promised his ‘ascension’ on Tuesday 18 July 1865, below Niagara’s Suspension Bridge, would exceed that miracle and unfold ‘in a manner not equalled’ by any other acrobat, foreign born or American.3
Coppin read all about it in the New York Clipper as his train from Buffalo pulled into the resort town of Niagara on the border between the United States and Canada. He was well acquainted with rope dancers—or funambulists as they were sometimes called. Ten years earlier, at his Olympic Theatre in Melbourne, he had presented a wire-walker named Monsieur Lalanne to considerable acclaim. The ‘physical intrepidity’ of one Madame Della Casse had impressed visitors to Cremorne Gardens as well but their agile antics paled against the daredevilry of high wire artistes who made the great outdoors their stage.4 No stage anywhere was better known for perilous feats than Niagara. And in the dying days of the Rebellion, no American funambulist was more acclaimed for his aerial artistry than Leslie.5
An April edition of the Clipper described his ‘daring rope ascension … across one of the public streets of Buffalo’ and informed readers that ‘Mr Leslie intends to make a number of excursions across the Niagara River during the coming summer’.6 The first of those excursions was on 15 June when he walked a tightrope across Niagara’s Whirlpool Rapids and performed ‘a variety of difficult feats … over the chasm’.7 At his second ‘ascension’, on the Fourth of July, Leslie took pleasure in ‘enacting a drunken scene, staggering, reeling etc., with a perfect recklessness of life or limb’, all the while wielding a 20-foot-long balancing-pole.8
Blondin casually reads a newspaper as the waters of Niagara swirl below. Stereoscopic view of Blondin’s 1859 Rope Ascension over Niagara River. Courtesy of Mark St Leon.
Coppin’s arrival in Niagara, on Monday 17 July, coincided with Leslie’s third scheduled ascension. ‘The wind was blowing very strong at the time’, he observed, and hanging onto his hat, he wondered how the acrobat could possibly avoid being blown into the ‘seething waters beneath’.9 Leslie not only appeared as advertised; he doubled down on the danger. Arriving in the late afternoon with wife and baby, he astonished onlookers by shackling his hands and feet to heavy iron chains. An ‘immense concourse of people’ had gathered in the soaking air to witness this do-or-die event and as Leslie started out, swaying in a ‘severe gale’, everyone held their breath, Coppin included.10 ‘I felt quite sick when I saw him upon the little rope so high above the foaming waters’, he confessed. ‘An extra puff [of wind] might have caused him to lose his balance and there was nothing but certain death for him’.11
Leslie survived his dice with death. Although ‘compelled to move cautiously’, he ‘made his march back and forth in a manner ... not equalled by Blondin’ and was ‘hailed with the most enthusiastic applause’ at ‘both ends of his cord’.12 A relieved Coppin marked the moment in his journal:
Saw Leslie walk across [Niagara] on a rope.13
Once was enough. Informed that ‘he [Leslie] is going to cross again on the 3rd of August’, he thought ‘I should not like to see him again’.14 In any case, there was so much else for Coppin to take in at Niagara. This was America’s most visited natural wonder and lodging in a ‘small country inn’ on the American side, in the company of Mr Everett and Mr Cathcart, he was well placed to enjoy the Horseshoe Falls and adjacent attractions such as Table Rock, the Devil’s Hole and the Cave of the Winds.15 The latest Guide to Niagara Falls carried ‘stereoscopic’ pictures of these fabled sites and enclosing the booklet in a parcel addressed to Melbourne, he assured his children they were ‘very like the places they represent’. When it came to describing the colossal scale of the falls, the roar of its thunder, the marvel of its mists, words—almost—failed him.16 ‘A wonderful sight’ was the most he could manage.17
George Coppin, 1865, photographed by C.D. Fredricks & Co., New York
From Album of American military portraits, presidents and performers, 1865, George Selth Coppin, Papers 1814-1965
Harry Leslie, 1865, photographed by C.D. Fredricks & Co., New York
From Album of American military portraits, presidents and performers, 1865, George Selth Coppin, Papers 1814-1965
With Mr and Mrs Kean staying in a large hotel at British Niagara on the Canadian side, Coppin was free to roam and he savoured every moment. One day, he enjoyed a ‘splendid rapid bath’ where the warm ‘sulphuretted [sic]’ water gushed with ‘great force’.18 Another time he strolled around Goat Island where the ‘swift flood glides like molten silver’ and bought ‘four little reticules [bags] ornamented with beadwork made by the Indian women’.19 ‘I only saw Mr Kean once during the whole time’, he wrote home. ‘Altogether, it was one of the most comfortable weeks I have enjoyed since I left Australia’.20
Niagara’s jaw-dropping diversions hardly eased Coppin’s ’distress’ at not ‘receiving one word’ from his wife in two months. He knew there had been a delay in Australian mail reaching England and therefore America ‘but I have not heard any reason why [it] is missing as I see very few English papers and the papers in this country know and care so little about Australia that they would not publish any account of the accident’.21 Coppin had no way of knowing either how his missives to the Melbourne Herald were being received. ‘I wonder what the people [in Australia] really think of them’, he mused. ‘If they are considered good and serviceable to the colony, they will be of advantage to me when I return. If not, I shall be laughed at’. Waiting on an answer, he decided to ‘send another letter’ to editor Somerton.22 There was much news to relate; most dramatically, the capture of fleeing Confederate President Jefferson Davis and the execution of Mary Surratt, one of John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators. He detected ‘a great feeling of indignation against the President [Johnson] for hanging the woman’.23 But putting pen to paper, he chose to ‘say very little on things political’ and focus on ‘things in general’ ... such as trains.24
Coppin had found ‘the railroads throughout [America] very much better than expected’ and remarked on how ‘the country here is [being] opened up by cheap railways’. ‘The trouble is the expense of getting produce to a population for consumption. They give you the land cheap but take it out of you for freight’. Tree planting was another admirable American initiative. It was ‘universally adopted in all the cities I have visited’, he wrote, and while ‘our trees [in the colonies] are not old enough to convey the least idea of the comfort they will give when their branches extend sufficiently to shade pedestrians, the sooner municipalities [in Melbourne] imitate the very excellent example here, the more beautiful and inviting each locality will become’.
Coppin judged Cleveland, Milwaukee, Buffalo and other places ‘upon the lake’ to be the ‘most charming’ in the way of trees but the most ‘go-ahead city after New York’? That would be Chicago. ‘Twenty five years ago, the inhabitants did not number 5,000’, he wrote, quoting facts and figures from his guide book. ‘Now it can show a population of 200,000 with the finest streets, opera house, theatre, museum, hotels, public buildings, wharves, warehouses and promenades in the country – it appears very wonderful to me’.
Buffalo was booming.
Fronting the shores of Lake Erie, with Canada on the other side, it had become a vital inland American port but appearing at the city’s Metropolitan Theatre, for a manager named McKee, the touring party encountered audiences of consistent coldness.25 ‘They neither applaud nor laugh at a joke’, Mr Kean complained after their debut in The Jealous Wife.26 Worse was the apparent lack of comprehension. ‘No where out of New York [City] where we have acted do they understand such lines as I say as Louis XIth ... I do not believe they know what “Dauphin” means’.27 On the other side of the curtain, the tourists encountered apathy and profanity. In London, offending actors were fined for swearing. In brawling Buffalo, there was no stopping the backstage blasphemies. ‘You should hear the women swear behind the scenes of the theatres!!!’, Mrs Kean huffed.28 Her ears continued to be assaulted when she left the stage door:
It is really awful to walk in streets here and listen to the swearing of the little little children. The mildest term they use to each other is d...d fool.29
Health problems persisted. Overworked and low on energy, the Keans were ill more often than not and resorted to remedies both conventional and naturopathic.30 Fortunately, the notices in Buffalo were positive and their four performances generated ‘fine business’.31 It was the same story in Rochester, on Lake Ontario, where they played one-night. Now, as the tour bent towards Montreal, a second—briefer—break at Niagara beckoned.32
Harry Leslie, ‘the American Hero of Niagara’, 1865, engraving by Clay, Cosack & Co. From sheet music for the ‘Leslie Polka’, dedicated to him by J.E. Hartel.
Levy Sheet Music Collection, Johns Hopkins University
AUGUST 1865
The very idea was preposterous, but it was there in black and white: for his fourth and final Niagara Falls ascension, on Thursday 3 August, Harry Leslie had announced he would ‘carry a cooking stove … cook his dinner and eat it on the rope’.33
Coppin, who had returned to his inn by the falls, was intrigued. Unable to resist watching another crossing, he joined a huge throng on the American side where Leslie appeared in a dress of silver cloth trimmed with gold. The crinkly haired acrobat made his first traverse of the gorge ‘on a run’ in four minutes flat. Returning to the centre of the rope, he pulled some risky gymnastic moves but cooking utensils were not part of this act.32 Nor the one that followed. Leslie had decided instead to insert his feet into two peach baskets and clomp across the roiling waters. On the return, he held a pail of water in each hand, put another on his head, and strapped a balancing-pole to his neck. ‘This is a feat never before attempted’, the Clipper declared ... and it almost came unstuck.34
Watching from his perch high over towering walls of water, Coppin saw Leslie confidently set out and then—suddenly—drop one of his pails:
This destroyed his balance, and compelled him to drop the other pail. In doing this he slipped or fell from the rope, upon which he caught by one leg. Leslie succeeded in catching the rope with his left hand, regained his equilibrium and the control of his pole, and reached the American shore in safety.35
Endnotes
1. Harry Leslie (1837–1883) formed a travelling minstrel company in the late 1850s and impressed audiences with his clowning and acrobatic antics. His first tightrope walk was at New York’s Bowery Theatre in 1860–1861. The four Niagara Falls ‘ascensions’ Leslie made in the summer of 1865 earned him national attention, but the fame was fleeting. By 1870, he was playing pantomime roles. A decade later, in a fit of ‘mania’, he was arrested for stabbing a policeman. Leslie died alone in Brooklyn, unknown and poverty stricken.
2. Charles Blondin (1824–1897) was born Jean Francois Gravelet and performed his first rope dance at the age of four. Arriving in America in 1855, intending to join an equestrian troupe, he was seized by the idea of crossing Niagara and did so in front of 25,000 people on 30 June 1859. The Great Blondin, as he was billed, shocked the crowd by sitting down on his cable above the gorge and calling for the Maid of the Mist tourist vessel to anchor momentarily beneath him. He cast a line down, hauled up a bottle of wine, and drank it before ‘breaking into a run’; towards the Canadian side. Blondin went on to cross Niagara dozens of times, on one occasion carrying a stove, on another bearing his son on his back. He gave his final performance in 1896.
3. Clipper, 29 Jul 1865.
4. Argus, 16 Aug 1856; Age, 25 Nov 1856; Age, 25 May 1929.
5. Rope dancers were in demand at the close of the civil war. In July 1865, John Denier gave a ‘rope ascension’ over Little Falls, New York State while ‘tight rope artiste’ Marietta Ravel promised ‘thrilling feats in mid air’. Clipper, 15 & 29 Jul 1865.
6. Clipper, 8 Apr 1865.
7. Clipper, 24 Jun 1865. ‘Harry Leslie ... did it in a storm which would have deterred any man of ordinary nerve’.
8. Clipper, 15 Jul 1865.
9. George Coppin to Lucy Coppin, Buffalo, 23 Jul 1865; SLV.
10. Clipper, 24 Jun 1865.
11. George Coppin to Lucy Coppin, Buffalo, 23 Jul 1865; SLV.
12. Clipper, 29 Jul 1865.
13. George Coppin journal, 18 Jul 1865; SLV.
14. George Coppin to LC, Buffalo, 23 Jul 1865; SLV.
15. George Coppin journal, 1 Aug 1865; SLV. ‘The Nestor Hotel … very comfortable, the family attend to the business’.
16. Geoprge Coppin to Lucy Coppin, Buffalo, 23 Jul 1865; SLV.
17. George Coppin journal, 18 Jul 1865; SLV. Visiting Niagara in 1842, Charles Dickens marvelled at the way the ‘waters roll and leap, and roar and tumble, all day long’. Fellow English author Anthony Trollope gave an account of his travels through the United States in North America (1862) and thought ‘of all the sights ... I am inclined to give the palm to the Falls of Niagara’.
18. George Coppin journal, 21 Jul 1865; SLV.
19. George Coppin to Lucy Coppin, Buffalo, 23 Jul 1865; SLV.
20. ibid.
21. ibid.
22. ibid.
23. George Coppin to Lucy Coppin, Chicago, 9 Jul 1865; SLV.
24. Herald, 21 Oct 1865.
25. Buffalo owed its emergence as a commercial hub to the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825.
26. Charles Kean to Mary Kean, Buffalo, 27 Jul 1865; Ripley. The Buffalo Courier declared that the visitors had a right to be proud of the engagement because ‘Buffalo is not unnecessarily enthusiastic’.
27. ibid.
28. Ellen Kean to Mary Kean, New Orleans, 18 Jan 1866; Ripley.
29. Ellen Kean to Mary Kean, Pittsburgh, 30 May 1865; Ripley.
30. Mr Kean sought medical attention for a persistent rash while Mrs Kean had a ‘furious attack of bile’. Ellen Kean to Mary Kean, British Niagara, 23 Jul 1865.
31. Strahan, 156. The Buffalo Courier (25 Jul 1865) thought Mr Kean’s Wolsey in Henry VIII was ‘rendered in a manner quite at variance with the style of those who practice vocal gymnastics on stage’. Ibid., 155.
32. Coppin was in Rochester 30–31 Jul 1865. He started for Niagara on 1 Aug 1865 and stayed for three days. ‘Went up to the Falls again—had a good look round’. George Coppin journal, 3 Aug 1865; SLV.
33. Clipper, 29 Jul 1865.
34. Clipper, 19 Aug 1865.
35. ibid. ‘Saw Leslie walk the rope again in the afternoon and evening’. George Coppin journal, 3 Aug 1865; SLV.
Note on Sources
George Coppin’s correspondence from America divides into letters, journals, diaries and documents. All are held in the Coppin Collection at State Library Victoria, 1814-1965.
Mr and Mrs Kean’s correspondence from Australia and America is shared between three major institutions. Letters about the Australian leg of their journey are held at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. The Pacific phase of the tour is recounted in letters in the Performing Arts Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. A further cache of letters, relating mostly to travel in the Eastern States, is at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC.
The letters cited above, from Charles and Ellen Kean to their daughter Mary in England, are reproduced in part in:
Ripley, John. ‘”We Are Not in Little England Now”: Charles and Ellen Kean in civil-war America’, Theatre Notebook, Vol. 61, No. 2, 2007.
Strahan, Richard Denman, The American Theatrical Tours of Charles Kean, University of Florida, [Gainesville, Florida], 1984.
