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The Niagara Frontier: Border Zone or "Middle Ground"?

David L. Herzberg

The Niagara River does nothing by half measures.  It hardly can.  Think your “in-box” is full?  Imagine this: after descending only 30 feet along the 1,000 mile stretch from Lake Superior to Lake Erie, the entirety of the water generated by the 87,000 square miles of the four upper Great Lakes then pours into the Niagara, where it plunges the next 325 feet to Lake Ontario in the river’s scant 35-mile length.  And even this rapid journey is telescoped, with the last 150 feet or so of descent accomplished in one spectacular leap at Niagara Falls.  This is not just a river.  It is a brute fact carved upon the landscape, an elemental force that animates and defines the region around it.

It also divides that region. 

Indeed, the easiest way to imagine the Niagara River is as a natural border given added symbolic power by the thunderous and impassable majesty of the Falls.  Certainly the history of the United States and Canada, rife with conflict and punctuated by the occasional war, offers much to support such a vision.  But this perspective, tempting as it is, captures only one element of the complex and dynamic history of the Niagara Frontier.  If the river is a border, it is also a crossroads, a place of connections.  Its roaring waters make the Niagara a potent symbol of separation ­ but why are the waters roaring?  Because the river links the vast Great Lakes watershed to the Atlantic ocean.  What divides also connects.  With a little imagination, one looks at the Niagara and sees not a border, but a nexus ­ a “middle ground” where cultures, economies, and even geologies have encountered each other, creating a dynamic history and a unique regional identity.  This is the great opportunity presented by borders:  when different peoples come into contact, they do not necessarily compete with each other for dominance in a zero-sum game.  Rather, something new can be created, something that represents not a victory of one side over another, but a joining together of efforts to achieve common goals that could not be reached ­ or perhaps even be imagined ­ separately.

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Of course, encounters between peoples do not always produce cooperative middle grounds. They can be destructive as well. The Niagara River is no exception; it has witnessed its share of bloodshed.  But the Niagara Frontier's best moments have occurred when the people living on both sides of the river have pragmatically recognized their common stock of cultural, economic, and environmental problems and opportunities. Some of these have been obvious, such as tapping the potential of the Falls to power industry and tourism, or building canals and railroads to establish the region as a center of trade and transportation.Others have been more subtle, such as building upon regional solidarity to foster a durable and surprisingly peaceful international zone of cultural and economic interdependence.Each instance represents a successful effort to transform shared problems into shared opportunities through cooperative effort ­ to imagine the region as a middle ground instead of a border zone.

The Niagara Frontier today faces a slate of issues that do not, in some respects, differ so much from what has always confronted the region:  how to reap the benefits of a unique cultural heritage; how to further facilitate trade and transportation; how to adapt to economic and technological change by re-using old industrial sites (“brownfields”); how to take advantage of the region’s many natural and built attractions; and how to encourage the growth of new industries, especially in the arena of information technology. These are fields of endeavor that call for region-wide action. They are problems that become opportunities if considered from the vantage point of the middle ground. As the recent Peace Bridge chronicles illustrate, the prevailing tendency today is to pursue separate processes even when goals are essentially the same. Nonetheless, the history of the Niagara Frontier is one of cooperation hard-won against just such backdrops of tension and conflict. It offers hope, and concrete precedents, that can sharpen our vision of today’s opportunities for collaboration even as we recognize the realities of division.

As you read the next pages, keep in mind this final image of Niagara Falls in 1859.The waterfall is monumental ­ it will be decades before any water is diverted for hydroelectric power. It is only seven years before a renegade band of Irish-Americans will actually launch an invasion of Canada from Buffalo.  And yet, what do we see at the Falls themselves, if we jostle through the thronging crowds close enough to get a glimpse?  Jean Francois Gravelet, better known as “Blondin the Great” to his audience, walking on a tightrope across the Niagara.  He is the first of a series of fearless entertainers who will walk, run, dance, bicycle ­ even eat leisurely breakfasts while reading newspapers! ­ along ropes strung across the great cataract. These playful but also deadly serious spectacles embody the paradox of the Niagara Frontier:  without the power and danger of the border that they dared to cross, the feats would have meant nothing.  Can you imagine looking at the Falls and seeing, as Blondin did, a path between the US and Canada?  Ludicrous!  But Americans and Canadians have been doing just that, in one way or another, throughout history ­ and, with any luck, they will continue to do so.