Introduction: Of Burial Mounds and Toxic Tombs

Abstract

Driving north on the 290 Expressway from Buffalo to Niagara Falls each day, thousands of cars race alongside the mighty Niagara River. North America's fastest-flowing body of water, the Niagara seems jet-propelled. If the Mississippi is the Father of Waters for its grand length, then the Niagara is its furious little cousin: a short but manic river that, in a span of roughly 30 miles, sprints from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, with a famous plunge of nearly 200 feet at Niagara Falls. Few visitors ever come away from a tour of Niagara unmoved. "I was in a manner stunned and unable to comprehend the vastness of the scene," Charles Dickens said of his first glimpse of the Niagara River Basin and Falls in the 1840s. "Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an image of Beauty; to remain there, changeless and indelible, until its pulses cease to beat, for ever." For Dickens, as for countless others, Niagara Falls exemplifies the American natural sublime. The highway chasing the Niagara River illuminates a different force cutting through Western New York: industrialization. For what was once a scenic landscape astride a beautiful waterway has long since become a poster child of mega-industrial growth. In Buffalo, where the "Niagara" section of the thruway begins, mammoth factory buildings, hulking steel mills, and a cityscape of grain elevators testify to the industrial pathway that made the region a production powerhouse. At Niagara Falls, the road rolls past majestic power canals and generating stations, illuminating the region's (and the nation's) path to hydroelectric energy. The advent of hydroelectric power, as the saying goes, turned night into day and helped fuel the American industrial dream. No wonder area nuns used to tell troublesome teens that they should pray for their souls. If the Soviet Union wanted to take out American industrial power in Cold War times, Buffalo-Niagara was a main target.