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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 430-431



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The Mighty Niagra: One River, Two Frontiers. By John N. Jackson. Amherst, N.Y., and Oxford: Prometheus Books, 2003. Pp. 486. $35.

Few rivers receive the adjective mighty. The Mississippi often freights the modifier along with barge traffic and seasonal devastation. Schoolchildren hearing the word attached to the Niagara almost certainly think of falls, then of hydroelectricity. As rivers go, the Niagara is not well known as a highway. But it is kinetic energy itself.

John Jackson focuses first on the deep past of the river and its region, but always through the prism of modernity. His book probes not only the physical geography of the region divided by the river but also its cultural pasts. From precontact Native American eras onward, the Niagara has been a boundary, and Jackson painstakingly traces the struggle of Britain and France, and then the new United States, for mastery over the river, its region, and, above all, its vast hinterland. Illustrated with acutely rendered, detailed maps that advance its arguments, the book positions its reader in regional time and space and focuses on the technological change peculiar to the Niagara country. [End Page 430]

Jackson understands epochs in technological terms. The river becomes a constituent in American and Canadian canal-making efforts: the sections on the several Welland canals and their feeders are especially strong, and set the stage for a subsequent analysis of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Trade flowing along lakes, rivers, and canals drew railroad builders next, some content with building canal-based connectors like the Welland Railway, others working to build bypass lines like the Rome, Watertown, and Ogdenburg (known in the region as the Hojack). Jackson deals in the most penetrating manner possible with the relationship of waterborne and railway transport, illustrating his narrative analysis with superb photographs, including the waterside terminal of the Lackawanna at Buffalo.

The core of the book emphasizes the building of hydroelectric plants and accompanying canals, the urban expansion produced by electrically powered manufacturing and trolley cars, and the creation of an electricity-producing node at the center of what is now a vast region including Ontario and most of the northeastern United States. As distribution networks expanded, the streetcar era merged into the motorcar era, distinguished by the building of international bridges, highway systems, and suburban settlement patterns. The last quarter of the book examines the political and environmental deterioration and degradation caused by the withering of heavy industry and the tentative development of tourism. Jackson emphasizes that the Love Canal disaster of 1978 originated in the filling of an aborted hydroelectric canal with solvents, pesticides, and other waste. He courageously explicates the long-term significance of a region punctuated with hazardous-waste sites and still suffering economic difficulties, and looks ahead at potential futures, all energized by hydropower.

Perhaps only winter deserves somewhat more attention. Deep cold freezes transport canals and lakes, and the so-called lake effect deposits deep snow throughout the region. Despite the year-round flow of the Niagara, winter routinely stymies waterborne transit, thrusting freight onto railroads and highways, and undoubtedly contributing to costs of operating farms, factories, and other businesses. Winter transforms the Niagara region annually, nowadays deflecting would-be settlers and visitors and confounding notions of inland ports and year-round power.

A generation inured to terms like "rust belt" will profit from a book that places periods of technological innovation and decay in precisely delineated regional frameworks.


Dr. Stilgoe is Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at Harvard University. His numerous books include Alongshore (1996) and Lifeboat (2003).
Permission to reprint a review published here may be obtained only from the reviewer.


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