Heritage Moments: ‘This Horrible Precipice’ — Father Hennepin bears witness to Niagara Falls

Seeing, hearing and feeling Niagara Falls for the first time is an awe-inspiring experience, even for visitors today who have viewed images of the mighty cataract all their lives before finally setting eyes on it. Multiply that sense of awe a thousand times and we can only begin to know what Father Louis Hennepin felt in the winter of 1678-79 when he stumbled through the woods and stood at the brink of Niagara.

Hennepin, born in what is today Belgium, was a Franciscan missionary who came to New France in 1675. In September 1678 he was part of the expeditionary party led by René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, that set out from Quebec City to explore the western lands of French North America. Few whites had gone before them.

By early December the French party had made it to Niagara, below the falls, probably somewhere around Queenston. They had already heard the roar of the waterfall. Indeed, they knew of it – in 1604 Samuel de Champlain wrote about “a fall about a league wide” that fell into a “sea so large” witnesses “have never seen the end of it.” But no European had ever both seen and described it.

Of course, La Salle’s native guides were quite familiar with Niagara Falls. On December 8, they led Hennepin through the snow to the falls. There, the priest witnessed a staggering sight, which he put to words in Description de la Louisiane, a book published in Paris in 1683. It was translated into English in 1698 as A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America:

His book included a relatively accurate illustration of the falls:

Credit Lehigh University Library

The Niagara Falls Hennepin saw was even more powerful and terrible than today’s falls – probably more than twice as powerful. Today, roughly 60 percent to 75 percent of the river’s flow is siphoned off above the falls via water intakes to feed the power stations on the American and Canadian sides. When Hennepin saw the Niagara, it flowed unimpeded – all the waters of the vast Great Lakes hurtling over the brink, some 2 million gallons of water every second.

Hennepin gave Europe its first accurate, verified description of Niagara Falls. But its name comes from the Attawandaron, or Neutral Confederacy, the Indians who lived on both banks of the mighty river. Only a few years before Hennepin and La Salle arrived, they were all but wiped out in the Beaver Wars by the Seneca nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. It was the Attawandaron who called the river Onghiara, a word that became Niagara by Hennepin’s time – then, as now, the only surviving remnant of that vanished people.