Niagara Falls at Sunset

In December 1678 a French priest named Louis Hennepin stood at Niagara and wrote of "this horrible Precipice" and a roar "more terrible than that of Thunder." His account, published in Paris in 1683, gave Europe its first eyewitness description of the falls.

The numbers explain the noise. At the Horseshoe Falls the river drops about 188 feet along a crest some 2,200 feet wide. The falls formed roughly 12,500 years ago and have been cutting upstream ever since; today the edge moves about a foot a year.

Then came the painters. Frederic Church's seven-foot Niagara opened in New York in May 1857, and tens of thousands paid a quarter each to see it in three weeks. In 1885, after a campaign called Free Niagara, New York opened the State Reservation at Niagara, laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and free to enter. It is the oldest state park in the country.

This picture looks across the basin at sundown. The sun sits low on the left and lays a gold path over the green, choppy water. The falls curve across the canvas, and from the center of the curve a column of spray climbs into the clouds. Autumn trees crowd both banks, and on the right a small American flag flies over the trees.