the history of Niagra Falls 🇨🇦 Lunatics, Underground Railroad, and War of 1812

hello and welcome to Niagara Falls to kick today off I need to tell you the story of someone named Annie now Annie was born in the mid 1800s and like many other people then and now she wanted to be rich that was her dream in life while she was born in Canada and grew up around Toronto she had this idea of the American dream go down to America get rich yada yada she moved to America no one would hire her so Annie then moved to Mexico City no one would hire her then after a while she got bored of that and was like you know what get me out of here and get me back to [Music] Canada someone dared her go over the side of this very big waterfall that I will show you and they said they would give her a bunch of money for it now many people before her had gone over the side of Niagara Falls but no woman has ever gone over it before okay so on her 61st birthday Ann finally found someone to build her a barrel she patted it with a mattress shoved herself in she went over the edge and she knew that this would make her her rich and famous well she goes over the edge gets all bloody and bruised and turns out though that no one actually cared they're like great woman over the edge in a mattress who cares she signed some autographs she stood around here you know signing autographs for people I was the woman in the barrel she never got rich from going over the barrel So today we're going to learn more about the false maybe not so much about Annie we're not going to go over the fals because cuz that sounds stupid and dangerous so yeah let's go explore more of this super awesome Geographic this super awesome geologic feature so where does the term Niagara come from well it was the first Nations word onara which means land cut into two right here we're in Canada just is the Canadian side now across that bog is the United States of America so whenever the first nations were naming things land cut two makes a lot of sense because yeah you kind of can't see the other side so you see behind kindas it's kind of shaped like a you kindas the official name of this Falls is Horseshoe Falls now in this whole area there's multiple Falls Horseshoe Falls is on the Canadian side on the American side way off in the distance over there we can see two tiny little othera Falls now horseshoe FS was obviously named because it's probably shaped like a horseshoe makes sense right well over the years and because of all of the stuff that has popped up here all of the tourism yada yada Horseshoe Falls has actually started to erode in fact Niagara Falls 10,000 years ago it was like 10 km more up north it's actually moved South at a very slow rate 10,000 years ago used to be huge and as it's moved further south it's kind of shrunken a little bit more in the next 50,000 years this will no longer exist so enjoy what we see today so I mentioned the erosion of Niagara Falls He also mentioned it's called horion Falls that name doesn't really fit it though because of the erosion it's more shaped like a V which is why we have this massive Cloud piling up on the American side over here which we see a little bit better it's more rounded there's a little bit less erosion it's a smaller fall Niagara Falls as we see it today it's around a kilometer long and it's about 80 80 M high so pretty tall waterfall um so yeah tall waterfall shaped like a V eroding because of massive tourism let's continue our little walk and go explore more we're inside but not for long because we're going behind the Falls so the story behind The Falls here is super cool now as you can imagine it's a waterfall so there's a bunch of hydroelectric power in in here and we'll go to the power station in a little bit so stay tuned if you're super into science and math and that sort of stuff but for now what I want to see and show you is what is behind this massive water pile so first we're going to take this tunnel that no one is down and go see what's down here jump cut to the end you guys we're behind the waterfall that's niaga fall this is so cool what how cool is this now can you imagine going over that in a barrel or in a ship or in a boat so this one guy decided Ed one time he was going to take his canoe over the edge of the falls so he got in his canoe and he was like nope not woring a life jacket cuz that life jacket is not going to be able to let me float after I go over the falls he didn't wear a helmet because he was like nope I'm a pro I don't need that well everyone saw him go over the fall and they saw his boat return but after that he was never seen again so that just shows you that Mama nature serious don't play in her play ground let her be guys let her be let's go see this one now now I mentioned Niagara Falls is eroding how are we under Niagara Falls and when was all of this structure built the water's going over our head the inside of these tunnels are super damp and super wet well in the 1960s the erosion of Niagara Falls got super super bad and so basically what happened is that they drained the falls for a long time they diverted all of the water to another place and then they built some structures up around Horseshoe Falls and the other Falls so then they could control the erosion during that time they also built a bunch of these tunnels to help with the tourism and that also just to help with the maintenance of the Fall so let's go see where else these tunnels [Music] go [Music] now we're on top of the falls there's all sorts of things to buy here they also sell a photo if you want to get yourself a photo like behind the green screen in front of the falls photo is about 60 Canadian dollar come on Canada you're better than that let's go see now where my next destination is because I want to beat the [Music] ticktockers so I mentioned that a couple people had gone over the side well it's illegal to go over the side but for whatever reason people still try to do it if you go over you'll be fined or you'll be dead now I mentioned back in the 1960s though this entire area was drained so they could go help fix the erosion and set up some structures to better suit tourism so it wouldn't erode as fast during this time whenever they drained the Falls they actually found a bunch of bodies just buried under the Rocks so yeah moral of the story don't go over the side water makes things pretty and and obey the laws Okay so we've been walking for a little bit not too long it's super sunny here it's about 10° so it kind of feels like British summer and I'm very warm right now anyway I am about to take you to one of the main reasons on why I wanted to come to Niagara Falls now being from Canada I've been here before that sounds really entitled I've been here before it's an awesome site but I haven't been to all of the stuff around it and I wanted to go to the power station because one thing that you may not know is that the flow rate of the falls changes so in the day it's super a lot and at night it's less and this is because the whole Falls both the American side and the US side is a massive generator of hydroelectric power so there's a treaty right now between the US and Canada that in the daytime they'll run the Falls a full BL blast and at night they'll run them at a smaller blast but then they'll go create hydroelectric energy for it so now we're going to go experience a little bit more of the Hydro power that this awesome balls [Music] creates and now we've entered out on the platform I mean you guys look at this I think there's nothing better than being alone on your so over here we see this bridge that's connecting Canada on this side and the USA on that side there's a little platform if you want to stand on the USA side but we're just going to enjoy what we see here how cool is this so this was built between 1901 and 1905 in the tunnel every single brick was hand Ling there's over 5 million brick and the tunnel's about a kilometer long walking from all the way over the falls to the a really really green ocean I mean lake so can you imagine just digging this tunnel out Brick by Brick bucket of dirt by bucket of dirt I mean remember in 1900s and the early 1900s there was no heavy machinery there was no occupational and health standards there was very little control over like building and doing safe stuff Dynam might would just blast in this tunnel and you hope you weren't in the way so while they were building the tunnel there was a bunch of safety precautions that were spun up on the spot but they were learning as they went on no tunnel this long had ever been built before and it was just learning as they went on every single of these 5 million bricks in here laid by hand so today this power station currently isn't in operation but unlike the other power stations that were built up around here it's really the only one that's set up for tourism because it's so structurally sound now the power stations around the Niagara Falls area were so important because along this area in the geographical region of Lower Canada and then the upper us there were so many factories the factories were there because there's a massive river that comes out of the Great Lake areas and that dumps into the Atlantic Ocean so this place generated power for a lot of those factories to consume now you'll see like that we're walking on pavement this pavement wasn't here whenever this was operational it was like little two mining railroad cars and that's how they haul stuff to and from in this massive power plant everything was custom made they couldn't just order a new part from eBay or Amazon they actually had to make it and structure it by the himself so you can imagine like how much tools and how much heavy machinery and stuff they just had to have down here in order to keep the plant fixed as they were changing a bunch of the various structures you know it took like two or three or four men just to do a change and promoting for the podcast stay tuned cuz I'm going to do a whole podcast on visiting Niagara and then what I found down here and me one of the workers who actually used to work in this power plant it's a pretty cool pretty cool story that I have to tell you I will try to make it come out sometime around the same time with the video so you can just watch this video and then pop over to the podcast later this week and watch it so as you may know Nikolai Tesla created a bunch of stuff with electronic currents and BTS and energy well his inventions were used like literally in here see he left ser in like the early 1900s to comeb to North America and pursue his dreams of creating a new alternating currency circuit now fast forward a couple of years and this machine here was used to test the different circuits it looks even scary for me to touch it right now so I'm not going to do that but here is how they used to test to see if the circuit was running or not Isn't that cool now when Nica came here he had two things with him four pennies which doesn't go very far even back in early 1900s and a notebook of his favorite poetry a man after my own heart except for the fact that maybe he was just super obsessed with electricity and I think that that would be annoying but in this case extremely useful especially to power Southern Canada was electricity for so long so yo Nick thanks you guys look a rainbow how cool is that that's nice thanks Mama [Music] nature now right here in front of us we actually see the old power plant that used to exist and this one was open until 1974 see the power plant that we were in with the tunnels below that one was open until 2006 so this one open a little bit I guess closed a little bit before that on this building you can see typical Canadian construction and by that I mean like a massive mix of both French and British architecture see can was settled by Britain and France now long before Britain and France came over there was a whole bunch of people already living here mostly in peace and we call them the First Nations so whenever Britain and France came and discovered Canada they were just chilling out doing as you do whenever you find a new place in fact in the early 1800s there was only about 500,000 people here 300,000 of those people were French sett and the others were a mix of British and just some other people that had come over some people from the nordics so it mostly was just a territory where people who didn't want to be in Europe were chilling out so just about 5 10 minutes away from all the touristy stuff look at this nature Paradise this is amazing this is the Dufferin Islands so in the winter like uh there's all these lights and stuff you can see up here a light show but right now we just see all these little tucks and all of this water feeds into Niagara Falls which as I mentioned feeds into the Atlantic Ocean one thing I do want to acknowledge is that the these lands that we on are not our lands they are the lands of the first nation and whenever all the settlers came in we did some pretty bad stuff to the First Nations and yeah so I'm really sorry that our forefathers were dicks and did what they did to you guys but I really appreciate what you kept for thousands of years before Britain and France and everyone else came over here here and I don't know if the camera just got that but I just saw a cardinal fly okay I'm going to see if I can find it for you guys do you see him he's right there cardinal hi pretty boy only in Canada so you see all of the the green water around here and here and I'm sure you notice it in the Falls so why is the water green around here well it's lime super super limey water in fact in the tunnels before they were excavated out there was massive stalagmites and statites growing in there so we don't see them anymore since the cave is dry but because it's lme so I hopped on the bus cuz I was pretty hungry I hav had breakfast yet and I maybe jet leged guess it's lunch or dinner and I was going to go to this one place for food but I forgot to go there because I saw this thing appear out of nowhere look we found a temple so it's the Temple of 10,000 buddh and actually in this Temple temp Le there are 10,000 different Buddha statues so this Temple was built first by importing a Buddha statue here in this building and it's a Buddha statue of like I think it's 12 M high and it's just hanging out in there so I'm going to see if they do tours and if not we're just going to go explore around because I was totally not expecting this and lunch is just going to have to [Music] [Music] wait okay ready spine press this is so cool so you can't go in the big Temple that's only open for people to go see in the summer and it's not summer right now but this is the big Temple all the way up there and we're going to go walk around and see other Buddhas now when you started watching this video did you expect this me neither is it exploring super cool I love it so in front of us this is what we are walking to this giant statue um and if you're a viewer and you are Buddhist I don't know the names of these so please tell me what they are I find this beautiful so I'm not entirely sure of the lore behind why we need 10,000 Buddhas in this Temple but we do and that's what makes it special so yeah let's go check out this other really large statue over here in front of me this statue here maybe they're Idols statue and or Idol and maybe it's a double statue Idol I mean it's just very peaceful in here I think these are kind of old they look pretty old they're pretty whatever they are so that was just random crazy get off the bus and go see something cool now I'm going to go finish my walk and take you to actually what I wanted to take you to originally because it's part of the Canadian lore so I have to tell you the story about Canada so we've reached to what I want to show you Queen Street District now why is this semi derel part of Ni about one of the reasons I wanted to come up here well long ago the us became a country in 1776 it wasn't until 1867 that Canada declared independence from Britain now in the year 1812 just what was that 40 years after the US had become a country they did something really dumb now I've read a bunch of reports on this and history I don't know dissertations blah blah no one actually knows knows why the US declared war in the year 1812 now on a global scale what was happening in 1812 the British were fighting Napoleon because basically Napoleon the massive French Emperor was starting up a naval fleet and at the time um Britain had the best naval fleet in the world and they felt threatened by what Napoleon had so for like I don't know four five 10 years 20 years there was a massive war going on between Britain and France even though at the time both Britain and France had people in North America the people in North America were living very peacefully the US was trying to figure out what to do how it wanted to be a country and then you have Europe in war so the US for whatever reason got anxious and they decided to attack Canada now as I told you there was only about 500,000 people in Canada at the time there was about 6,000 British troops the US had about 20 ,000 and they signed a bill to like triple the size of their army so the US are coming up here trying to cross the river trying to attack Canada now during that battle this used to be the capital of what we know today is Upper Canada and the US came in here and they flattened this entire city they pillaged all the civilians burnt the city and it was nothing so what happened is that the Canadians took the capital that was here in Niagara and moved it up to York which we know today as Toronto so Niagara holds great history in the Canadian lore because now get this the Canadians with their tiny little army beat the americ see there was a super smart general and he was like hey I think that if we get together and if we Ambush the Americans at 2 a.m. they won't know what hit them now it was the first Nations the French the British all got together to push the Americans back into their soil so at 2: a.m. one morning everyone ambushed the Americans and the Americans were terrified see when they declared war in 1812 they sent a letter like a literal paper letter to Britain and said hey we're declaring war on you and specifically war on your territory up in Canada it took forever for that letter to get to Britain and they were still busy fighting Napoleon and Britain's like what the hell are you guys doing you don't even have an army we are the best Naval army ever so they kind of ignored it but they were also really busy trying to defend their home territory whenever this Ambush happened the Americans thought it was the British that had come and sent in fleets when in fact it was just a couple hundred really unified really committed people to pushing the Americans back across the river so that was really the First Fundamental thing in Canadian history that unified us as a nation because without it I mean we still would have probably been a nation but we wouldn't have had that bonding moment so over time and about 50 years later you know Britain gave Canada their freedom but whenever the War of 1812 ended uh one thing that's very important that gets unlooked a lot of times Britain wrote something in the ending the war agreement they told the US do not destroy the native people living here it's like they had learned something from destroying civilizations before in their past battles did the US listen no did Britain enforce it no so I find that really interesting that Britain may have known something they could have stopped something really bad from happening to the First Nations people both in Canada and in the US happening and they didn't this is cool we're underneath the bridge walking towards the falls and we just see them starting to appear under these archways so I'm glad we're back here so I can talk to you when we were in Downtown Niagara and I was telling you about the the history of Canada there were some cars and people that started to follow me and I didn't want to be followed I want my own camera and I want my own stories for myself so now that we're back in tourist area it's all fine so one thing that I find super interesting about this area and I guess North America in general it's young like living in Europe for the last 10 years it's super super old and this is so young so it was back in like the mid 1850s where the Niagara region started to become tourist destination so as you may be aware in the 1800s um slavery was thing in the US in Canada it was not a thing we weren't into that sort of stuff but what we were into was the Underground Railroad and this area was actually a massive stop for the Underground Railroad you see a lot of slave owners and plantation owners would come up from the south bring their slaves because people couldn't go anywhere without their slaves then they would come up here and whenever like the plantation owner would be off doing a tourist thing or having a dinner the slaves would just suddenly disappear and that's when the Underground Railroad people would come and sweep them up and take them over to Canada so they was so many disappearing of people up here and I find it super cool that it was just like up here as we enter the people you will soon learn why so many people other than just people from Southern us started to come here and travel but first I need to show you this the sun is out [Music] so when did this area become so busy and so touristy well shortly after World War I with the rise of automobiles and personal owned automobiles it became so much easier for rich people to travel no longer did they have to get on a train or a horse they could just come up here in their car so after World War I ended tourism started to Boom here but then the world wasn't really at rest until the end of World War II at the end of World War II is when everything here started to get crazy which we can kind of see now how crazy the touris is so what happened at the end of World War II as many of you know there's this term called bab Boomers Niagara Falls was marketed as one of the best honeymoon spots ever and the reason for that is because of Hollywood see Marilyn Monroe was in a movie so cleverly named Niagara and with that movie they decided to start marketing this area for honeymoon spots and then after that it just kind of spiraled into what we see today so here's another Viewpoint with all sorts of people viewing and doing Tik Tok ah this must be a good viewing because there's a standable view machine so if you come here one question that people ask me is should I go to the American side should I go to the Canadian side should I go to both sides well obviously if you have infinite time and money go to both sides sometimes though you don't have a visa to go into either country so if you have the visa to get into the us or into Canada do what you can legally go into like don't sneak across the border because that'd be weird what I would say though is if you have to pick between one of the sides I do think the Canadian side is a whole lot better you get some amazing viewpoints of the Horseshoe Falls up here you can also see the other falls in the American side this massive Tower up here on the American side like that little Landing Bridge up there gives you a Viewpoint of Horseshoe Falls that said if you want to take a cruise ride do it on the American side and the reason you want to do that is because the mist from Horseshoe Falls doesn't get you as wet and you can actually see more so if you're going going and you're just like nope we're going to stay on the US side then take the cruise they take you a really nice distance away from the Mist the Canadian side takes you a little bit further into the mist and you know phone camera wet rice we covered so much today some history of Canada some history of the War of 1812 we covered running away from random people who started to follow me what else did we cover a price Temple amazing there's more to come in Canada so stay tuned there's going to be a bunch of stuff here and I'm super excited that I get to share with you my home country thanks for watching today's adventure in Niagra like subscribe and drop a comment where I should go next and with that I'm just going to leave you with some really pretty music and photos of what's behind me CIA [Music] he [Music]

Channel: Vagabond Chronicles

Views: 330

Keywords: travel, budgettravel, europe, wanderlust, history, canada, travelvlog, solotravel

Id: nuvflXbgEP4

Length: 34min 38sec (2078 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2024