The Falls of Niagara are situated about twenty-one miles from Lake Erie, and fourteen miles from Lake Ontario.  At this point the Niagara River, nearly a mile broad, flowing between level banks, and parted by several islands, is suddenly shot over a precipice 170 feet high, and making a sharp bend to the north, pursues its course through a narrow gorge towards Lake Ontario.  The Falls are divided at the brink by Goat Island, whose primeval woods are still thriving in their spray.  The Horseshoe Fall on the Canadian side is 812 yards, and the American Falls on the south side are 325 yards wide.  For a considerable distance both above and below the Falls the river is turbulent with rapids.

The water-power of the cataract has been employed from olden times.  The French fur-traders placed a mill beside the upper rapids, and the early British settlers built another to saw the timher used in their stockades.  By-and-by, the Stedman and Porter mills were established below the Falls; and subsequently, others which derived their water-supply from the lower rapids by means of raceways or leads.  Eventually, an open hydraulic canal, three-fourths of a mile long, was cut across the elbow of land on the American side, through the town of Niagara Falls, between the rapids above and the verge of the chasm below the Falls, where, since 1874, a cluster of factories has arisen, which discharge their spent water over the cliff in a series of cascades almost rivalling Niagara itself.  This canal, which only taps a mere drop from the ocean of power that is running to waste, has been utilised to the full; and the decrease of water-privileges in the New England States, owing to the clearing of the forests and settlement of the country, together with the growth of the electrical industries, have led to a further demand on the resources of Niagara.

With the example of Minneapolis, which draws the power for its many mills from the Falls of St. Anthony, in the Mississippi River, before them, a group of far-seeing and enterprising citizens of Niagara Falls resolved to satisfy this requirement by the foundation of an industrial city in the neighbourhood of the Falls.  They perceived that a better site could nowhere be found on the American Continent.  Apart from its healthy air and attractive scenery, Niagara is a kind of half-way house between the East and West, the consuming and the producing States.  By the Erie Canal at Tonawanda it commands the great waterway of the Lakes and the St. Lawrence.  A system of trunk railways from different parts of the States and Canada are focussed there, and cross the river by the Cantilever and Suspension bridges below the Falls.  The New York Central and Hudson River, the Lehigh Valley, the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburgh, the Michigan Central, and the Grand Trunk of Canada, are some of these lines.  Draining as it does the great lakes of the interior, which have a total area of 92,000 square miles, with an aggregate basin of