of Niagara, or Niagara-on-the-Lake. Fort Niagara has a reservation of 288 acres, with fairly modern equipments, several historic buildings of the time of French and of British possession, in one of which, the old magazine (1757), William Morgan was imprisoned in 1826. Fort Niagara was long, especially during the French occupation of Canada, one of the most important forts in North America, being the key to the Great Lakes, beyond Lake Ontario. “This immense extent of inland navigation,” says Parkman, “was safe in the hands of France so long as she held Niagara. Niagara lost not only the lakes but also the valley of the Ohio was lost with it.” René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, wintered here in 1678–9, built his ship the “Griffon,” and established a trading post and Fort Conti, destroyed not long afterwards. Fort Denonville, built in 1687 by Jacques René de Brésay, marquis de Denonville, governor-general of Canada, in his cruel campaign against the Iroquois, was abandoned in 1688, after the garrison, commanded by Pierre de Troyes (d. 1687), had been wiped out by an epidemic. The first Fort Niagara, to be so named, was built in 1725–1727 at the instance of Charles le Moyne, 1st baron of Longueil (1656–1729), and became a very important military and trading post; the fort was rebuilt by François Pouchot (1712–1769) in 1756, but in July 1759, after a siege of about sixteen days, it was surrendered to Sir William Johnson by Pouchot, who wrote a Memoir upon the Late War (translated and edited by F. B. Hough; 2 vols., 1866). On the 14th of September 1763 a British force marching from Fort Schlosser (about 2 m. above the Falls; built 1750) to Fort Niagara was ambushed by Indians, who threw most of their captives into Devil’s Hole, along the Niagara river. In July 1764 a treaty with the Indians was signed here, which detached some of them from Pontiac’s conspiracy. Joseph Brant, John Butler, and, in general, the Indians of north-western New York favouring the British during the American War of Independence, made Fort Niagara their headquarters, whence they ravaged the frontier, and many loyalists and Indians took refuge here at the time of General Sullivan’s expedition into western New York in 1779. The fort was not surrendered to the United States until August 1796. In the War of 1812 it was bombarded by the guns of Fort George (immediately across the river in the town now called Niagara, then Newark[1]) on the 13th and 14th of October 1812; was the starting-point of the American expedition which took Fort George on the 27th of May 1813; and on the 19th of December 1813 was surprised and taken by assault—most of the garrison being killed or taken prisoners—by British troops under John Murray (1774–1862), who had previously retaken Fort George. After the close of the war, on the 27th of March 1815, Fort Niagara was restored to the United States, and a garrison was kept there until 1826. The fort was regarrisoned about 1836.
See F. H. Severance, Old Trails on the Niagara Frontier (Buffalo, 1903), Parkman’s works, especially Montcalm and Wolfe (2 vols., Boston, 1884), and The Conspiracy of Pontiac (2 vols., Boston, 1851), and a pamphlet by Peter A. Porter, A Brief History of Old Fort Niagara (Niagara Falls, 1896).
NIAGARA FALLS (formerly Clifton or Suspension Bridge), a town and port of entry of Welland county, Ontario, Canada, 40 m. S.S.E. of Toronto, on the west bank of the Niagara river and opposite the Falls. Pop. (1901) 4244. It is a station on the Grand Trunk, Michigan Central and St Catharines & Niagara Central railways, and has electric railway communication with the chief towns in the neighbourhood. Three large steel bridges connect it with the American town of Niagara Falls on the opposite bank. Its importance is chiefly due to the tourist traffic, but the unrivalled water power is being more and more employed. Factories have sprung up, and power is transmitted to Toronto and other cities. A beautiful park, named after Queen Victoria, extends along the bank of the river for 212 m. above the Falls.
NIAGARA FALLS, a city of Niagara county, New York, U.S.A., on the E. side of the Niagara river, at the Falls, 22 m. N.N.W. of Buffalo. Pop. (1900) 19,457, of whom 7326 were foreign-born, (1910 census) 30,445. The city is served by the New York Central & Hudson River, the Wabash, the Erie, the Lehigh Valley, the West Shore and the Michigan Central railways, and by the International Electric railway and the Niagara, St Catharines & Toronto (electric) railway. The city extends along the level summit of the cliffs from above the Falls to some 3 m. below. The river is here crossed by three bridges; the (upper) steel arch bridge, built (1895) on the site of the former suspension bridge (built in 1869; blown down in 1889; rebuilt as a suspension bridge) near the Falls, is crossed by double carriageways and footpaths and by an electric railway, and is probably the longest bridge of the kind in the world, being 1240 ft. long with an arch span of 840 ft.; and 112 m. farther down the river are two railway bridges, the Michigan Central’s cantilever bridge, completed in 1883, and the (lower) single steel arch bridge (completed in 1897, on the site of John A. Roebling’s suspension bridge built in 1851–1856) of the Grand Trunk railway, which has a terminus at Niagara Falls (Clifton), Ontario, and connects here with the New York Central & Hudson River and the Lehigh Valley railways.
The principal buildings of the city are the Niagara Falls Memorial Hospital, the Federal Building and the Niagara Falls Power Co. Building. The city has a Carnegie library, De Veaux College (Protestant Episcopal, chartered in 1853), and Niagara University, a Roman Catholic institution, founded in 1856 by the priests of the Congregation of the Mission and incorporated in 1863 as the Seminary of Our Lady of Angels, a name still used for the theological department, but displaced, since the charter of the university in 1883, by the present name. In the extreme S.W. part of the city is Prospect Park, which with Goat Island immediately S., and several smaller islands, has been, since 1885, the “New York State Reservation at Niagara Falls.” From the Falls, which gave the city its first importance as a stopping place for tourists, valuable electric and hydraulic power is derived (by a tunnel 29 ft. deep and 18 ft. wide, passing about 200 ft. under the surface of the city, from the upper steel arch bridge to a point 114 m. above the Falls, and by the canal of the Niagara Falls Hydraulic Power and Manufacturing Company). Niagara Falls is an important manufacturing city; the value of the factory products increased from $8,540,184 in 1900 to $16,915,786 in 1905, or 98·1%. The city is the shipping centre for the W. part of Niagara county. The village of Niagara Falls was for a time called Manchester. In 1892 the village of Suspension Bridge (formerly Niagara City) was joined with it under a city charter, which has been frequently amended.
NIAM-NIAM (Zandeh, A-Zandeh), a people of Central Africa, of mixed Negroid descent. With kindred tribes, they stretch from the White Nile above the Sobat confluence to the Shari affluent of Lake Chad, and from the Bahr-el-Arab, about 10° N., nearly to the equator. Their political ascendancy, weakened by the incessant attacks of the Arab-Nubian slave-raiders before the rise of the Sudanese mahdi in 1882, was afterwards broken by the forces of the Congo Free State and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.
The term Niam-Niam appears to be of Dinka origin, meaning in that language “great eaters,” with reference, as is supposed, to their cannibalistic propensities. They are called Babungera by the Mangbettu (Monbuttu), A-Madyaka by the Diur, Mundo or Manyanya by the Bongo, Makaraka or Kakaraka by the Mittu. But Niam-Niam has been adopted and generalized by the Sudan and Nubian Mahommedans. Their native name is Zandeh (pl. A-Zandeh), which is current throughout the eastern Niam-Niam domain, a region estimated by Georg Schweinfurth, who visited the country in 1870, at about 48,000 sq. m., with a population of at least two millions. But these by no means constitute a uniform ethnical group, for within this area is the large Madi nation, differing altogether in speech and even
- ↑ On the night of the 10th of December 1813 the American general George McClure (1771–1851), upon abandoning Fort George, set fire to Newark, almost destroying the town and causing great suffering among the inhabitants. McClure attempted to justify this act by a strained construction of a letter to him from the secretary of war, but it was promptly disavowed by the United States government. The burning of Newark led to severe reprisals on the part of the British.
