The oldest ride at Niagara started as a ferry

It was a ferry

The service began in 1846 and it was not built to show anyone a waterfall. It was a working crossing, carrying passengers, luggage, mail and cargo between the United States and Canada across the river below the falls, as the historical record sets out.

There was no bridge. If you needed to get from one side to the other with a trunk and a mailbag, this was how.

The sightseeing came later, and it came by accident of obsolescence. Once a bridge opened the ferry business evaporated, and the operators discovered that the part of the job people had actually been enjoying was the bit where the boat went near the falls.

The 1861 delivery run

The single best story the operation has comes from the year the tourist trade collapsed.

In 1861 the boat was sold, in part because the American Civil War had emptied Niagara of visitors. Delivering it meant getting it downriver to the buyer, and downriver meant the Whirlpool Rapids and Devil's Hole Rapids, a stretch of Class V water that nobody had run.

On 6 June 1861, Captain Joel Robinson took the boat through alone, after the rest of the crew declined to go. Boat and captain both came out the other end. The operator's own history records it, and it is the only time a Maid of the Mist has been through that water deliberately.

Nobody has repeated it. The Whirlpool Rapids are today the preserve of the jet boats, which run them at speed and by design, and which our jet boat guide explains are a completely separate product from the falls cruise.

What has changed and what has not

The route has barely moved in a century and a half. Out along the gorge, past the American and Bridal Veil Falls, into the Horseshoe basin, turn, return. That is the same circuit the ferry passengers were incidentally enjoying in the 1840s.

The Canadian side is a much younger story. Hornblower took the Ontario concession in 2014 and the operation was rebranded Niagara City Cruises in 2021 under City Experiences, as the corporate record shows. Both names remain in circulation, which is why visitors routinely think there are two Canadian boats. Our Canadian ticket guide untangles it.

The rescue

The other thing an operation this old accumulates is a role it never advertised. Because the boats are the only crewed vessels routinely working the plunge pool directly below the falls, they have been first on scene more than once.

The most famous instance was 9 July 1960, when a Maid of the Mist under Captain Clifford Keech recovered a seven-year-old boy who had gone over Horseshoe Falls in a life jacket and survived. Our post on the boy who went over the falls covers what happened in full.

That is a strange thing for a tourist attraction to have on its record, and it is a direct consequence of the 1846 decision to put a boat in that particular piece of water.

Eighteen decades on one stretch of water

Almost nothing on that list was planned. A ferry business lost its purpose, a captain took a boat somewhere nobody had been, and a river kept putting things in awkward places.

Why the age matters to a visitor

Mostly it does not, and it would be dishonest to claim the ride is better for being old. Twenty minutes on the Canadian boat delivers the same falls.

What the history does change is the register of the thing. Most attractions of this scale were designed as attractions: built to a brief, priced to a model, themed to an audience. This one is a piece of nineteenth-century transport infrastructure that outlived its purpose and found a second one, on a route nobody planned as a route.

You can ride it for US$30.25, which our ticket guide breaks down, and it will be about twenty minutes, of which four or five are the reason anyone goes.

Questions about the history