NIAGARA FALLS—A wind came up. The temperature dropped to zero. An ice floe sent people to their deaths.

We’re not talking about the destruction of Titanic, but a second tragedy off Canadian waters. One hundred years ago, on Feb. 5, 1912, just two months before Titanic sank, a Toronto man gave up his life beneath romantic Niagara Falls in order to die with his wife.

Eldridge Stanton and his wife, Clara, were swept to their deaths on an ice floe when a popular ice bridge below the falls cracked. Twenty-three others tourists were saved by fabled river man William “Red” Hill.

“It was spectacular, but very sad. It made my father a hero, but three people died,” Hill’s daughter Edith said in an interview before her death recently at age 92. “Through it, you could see the beauty and tragedy of Niagara Falls.”

In those days, tourists were allowed to walk on the ice bridge, which still freezes each winter below the falls. They would come by train to frolic at the base of the falls on horse-drawn sleighs, to buy whisky and roasted chestnuts from a series of portable, wooden shacks in Shanty Town and to toboggan down glaciers produced by the falls. Even the Salvation Army got involved, holding a weekly Sunday service at the bottom of what was known as No Man’s Land between Canada and the United States.

After a late breakfast, Eldridge, an executive with a stationary company, and Clara Stanton left their U.S. hotel to meet with friends on the Canadian side.

Suddenly, the effects of a strong southwest wind took hold and there was a flood of water over the falls, undermining the ice below. As a titanic grinding sound echoed through the gorge, Hill scrambled from the wooden shack he was operating. Shouting “follow me!,” he led most of the tourists to safety on the Canadian shore.

However, the Stantons became trapped on a huge floe and couldn’t make it back to the U.S. bank. Also on the floe were Cleveland teenagers Burrell Hecock and Ignatius Roth, who moments earlier had been having a snowball fight.

Back in Cleveland, Burrell’s mother, H. L. Hecock, said she looked into her glass of water and saw a premonition of her son in danger on loose ice. She became hysterical.

Meanwhile, the rugged Hill jumped in heavy boats from floe to floe in an attempt to save the four people, shouting: “You can still make it! To the shore! Back to the Canadian side! Don’t panic! Follow me!”

With thousands watching, Clara Stanton panicked and slumped to her knees, crying and afraid to move.

Hill got Roth to safety, but Stanton wouldn’t leave his wife as they hurtled toward the rapids. “Let me die!” she cried.

Police and firefighters dangled ropes and cables from three bridges over the gorge, but Eldridge couldn’t hold on to them and the couple, kissing and embracing, crashed to their deaths, along with Hecock. Their bodies were never found.

After the incident, Hill was awarded a life-saving medal — the second of four he received in his lifetime — although Edith Hill was disappointed there was never a memorial or plaque to mark the many other rescues he made along the river until his death in 1942 (a memorial was made for Hecock, who also tried to help the Stantons).

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Today, millions of tourists visit the falls annually to see the spectacular ice bridge, but they are allowed to view it only from behind railings. Occasionally, people venture across it at night to enter Canada or the U.S. illegally and two years ago, a British woman and her fiancée had to be rescued when they became trapped on the ice while trying to meet in the middle of the precarious river.

“The ice bridge has a life of its own: beautiful but often destructive,” says Rick Berketa, an amateur historian and creator of Thunder Alley, a website on Niagara Falls. “It’s always evolving in motion as it undulates under the extreme stresses of the winds and the water. It is as dangerous as it is unpredictable and unstable.”