In this tourist’s letter home to Philadelphia, he writes of the waitstaff: “the head waiter in this hotel is a large fine looking Indian, the whole party some 25 or 30 are well drilled and move in battalions with the precision and quickness of a company of infantry, they are said to be some of the best in the United States.”

The luxurious hotel was founded by proprietor Parkhurst Whitney, who was sympathetic to the abolitionist cause. In the 1840s and throughout the 1850s, the establishment employed Black men as waiters in the dining rooms and in other roles. Niagara, situated on the border with Canada, presented a unique opportunity for those involved with the Underground Railroad. It was both a popular tourist destination and directly adjacent to free territory.

The waitstaff formed a network that assisted self-emancipated individuals seeking freedom and safe passage across the Niagara River into Canada. They shared information about the journey, and head waiter John Morrison personally ferried numerous freedom seekers. The 1860 Federal Census lists John Morrison as “mulatto,” and he is almost certainly the “fine looking Indian” described by the letter writer.

When slave-owning Southerners traveled to the North, they often brought enslaved people with them. Most hotel owners turned a blind eye, and they were registered as “servants.” As early as 1841, a slave owner lamented in the New Orleans Times-Picayune that waiters at the Cataract House had helped his 14-year-old “servant” girl escape to Canada.

The letter writer also expounds on the beauty of Niagara Falls and their trip aboard the Maid of the Mist: “We have been looking at the falls and roaming over the islands for the last 2 days and hardly feel as if we had begun to understand the greatness and immensity of this world's wonder. Every new point of view shows some before unseen attraction; the whole affair is on so grand a scale that the more you look, the more you appreciate it...We went yesterday in the afternoon on a trip in the little steamer ‘Maid of the Mist’ to the very foot of the falls and among the boiling and angry waves that seem anxious to swallow you up without chewing. We were much pleased with the exursion, tho had we not been dressed from head to foot in india rubber we should have been half drowned; as it was the spray was so heavy that we could not look at the falls part of the time; it took away the breath; the captain said no one had ever been nearer.”