Annie Edson Taylor, who was about 62 when she became the first, and oldest, person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Photo / Supplied
She was the oldest person, and the only woman, to attempt going over Niagara in a barrel alone, but the glamour that followed was short-lived. Jesse McKinley of The New York Times reports.
Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
Imagine a barrel 1.3m tall, about as big as an antique ice box, or — perhaps more to the point — a small coffin. It's in a treacherous spot: bobbing and dunking in the waters of the Niagara River, just above the cascading chaos of Niagara Falls.
Inside is a sexagenarian widow named Annie Edson Taylor, an increasingly underemployed charm school instructor who is about to add a new title — amateur daredevil — to her theretofore itinerant and largely unremarkable résumé.
Taylor, you see, is about to go over the falls.
In an era of Harry Houdini, Barnum & Bailey and other death-defying showmen, Taylor, at about 62, became front-page famous when, in a moment of unequivocal courage and questionable decision-making, she crawled into the white-oak barrel of her own design on a late October afternoon in 1901.
Taylor fell nearly 49 metres, hurtling toward the cauldron of rocks and raging water below, all in hope of landing in a far richer future.
Amazingly, she survived, becoming the first, and oldest, person to accomplish such a fearless, foolhardy feat. She is also the only woman to have done it alone.
Taylor openly admitted that she had made the trek to Niagara from Bay City, Michigan, to "aid myself financially" as well as "succour two friends" who were also facing hard times by catching a little of the glisten that such stunts had been attracting.
The rapids below the falls had been the site of all sorts of daredevil attempts at the turn of the century. Stuntmen were gaining fame with feats in boats, on tightropes or with sole reliance on the human body. In one famous attempt, swimmer Captain Matthew Webb, the first known person to swim the English Channel without assistance, drowned in the rapids in 1883.
But no one had ever gone over the more fearsome falls in a barrel: Taylor aimed to change that, and planned to capitalise on a crush of visitors in the area during the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in nearby Buffalo.
"The idea came to me like a flash of light: Go over Niagara Falls in a barrel," Taylor wrote in a slim 1902 souvenir memoir, aptly named Over the Falls, which she later sold for 10 cents to curiosity-seekers at a stand near the site of her stunt.
The "Goddess of Water," as she was nicknamed, achieved instant celebrity status, complete with poetry penned in her honour.
One of them, printed in The Lady Who Conquered Niagara, a 1990 biography published by her descendents, read: "This great heroine of our nation, has won both fortune and fame. Now people all over creation, will praise this illustrious dame."
While the sales of her memoir briefly lifted her fortunes, her fame and financial security were brief. She eventually faded into much less glamorous circumstances and died, poverty-stricken and largely unnoticed (including by this newspaper), on April 29, 1921. An obituary in The Buffalo Express that year said that she had been swindled by "unscrupulous managers," during post-plunge publicity tours. In a final indignity, the miscreants even stole her barrel.
"She was persistently followed by ill luck," the newspaper reported.
Such a sullen end seemed incongruous for a woman who seemingly spent much of her life searching for adventure.
Anna Edson was born on October 24, 1838, one of 11 children to Merrick Edson and Lucretia Waring, who ran a prosperous milling operation in New York's Finger Lakes region and later became farmers. But her dreams soon outgrew their surroundings. The 1990 biography described a young woman endowed of a dreamy disposition, uninterested in dolls — she preferred outdoor sports — and an imagination "fueled by an insatiable thirst for adventure stories."
If Taylor did not fit the mould of the dashing practitioner of derring-do, nor did she seem to be a damsel in distress: She had a brief marriage at 18 which she said she regretted — her husband, David Taylor, was the older brother of a dear friend, and died shortly after their union. Taylor then bounced around several cities, encountering potential peril: She survived a house fire in Chattanooga and an earthquake in South Carolina.
A stagecoach she was riding in rural Texas was waylaid by robbers, who put a gun to her head. Taylor refused to give them her money, some $800 hidden in her dress.
"Blow away," she recalls saying in her memoir, "I would as soon be without my brains as without money."
Around 1898, she settled in Bay City, Michigan, teaching the waltz and table manners to the children of the local gentry. But the income from her charm school faltered as her students grew up, and Taylor soon found herself searching for other opportunities to make money.
It was then that she read about the 1901 Pan-American Exposition and decided to do something for which she had no experience.
She did not look the part: stout and greying, Taylor even lied about her age and told reporters she was in her early 40s.
She personally designed the vessel, sketching a diagram and making a prototype out of cardboard and string. A local company that made beer kegs constructed the barrel, and she selected each piece of wood. The result was uneven and oblong, less than 3 feet at its widest and tapered at either end. It was secured by 10 metal loops and included an anvil intended to keep it upright along its watery course.
On the afternoon of the stunt, fresh air was pumped in before Taylor was sealed inside. There was enough for almost an hour, though her journey would take far less time than that. Taylor was towed near the Canadian border, where the waters were deeper and the Horseshoe Falls, the biggest of the three falls at the location, beckoned. After a brief goodbye to the boatmen who had pulled her to the brink, Taylor was released and floated toward "the Mighty Cataract," as she put it, protected only by a collection of pillows packed in around her.
"I felt as though I were being suffocated," she wrote, "but I determined to be brave."
The barrel swerved and swooped down the rapids toward the edge, as the roar of falling water grew louder. After a brief spell of peculiar calm at the top, Taylor felt gravity take her.
"As I reached the brink the barrel did what I predicted it would do," Taylor wrote, "paused for a moment, and then made the awful plunge."
Seconds later, she hit the surface. The barrel was submerged on impact and then was spun and cast about, ending up behind the veil of the falls. Water started to seep into the barrel, and she bounced off the rocks before being shot "like an arrow from a bow" back into the churn of the river.
She was not to be adrift for long; Taylor was being watched by throngs of spectators on both sides of the border, and she was soon pulled from the water by a team of anxious boatmen.
They tore the lid off the barrel and found her startled, seasick and clutching a waterlogged pillow.
"Good God!" shouted one of her rescuers, a fellow daredevil named Carlisle Graham. "She's alive!"
Word of her success was shouted to spectators by megaphone and a local steamer, "The Maid of the Mist," blew its horn in celebration. A report in The Boston Globe several days later credited Taylor — bruised and with a cut on her head — with accomplishing a feat "never attempted except in the deliberate commission of suicide" and doing so "without a broken bone."
But as the years passed, details of her plunge faded out of memories: Some reports said it happened on October 21, but most others, including one in this newspaper, said it was on October 24, a date that was more symbolic — it was Taylor's birthday.
The feat has only been replicated a handful of times since. For her part, Taylor returned to the falls in the 1910s to sell her memoir and try her hand at other moneymaking schemes, including working as a clairvoyant and offering "electric and magnetic" medical treatments, according to her biography. She also appeared in a silent-film re-enactment of her 1901 stunt.
There was one thing she would never do again.
"I would rather face a cannon," she told The Globe, "than go over the falls again."
Written by: Jesse McKinley
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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