Niagara: A History of the Falls (34 page)

Annie Taylor, a septuagenarian widow, looking
remarkably young for her 73 years, today became
the first human being to conquer Niagara Falls in a
barrel. At a time when most people of her age have
a foot in the grave, the amazing Mrs. Taylor, active
and bold, in spite of her advancing years …

But Annie was no Barnum. She insisted on the proprieties. She would not, she declared, make her way through the town to the point where her barrel was to be launched already dressed for the trip. It would be unbecoming, she said, “for a woman of refinement and of my years to parade before a crowd in a short skirt.”

Russell found an expert riverman to help launch the barrel: Fred Truesdale, a sturdy teamster with a bold black beard, who had been hired by previous thrill seekers to send barrels containing cats and dogs over the Horseshoe. No one knew whether or not the animals survived, but none of Truesdale’s customers had followed through on the feat itself.

Truesdale tested the barrel, dubbed
Queen of the Mist
, on October 18, supplying a cat for the journey. Russell watched from Terrapin Point on Goat Island, accompanied by the ubiquitous Carlisle Graham and another daredevil, Bill Johnson, who had celebrated the Glorious Fourth that year by jumping, manacled, from the
Maid of the Mist
.

Truesdale tossed the barrel into the river from the Canadian shore. Spinning, tumbling, tossed high on the crest of the waves, it wallowed through the rapids before being hurled over the brink. The barrel was retrieved, but whether or not the cat survived remained a matter of conjecture. The Niagara Falls
Gazette
and the
Cataract Journal
said it had. The Buffalo
Express
and the
People’s Press
of Port Welland said it hadn’t. Russell wasn’t saying anything.

The crowd gathered on Sunday to watch Annie go over. She failed to appear, and Russell gave the press a confusing variety of excuses. The most plausible was that the photographs Annie had intended to sell on the site had not been developed. After all, she was almost broke.

She apologized later to the reporters for her absence. “I do not wish to be classified with the women who are seeking notoriety,” she said. “I am not of the common daredevil sort. I feel refined and I know that I am well educated and well connected.” The barrel trip was postponed to Wednesday afternoon, October 23. “I have no fear whatever,” said Annie. “When I make up my mind to do a thing, nothing can stop me.”

Heavy winds caused a second delay, and the presence of Carrie Nation, the axe-wielding prohibition advocate, shuttling between the exposition and the Falls, briefly crowded Annie out of the headlines. By this time, few believed she was prepared to make the trip. The
People’s Press
, in its headline, suggested it was all “A GIGANTIC HOAX!”

But she was determined. “If I say I will do a thing, I will do it,” she said, her voice trembling. “I hate a weak, vacillating person who says they’ll do a thing and then backs out. I value my word of honor. If I thought it were necessary, and I had given my word that I would step in front of a cannon and be shot to pieces, I would do it!”

She remained true to her promise. At half-past one on the afternoon of Thursday, October 24, she was ready.

There was a small hitch when Truesdale’s assistant, Fred Robinson, bowed out. “I ain’t going to be a party to the murder of any woman,” he announced. The local police chief had scared him off by threatening to arrest him for manslaughter if Annie perished. Truesdale replaced him with a cheerful youth, Billy Holleran.

Wearing a long black skirt with matching jacket and a black, wide-brimmed hat, and looking and acting “as if she were some plain, stout woman on her way to Sunday morning service,” Annie emerged from Truesdale’s house with her manager and walked to her boat as a crowd of well-wishers chorused goodbyes. “I will not say goodbye,” she said, “but
au revoir”
Peter Nissen, better known as “Bowser,” who had made headlines tempting the rapids the year before in his boat (aptly named the
Fool Killer)
, was present to pump her hand.

In order to elude the police, who were making a half-hearted attempt to stop what the authorities regarded as a potential suicide, Russell had decided that Annie should push off from Grass Island in midstream a mile and a half above the cataract. There she was photographed with her barrel, and there, at her request, the members of her entourage and the press retreated to the far side of the island while she, hidden in the reeds, modestly peeled off hat, jacket, and outer skirt. Then, attired in a short black skirt, blue-and-white shirtwaist, black stockings, and tan slippers, she pronounced herself ready for the ordeal.

There she stood, with the waters swirling only a few feet away – a lumpy figure with a pudding of a face, resolute, unafraid, and totally confident that she, at sixty-three, could accomplish a feat that no other human being had managed, and from which younger and more athletic daredevils had shrunk. What was she doing here – a woman of “refinement,” as she constantly reminded the press – indulging in a common stunt mainly suitable for exploitation in the music halls that she despised? Many in the crowd that day must have seen her as a figure to be laughed at or pitied; that she was not. What Annie Edson Taylor was doing, as she prepared to enter her barrel, was to shake her fist at Victorian morality, which decreed that there was no place but the almshouse for a woman without means who had reached a certain age.

Her only concern was the Whirlpool, in whose grip Maud Willard had suffocated. She had a terror of the Whirlpool Rapids, she said, and had given some thought to the problem of air inside the closed barrel. “I will have the barrel filled with air by a bicycle pump,” she said. “I believe I can live fully an hour, or perhaps two, with the cover closed.”

She squeezed through the opening of the barrel and buckled herself into the special harness, designed to hold her fast to the bottom. Protected from buffeting by two cushions and a pillow, she gripped a strap on either side as a further stabilizing precaution. Three airholes, stopped with removable corks, had been drilled into the barrel. After the two-inch thick cover was fitted into place, Billy Holleran worked away for twenty minutes with a bicycle pump at the airholes to replenish some of Annie’s air. “I’ll give her enough gas to last her for a week,” he cried enthusiastically.

Truesdale heard her call in a weak voice that a chink was letting in light between the staves. He stuffed it with a rag. At 3:50 he rowed his boat directly for the Canadian shore, pulling the barrel with the help of another boat. As he reached the main current and the barrel was pulled alongside, Truesdale heard a faint tapping from within.

“What is it?”

“The barrel is leaking,” Annie said.

“How much water is there in it?”

“About a pailful.”

“Well, that will not hurt you. You will be over the Falls and rescued in a few minutes and the water will help to keep you awake. We’re going to cast off now. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” replied Annie faintly.

The crowd, having been put off twice, was thinner than it had been the previous Sunday, but the shores were still heavily lined with spectators as the barrel bobbed off in the current, heading directly toward the brink of the Horseshoe.

On the inside, Annie Taylor felt the barrel glide away until it reached the suction of the rapids. It paused for a moment, and then, thrown into the angry waters “like a thing of life, fighting for its prey” (Annie’s words), it zigzagged through mountains of spray until it reached the first sudden drop – about forty feet – half a mile above the Falls. It caught on a fragment of driftwood, turned over, gave a lurch, and plunged to the bottom of the river. She could hear the hundred-pound anvil at the base grind in the riverbed, but then the barrel popped to the surface and continued its race downstream. She knew that if it moved too close to the huge rocks on the Canadian shore it would be dashed to bits, but she felt no fear, resigned “to whatever fate had in store for me. I knew that my motives were pure and exalted though my life were to pass.”

The barrel paused in midstream. It turned over, from side to side, righted itself, and entered the smooth, swift current that rounds the bend in the river. Now the roar of the cataract, “like continuous thunder,” assailed her ears and she realized she was on the brink of the precipice. She placed a small cushion under her knees, clasped her hands tightly, relaxed every muscle, and dropped her head on her bosom as the barrel went over. The sensation, she said later, was one of indescribable horror. “I felt as though all Nature was being annihilated.”

She felt no impact when the barrel struck the water; she simply knew it had dropped below the surface. No sound reached her. She felt alone, forsaken. About a minute passed and then she felt the barrel starting upward. It shot out of the water ten or fifteen feet into the air, dropped and plunged again, and was hurled back into the cavern behind the sheet of water. There it was picked up by the force of the waves, dashed around in midair and dropped onto the rocks. She could feel herself being whirled about and lifted like “butter in a churn.” She felt her strength ebbing but remained calm. The gusts below the Falls shot the barrel into the
Maid of the Mist
eddy, a minor whirlpool, in which she feared she would be trapped. But then she heard the barrel grate on the rocks and knew she was safe. Her head dropped forward but she did not hear the barrel being opened until a fresh breeze struck her.

She heard a male voice: “The woman is alive!”

“Yes, she is,” Annie gasped.

Carlisle Graham and several others had been waiting on a big rock a few feet from the shore. “Kid” Brady, a well-known featherweight boxer and a good swimmer, had stripped to his trunks and, clinging to the rock, was able to grasp the rope attached to the barrel and with help pull it to safety as the crowd of onlookers cheered.

Graham helped work the lid off the barrel and peered in, not knowing whether its occupant was dead or alive. A limp hand, blue and benumbed, gave a feeble wave. The crowd cheered again, but Annie was too far gone to squeeze out of the barrel by herself.

A hoop was removed; it wasn’t enough. A saw was called for, and part of the barrel was cut away. Through this opening Annie Taylor was finally dragged, blood streaming down her clothing from a gash in her head.

“Have I gone over the Falls?” she asked wearily. And then, “I’m cold. I’ve lost my power of speech. I want to go home.”

She was so dazed that she had difficulty walking. Graham and another helper each took an arm and guided her across a plank from the rock to the shore. Bedraggled and unkempt, she looked her age as she was bundled into blankets, taken to her boarding house, and wheeled before a blazing fire. The scalp wound, caused by the incessant bumping of the barrel against the rocks, was superficial. There were no broken bones. She was, however, suffering badly from shock.

She managed only a few words for the press. “If it was with my dying breath,” she said, “I would caution anyone against attempting the feat. I will never go over the Falls again. I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces than make another trip over the fall.”

5
Aftermath

The local press went wild over Annie’s exploit. The Niagara Falls
Gazette
claimed that she deserved “foremost rank in the list of those who have dared to toy with Nature.…” To the
Cataract Journal
she was a “woman of indomitable resolve, of lion-like courage and a woman who had the strength of her conviction.” The Buffalo
Courier
declared that her exploit was “the climax of Niagara wonders.”

The New York papers didn’t gush. Indeed, they almost missed the story because most editors refused to believe it was true. The
Times
, in its imperious fashion, made a habit of sneering at Falls stunters. When Robert Flack lost his life in the Whirlpool Rapids, the
Times’
callous headline had read: “ANOTHER NIAGARA CRANK DISPOSED OF.”

Annie’s home-town paper, the Bay City
Times-Tribune
, predicted Fame and Fortune for Mrs. Taylor. She received an immediate offer of two hundred dollars to appear during the closing week of the Pan-American Exposition, but her expenses in equipping the barrel and paying her helpers quickly gobbled that up. Russell managed to secure her a week at Huber’s Museum in New York for a fee of five hundred dollars, but, to his fury, she declined. Dime museums were not for her, especially in her emotionally drained condition.

She returned to Bay City to be greeted by her long lost brother, Montgomery Edson, a blacksmith. The two, who hadn’t seen each other for twenty-five years, embraced warmly. But when Edson started to reveal his sister’s real age, she disclaimed all relationship. She was still intent on presenting herself as a woman in her early forties.

Fame was fleeting, fortune illusory. Russell booked her into a series of store window appearances in Saginaw, Detroit, Sandusky, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. There she sat with her barrel and her black cat, advertised as the same animal that had survived the test plunge over the Falls. For this she grossed no more than two hundred dollars.

Annie’s weight had dropped from 162 pounds to 135, and she was still feeling the bruises from her ordeal. She turned up at the Charleston Exposition, but heavy rains kept the customers away. Back in Cleveland, she and Russell found themselves broke, depending on the city’s charity. At this point, Russell decamped with Annie’s only assets, the barrel and the cat. “If she had been a beautiful girl, why we could have made thousands,” he was quoted as saying. But poor, greying Annie failed to electrify the crowds.

She was obsessed with getting her barrel back; it was, she felt, the key to financial success. Then she found that Russell had sold it to a Chicago theatrical company that was planning a stage play entitled
Over the Falls
. She raised some money by publishing a quickie pamphlet about her exploits, and with the proceeds she hired a lawyer to locate the missing barrel. Private detectives traced it to Chicago where on August 14 the stage company was displaying it in a department store window to advertise their play.