It was October 24, 1838 that Annie Edson Taylor was born in Auburn, New York in the US. She grew up to become a schoolteacher. She married, but her husband died fairly soon afterward, and she never remarried. As a widow, she moved around the US for years, working in various cities.
In Bay City, Michigan, in the late 1800s, she wanted a change from classroom teaching to teaching dancing, so she opened her own dancing school. That must not have worked out particularly well, because by 1900 she had moved to a different Michigan city and opened a music school. That failed as well. From there she moved to Texas, and finally traveled with a friend to Mexico City, Mexico in search of work. She didn’t find any opportunities to her liking there, and returned to Bay City, Michigan.
Nothing she’d done by that point in her life had distinguished her at all, and by 1900 she was 62 years old and evidently feeling anxious about her prospects. She apparently thought that she’d have more success if she were younger, and so in that year’s US Census she listed her birth year as 1860, not 1838. But she still needed money. So she came up with A Plan. Now, having A Plan is not necessarily an assured path to success; plans vary between “good plans” and “what-on-earth-were-you-thinking plans.” But here was Taylor’s: she would get rich by being the world’s first person to ride over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Even at the time, there was not a financial prize for doing that, and as far as history goes, there’s no mention of a popular outcry anything like “if only somebody was brave enough to ride over that waterfall in a barrel, we’d pay them a lot.” Nevertheless. that was The Plan.
The first thing Taylor needed as a barrel. Not just any barrel would do; it had to be extra strong and pretty well padded inside. Also pretty big; about five feet (1.5 meters) tall. She got somebody to custom-build it for her. Then it had to be tested, and for that she enlisted (well, recruited. No, make that captured and imprisoned) a cat, which she locked in the barrel, then sent the barrel over Niagara Falls. The cat survived, but had suffered one cut. The details were not recorded, but the cat was most likely in a fairly bad mood when they let it out of the barrel.
But the barrel was just fine, and Taylor was ready. It was 1901, and on October 24, her 63rd birthday, she set out. There was a bit of a problem finding somebody — anybody — to help her by sealing the barrel and launching it, because for some reason Taylor’s opinion of her plan (“a good plan”) was not shared by anyone else, who regarded it as a “what-on-earth-are-you-thinking” plan, and wanted nothing to do with it. She found some assistants, though, and sure enough, she was soon drifting down the Niagara River in her barrel, accompanied only by her lucky pillow. There were rescuers waiting to retrieve the barrel below the falls.
The whole thing took less than 20 minutes, and to everyone’s surprise — well, at least to the surprise of the few people who even knew about the stunt — Taylor survived. She had received one small cut, just like the cat, but was otherwise uninjured. She hadn’t enjoyed it, though, and told the press:
“If it was with my dying breath, I would caution anyone against attempting the feat … 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.”
You’ll recall that The Plan had another part — the part where Taylor made a lot of money from her stunt. That part did not work out. She earned a little money from lecturing about her stunt, and from posing at the falls for tourist photos, but the windfall she’d hoped for never arrived. She tried to write a novel, worked on a film about her stunt (or said she did; nobody ever saw the movie), and even worked as a fortune teller and trying to sell “magnetic therapy.” It’s not recorded whether her sales pitch was anything like “you wouldn’t believe how sore you can get going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, but these magnets fixed me right up.”
Taylor lived to be 82, and in her later years suffered poor health and near blindness — both of which she blamed on her trip over the falls, not on her advanced age (possibly because she was still claiming that she was only 57). She’s buried in a special section of the Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls, New York. The section is reserved for daredevils, and is called Stunters Rest.
