Over the Falls in a Barrel
A hundred and five years ago today, Annie Taylor became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She was 63 years old, a widow, and a failed dancing school teacher—an unlikely candidate for such an exploit. But she survived, and her name goes down in history as not only the first survivor but the only woman ever to try barreling over the falls alone.
At 1:30 that afternoon, she stepped out of a cottage owned by Fred Truesdale, a local river man she had hired to help launch her barrel, and faced a gathered crowd. Demurely dressed all in black, including a big hat with ostrich feathers, she walked to a skiff and rode with the barrel out to a small island a mile and a half above the cataract. There she got out of the boat, hid herself in a clump of reeds, and stripped down to the Victorian version of underwear—a short skirt, a shirtwaist, stockings, and slippers. She was ready for the barrel.
Back in Bay City, Michigan, where she had been living when she came up with her Niagara scheme, she had made a preliminary cardboard model of a barrel and presented it to a local cooper for construction. The notion of surviving in such a thing may have been foolhardy, but she tried to be as prepared as possible. She carefully inspected each stave of Kentucky oak, individually oiled to repel water, before it was fitted into place, and the finished result was a custom container that protected its rider better than fancier models ridden by later daredevils.
Taylor went into the barrel, fitted with a leather harness. One end cinched around her waist and the other to an iron hasp. Thick cushions and a pillow filled out the remaining space. Some accounts say that a cat went into the barrel as well, though this may have been an elaboration of Truesdale’s, who had made a number of test runs with animals as passengers. Taylor did pose for photographs with a cute kitten poking its head out of the barrel, but for the real event she probably went in alone. (Riding solo was a smart choice. Two vaudeville women had ridden in barrels through the whirlpool on the American side of the Niagara River before Taylor’s attempt at the falls, and one of them had suffocated because her pet dog, also in the barrel, stuck his muzzle into the air hole.)
A bicycle pump filled the barrel with air, and the air holes were stuffed with removable corks. It was towed behind a boat, and then, where the river began the churn, cut loose. Taylor heard the rap of an oar on the outside and knew that her journey had begun.
Her trip had attracted a fair number of spectators; she had chosen one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country for her adventure. In 1901 Niagara Falls was not only America’s honeymoon capital but also a popular suicide spot and the setting for many stunts. The tightrope walkers Charles Blondin and Enrico Farini had sauntered across the gorge in the 1850s, and even tourists regularly tested the great Niagara. In the winter, when the waters below the cataract froze over into an ice bridge, people would run across it, some stopping at makeshift shacks erected in the middle to buy souvenirs or liquor. (Technically, the ice was neither Canadian nor American, so no alcohol permits were required.) But when the ice began to thaw and shift, a tourist could easily be stranded in the middle of the waters, with no way of reaching the shore. There were some close calls, but the death of a couple in 1912—“the two, clasped in each other’s arms, then dropp[ed] to their knees as in prayer,” wrote Pierre Berton, in Niagara: A History of the Falls—ended the unregulated runs across the ice bridge.
None of these stunts had the drama of going alone, in nothing but a barrel, over the actual falls. Others before Annie Taylor had proposed the thing, including P. T. Barnum, but no one had dared to do it. What could have driven her to it?
Joan Murray, the author of a 1999 book of poems told from Taylor’s point of view, Queen of the Mist, may have captured the truth in her imagined verse: “I saw the options left me—/ the options of all single, destitute women over forty:/ I could turn to poorhouse charity/ or keep my self-sufficiency by scrubbing pots and privies/ —and spend my nights doing other people’s laundry.”
With mounting debts and unwilling to perform menial labor, Taylor was almost desperate. She wrote in her autobiography, “I didn’t want to lower my social standards, for I have always associated with the best class of people, the cultivated and the refined. To hold my place in that world I needed money, but how to get it?”
By throwing herself over the falls, she apparently reasoned. This may not seem like the most logical possible conclusion, but there was a rationale behind it. Big crowds were attending the Pan-American Exposition in nearby Buffalo, providing a built-in audience, and Blondin, the tightrope walker, had been blessed with fame and fortune for the rest of his life after his Niagara acts. So there was some precedent for earning a living with one amazing feat.
Swept along in Niagara’s rapids, Taylor had little time to think of what the future might bring. In a ride altogether 18 minutes long, she was swept over the falls—“I felt as though all Nature was being annihilated,” she later recalled—into a little whirlpool, and onto the rocks. And then it was over. She was helped out of the barrel, cold, dazed, and confused, her bun still intact.
Though she survived, alive and with only minor bruises to show, there was, unfortunately, no happy ending for her. What she hadn’t taken into account was that she had neither the looks nor the savvy to market herself. Blondin had been a showman and a canny entrepreneur; Taylor was a frumpy woman in her skivvies who squashed herself in into a barrel with a couple of cushions. After the plunge, she did make an appearance at the Pan-American Exposition, but she refused to appear at dime museums or in the new medium of film. She felt that her adventure itself should have been enough to generate income.
She died a pauper, reduced to selling autographed postcards next to a fake barrel at Niagara Falls, and even posterity was not kind to her. One Niagara historian wrote, “The rapids lost their glamour when on October 24, 1901, Mrs. Anna Edson Taylor went over the Horseshoe Falls in a barrel.” Another said, “When Mrs. Taylor followed in the footsteps of other Niagara daredevils by becoming a dime museum attraction, the vulgarization of Niagara seemed complete.”