She was a frumpy, sixty-three-year-old woman, who had failed at most of the endeavors she undertaken in life, including teaching and working as a dancing instructor. She needed money to help her keep up with her financially affluent friends. But it was 1901, and women had not yet been granted their equal rights in society.
As she put it in her autobiography: 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. 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?
The choice Annie Taylor ultimately made would astonish her friends and acquaintances, as well as an awestruck world. Annie Taylor had decided that she would be the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She would not be deterred. After all, in 1850 a man, tightrope walker Charles Blondin, had earned both fame and fortune after he and Enrico Farini traversed the Falls on a tightrope. Why couldn’t she earn the same notoriety and riches?
On the afternoon of October 24, 1901, wearing only a shirtwaist, stockings and slippers, she took her lucky heart-shaped pillow in hand and climbed into a padded barrel she had designed herself and then had built by a local cooper. Some say a black cat went with her and emerged from the harrowing ride totally white. Others say the cat rumor originated from Annie’s use of animals to test the barrel before her trip. Eighteen minutes after she plunged over the edge of the Horseshoe Falls, Annie emerged from the Niagara River unscathed, except for minor bruises and being cold and dazed, and with her hair still in place.
Afterward, she told the newspapers: 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 Falls.
Unfortunately, disappointment was to be Annie’s only reward for risking her life. She made little money off her daring feat and what she had made was used to hire private detectives to track down her manager who had stolen the barrel. Though she eventually found it in Chicago, it disappeared again and was never found. In the final years of her life, Annie was reduced to standing beside a fake barrel and selling autographed postcards at Niagara Falls to gawking tourists.
Despite her unequaled courage, even if her underlying reasons for undertaking such a dangerous adventure were questionable, the kindest words posterity could afford her were the thoses of two Niagra historians: The rapids lost their glamour when on October 24, 1901, Mrs. Anna Edson Taylor went over the Horseshoe Falls in a barrel. AND, When Mrs. Taylor followed in the footsteps of other Niagara daredevils by becoming a dime museum attraction, the vulgarization of Niagara seemed complete.
At the age of 83, Annie Taylor died in the Niagra County Infirmary. She is buried in the Stunters Section of Oakwood Cemetery in Niagra Falls, NY.
Blessings,
Diva Elizabeth
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