Who Was Annie Edson Taylor?
On October 24, 1901, Annie Edson Taylor (October 24, 1838 – April 29, 1921), an American schoolteacher, became the first person to survive a barrel ride over Niagara Falls on her 63rd birthday. Although she had financial motivations, her expedition never brought her much money. She passed away without money, and donations from the public covered her funeral.
On October 24, 1838, Annie was born in Auburn, New York. Merrick Edson (1804–1850) and Lucretia Waring had eight children, including her. Her father, who owned a flour mill, passed away when she was twelve years old, leaving enough money to support the family well. After completing a four-year training program with honours, she became a schoolteacher. She met David Taylor while she was a student and married. Their son passed away in infancy and her husband died shortly after. She worked for years in between jobs and locations after becoming a widow.
She eventually found herself in Bay City, Michigan, where she aspired to teach dance. Taylor started her own dancing school because Bay City didn’t have any at the time. In 1900, she relocated to Sault Ste. Marie to work as a music educator. She subsequently proceeded to San Antonio, Texas, and, in search of employment, she and a buddy moved to Mexico City. She failed and went back to Bay City.
By 1900, Taylor had fallen on hard times, losing money she had invested with a clergyman and having been burned out of her home. She stated that she was only 42 at the time, implying that being younger would make it easier for her to earn money. Taylor, who had always been surrounded by “the best class of people, the cultured and the refined,” felt that she required money to maintain her status in society. She listed 1860 as her birth year in the Federal Census of 1900. She made the decision to be the first person to ride over Niagara Falls in a barrel in the hopes of securing her financial future. For her journey, Taylor used a specially designed barrel that was built of iron and oak and cushioned with a padded with a mattress.
The barrel’s launch was delayed multiple times, especially because nobody wanted to participate in the prank. A domestic cat was sent over the Horseshoe Falls in her barrel two days prior to Taylor’s own attempt to test the barrel’s strength and determine whether it would break. The cat survived the plunge, despite what was being said at the time, and seventeen minutes after being discovered with her head bleeding, she posed for pictures with Taylor.
On her 63rd birthday, October 24, 1901, Taylor and her lucky heart-shaped pillow climbed into the barrel that had been placed over the side of a rowboat. Friends screwed down the lid and then compressed the air in the barrel with a bicycle tire pump. A cork was used to seal the hole, and Taylor was set adrift south of Goat Island, close to the American coast.
The barrel was dragged over the Canadian Horseshoe Falls by the river currents, and all successful daredevil stunts at Niagara Falls has since taken place there. Shortly after the plunge, rescuers arrived at her barrel. Taylor was discovered to be alive and relatively unhurt, save for a little gash on her head. Although the journey took less than twenty minutes, it took a while for the barrel to be unlocked. Carlisle Graham, Taylor’s buddy and the first guy to run the rapids on a raft, assisted her out of the barrel. Following the trip, Taylor told reporters:
“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.“
Speaking about her experience brought her some money for a short time, but she was never able to accumulate much fortune. She went back to Niagara Falls to market the memoir she had written. The majority of her savings were used to pay private investigators to locate her barrel after her manager, Frank M. Russell, stole it. It was eventually found in Chicago, but after a while, it vanished forever.
In her last years, she worked as a clairvoyant, offered magnetic therapy treatments, tried to make money from the New York Stock Exchange, posed for pictures with tourists at her souvenir stand, briefly discussed taking a second plunge over cataracts in 1906, tried to write a novel, and recreated her 1901 plunge on film (which was never seen).
On February 23, Taylor claimed to be 57 years old when she arrived at the Niagara County Infirmary in Lockport, New York. She passed away on April 29, 1921, at the age of 82. She was buried in the “Stunter’s Rest” portion of Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls, New York, adjacent to her companion and fellow daredevil Carlisle Graham .
Public donations were requested to cover the costs of her funeral, which was held on May 5, 1921, because she passed away without any money. She blamed her journey over the falls for her poor health and near blindness.
Thousands of people have passed over Niagara Falls, either purposefully (during stunts or suicide attempts) or accidentally, but Annie was the first person documented that survived. Many of these suicides go unreported by authorities.
According to a 2011 estimate, since 1850, 5,000 remains have been discovered from the base of the falls.
Leslie Frost, the premier of Ontario, ordered the Niagara Parks Commission to jail anyone caught doing stunts near the falls after daredevil William “Red” Hill, Jr. died in 1951. Authorities in both Canada and the United States started fining daredevils at the falls; as of 2011, the fines are $10,000 CAD (about $7,700 USD) in Canada and $25,000 USD (around $32,800 CAD) in the US.
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