In 1901, A Broke Sixty Three Year Old Schoolteacher Decided To Get Rich By Becoming The First Person To Survive Going Over Niagara Falls In A Barrel. She Tested It By Sending Her Cat Over First. She Survived. Then Her Manager Stole The Barrel, And She Died Penniless In A Poorhouse.
In 1901, a sixty three year old schoolteacher climbed into a wooden barrel and threw herself over Niagara Falls. On purpose. For money.
Her name was Annie Edson Taylor. She taught etiquette and dancing, she was a widow, and she was broke. Her house had burned down, she had handed her savings to a clergyman who lost them, and she had just turned sixty three. She did not look the part of a daredevil, and she knew it, so she told every newspaper she was forty three. Her plan to escape poverty was bold and very simple. She would become the first human being to survive going over Niagara Falls, and then she would get rich telling the story. She had a barrel built out of oak and iron, padded the inside with a mattress, and had a friend pump it full of air with a bicycle pump.
Two days before she climbed in, she ran a test. She put a house cat in the barrel and sent it over the falls. Seventeen minutes later they fished the barrel out, opened it, and the cat walked out alive, a small cut on its head, and sat for photographs beside her. Good enough. So on the twenty fourth of October 1901, her birthday, two boatmen towed Annie out into the river, screwed her into the barrel, and let it go. The barrel dropped a hundred and seventy feet into the white thunder at the foot of the Horseshoe Falls, vanished, then bobbed back up. They hauled it to shore, unscrewed the lid, and there she was, dizzy, bleeding from a gash on her forehead, and completely alive. The first person in history to go over Niagara Falls and live.
And then everything went wrong. The fame never paid. Her own manager stole the famous barrel and ran off to tour the country with a younger woman pretending to be her. Annie spent the last of her money hiring detectives to chase the barrel down. She died penniless twenty years later, in a poorhouse, and was buried in a corner of the cemetery set aside for stunt performers. Her warning to anyone tempted to follow her: if it was with my dying breath, I would caution anyone against attempting the feat.
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