Today in History—October 24: The First Person to Survive Niagara in a Barrel

Let’s say you’re looking to get rich quick. Would you play the lottery? Rob a bank? Hit the blackjack tables?

Would you jump off Niagara Falls?

On this day in 1901, Annie Edson Taylor, at some 63 years old, did just that.

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Once a popular dance tutor in high society, Taylor found herself strapped for cash—and being choosy about how to earn it. Here’s a quote that encapsulates Taylor’s snobbery: “I couldn’t entertain the class of people I was used to, and I didn’t want the other class of people around me.”

So Taylor took notes from the mid-19th-century equivalent of Jackass: daredevils. These stuntmen dazzled the public with aerial acrobatics, shot themselves out of cannons, and crossed tightropes that stretched over treacherous heights. Sometimes they even got paid for it.

Why would Taylor follow in such perilous footsteps? The realization came to her while reading a New York World feature about tourists at Niagara Falls: “No one in the world has ever gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel.”

Taylor would be the first.

To stay (relatively) safe, Taylor designed a barrel that was kept upright by an anvil attached to the bottom. Inside, pillows cushioned her head. On the day of the stunt, with no documented practice sessions, the New York Times reported that Taylor “dropped over the fall at 4:23 o’clock.…In less than a minute [the barrel] appeared at the base of the fall, and was swept downstream.” By 4:40 pm a rescue team captured the barrel and released Taylor—bruised and disoriented but alive. A crowd celebrated her victory.

Taylor found fame at Niagara Falls. But despite her expectations—and years of self-promotion, including selling photographs of herself with her barrel, publishing a book, and telling the press that she was 43—fortune did not follow. She died in poverty on April 29, 1921.

She was buried among other daredevils in Oakwood Cemetery, about a mile from Niagara Falls.