Annie Edson Taylor was an American schoolteacher whose whole life was marked by a quest to better her own financial circumstances. This desire led her to the feat that would eventually make her famous: on her 63rd birthday, on 24 October 1901, she successfully rode a barrel over Niagara Falls. In doing so, she became the first person to survive such an act.
Although the 20-minute journey was very hard on her, she emerged from the barrel almost unscathed. In the end, however, the production brought her much less money than she had expected and, unfortunately, she lost what little she had gained. Annie Edson Taylor was not a lucky person, and the end of her life did not turn out as she would have liked.
Annie Edson Taylor, the materialistic heroine
Born on October 24, 1838 in Auburn, New York, Annie had seven brothers and sisters. Although her father died when she was 12, her childhood was not spent in poverty, as she was born into a wealthy milling family.
She graduated with honors and became a teacher. She got married and had a child, but soon afterwards both her son and her husband died. From then on, Annie was restlessly moving around a lot and moving from job to job.
She eventually settled in Bay City, Michigan in 1900. By that time, she had suffered a number of misfortunes: her house burned down and she herself almost fell victim to the flames, and later she failed big on a botched investment. But even in the midst of this flood of bad luck, Annie kept thinking about how to acquire great wealth, as she felt that money was the key to securing herself a place in the world.
The teacher was always looking for the company of upper-class people. She wanted sophisticated, cultured and, of course, wealthy friends, and she even claimed to be much younger if she felt that a man was interested in her.
In the 1900 census, she gave 1860 as his year of birth, making herself 22 years younger. In the same year, she conceived the idea of the barrel stunt, from which she hoped to get rich quickly.
Barrelling over Niagara Falls
After a long period of preparation, the attraction finally took place on Annie’s 63rd birthday. She made the journey in a barrel specially prepared for this occasion, which had already been lowered down the waterfall two days before, with a cat inside.
Since both the device and the cat survived the ordeal, on October 24, 1901, Annie climbed into the mattress-lined barrel with her heart-shaped lucky pillow in hand. Her supporters used a bicycle pump to pump air into the unusual vehicle, then sealed it and set it on its way down the falls on the Niagara River, south of Goat Island.
Rescuers fished out the barrel about 20 minutes later, which by then had been carried by the current to Canada’s Horseshoe Falls. Not long after, the rescuers arrived and freed Annie, who was found to have escaped the fall almost unharmed, except for a small cut on her head. But she declared to the press present that she would sooner stand before the barrel of a cannon in the knowledge that the bullet would crush her to pieces, than make that journey again, and warned all against attempting the same.
Later, she spoke a few times about her experience, which earned her some money, but the expected wealth did not come. She also wrote a book about the stunt, copies of which she was selling near the falls, but this effort also failed when her manager, Frank M. Russell, conned her, stole the barrel, and disappeared. Annie spent her meagre income and all her savings on private investigators, who managed to track down the barrel, but soon lost sight of it again, this time for good.
The last years of Annie Edson Taylor
Annie Edson Taylor’s life unfortunately never had a turn for the better. In another attempt to get rich, she posed at souvenir stands in Niagara and took photos with tourists to raise money. Her health deteriorated, and she almost lost her sight due to cataracts.
Since she also attributed this to the waterfall ride she had performed, in 1906 she repeatedly mentioned the idea of getting into the barrel again and repeating the stunt to see if it would reverse her deteriorating health.
In the end, this did not happen, and instead Annie wasted her last years on varied, but mostly unsuccessful endeavors. She traded stocks, started a novel, and made a film about her 1901 stunt, which was never released to the public. She worked as a fortune teller and gave magnetic therapy treatments to people at her residence.
At the beginning of 1921, at the age of 83, she claimed to be 57 years old when she was admitted to a hospital. She died the same year, on April 29, and since she was by then completely penniless, there was no cover for his funeral. She was finally laid to rest thanks to donations next to her friend Carlisle Graham in Niagara Falls, New York, at the “Stuntmen’s Resting Ground”.