Annie Edson Taylor: Lady in a Barrel

"The Queen of the Mist" posing with her barrel in which she made history. Public Domain

For a woman who craved an adventurous and independent life, Annie Edson Taylor (1838–1921) had mostly experienced one without the other. When she married at 18, her husband died shortly thereafter, leaving her in a state of independence.

Taylor was born and had grown up in Upstate New York, but after her husband’s passing she pursued a teaching career. She took a job far from the Empire State, down in the Lone Star State. While traveling by carriage to San Antonio, where she would be stationed as a teacher, the carriage was held up by robbers. Indicative of her strong-willed nature, when she was threatened by one of the robbers that he would “blow her brains out” if she didn’t hand over her money, she responded, “Blow away!”

She continued to move around the country, teaching in places like Charleston, South Carolina, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Bay City, Michigan. Though she had survived the robbery (possibly by the famous Jesse James Gang), an earthquake, and a massive fire, those moments of daring-do were hardly of her own choosing, and teaching had not sufficed for adventure.

In the summer of 1901, while reading about the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, she decided to take advantage of the opportunity and the crowds. She would do what no one else had done, or at least no one else had survived doing.

Annie Taylor was the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Public Domain

A Barrel of Adventure

“For two years I have been constantly studying, when not occupied in teaching, what I could do to make money―to make it honestly and quickly. All kinds of schemes ran riot through my brain,” Taylor noted in her brief 1902 memoir. “Reading the New York paper about people going to the Pan-American exposition, and from there to Niagara Falls, the idea came to me like a flash of light. Go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. No one has ever accomplished this feat.”

When the 62-year-old widower announced she would literally be taking the plunge, she told reporters that she was in her early 40s. With such an inconceivable notion as barreling down the Niagara Falls, this significant alteration to her age was apparently inconsequential.

The barrel was of her own design. She sketched it and created a model out of cardboard and string. The barrel was built to her specifications by a business that made beer kegs. The shape was nearly like a football, but with flat ends. The barrel was four and a half feet tall and three feet wide at its widest. It was cushioned with pillows to soften the impact from the approximate 170-foot fall. Leather straps were installed to hold Taylor steady. Ten metal hoops were placed around the barrel to keep it intact. A large anvil was connected to the bottom as ballast. Without the ballast, the barrel could easily land sideways, causing injury, or, worse, land upside down, killing Taylor. There was already a high risk of death, let alone injury, with this feat.

The Birthday Float

Taylor’s plan was in place. She and her barrel would be taken by boat into the middle of the river on the Canadian side and released about a mile away from the precipice of Horseshoe Falls.

On her 63rd birthday, Oct. 24, 1901—or her 42nd, if she had been asked that day―she settled into her barrel. Enough fresh air to last an hour was pumped into it. The lid was sealed, and Taylor floated down the Canadian rapids until she could hear the roar of the great falls.

“As I reached the brink the barrel did what I predicted it would do,” she recalled, “paused for a moment, and then made the awful plunge.”

By the time she reached the bottom in a few seconds, she had fallen along with about 7,000 tons of water. The immediate fear, if one completed the fall safely, was being sucked into the powerful whirlpool. Taylor’s barrel, luckily, was spit out away from the falls, where onlookers, fellow thrill seekers, and rivermen helped bring her barrel to shore.

When the top of the barrel was removed, Taylor was bruised and bloodied from a gash on the top of her head. But that was the extent of her injuries. “Good God! She’s alive,” yelled Carlisle Graham, an adventurer who had successfully barrel-floated the Whirlpool Rapids several times.

Taylor being helped to shore after her adventure. Public Domain

About a week after being helped from her barrel, Taylor arrived on the scene to great fanfare for the final days of the Pan-American Exposition. A long line of people gathered to meet her, or at least see the woman who accomplished such a daring feat. She was given the moniker “Maid of the Mist.”

Unfortunately, her fame, though not completely short-lived, did not result in the financial windfall that she had hoped for. She wrote a brief memoir, which she sold near the Falls about a decade later. Her family wrote a biography of her entitled “Queen of the Mist: The Forgotten Heroine of Niagara.”