The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City

by Margaret Creighton

  At Auburn State Prison, 150 miles to the east, the man responsible for much of the misery in Buffalo continued to eat big meals and rest soundly. He also sat, paced, and, infrequently, talked with guards. He asked for nothing to read, nothing to write with, and wanted no consolation. Because he received no news, he did not know that anarchists in London had labeled him “Saint Czolgosz” and that in New York an anarchist had delivered a public rant denouncing McKinley’s policies and linking the assassination to “the oppression of workmen by capital.”

  The prison warden, Warren Mead, let it be known that Czolgosz remained calm about his upcoming death. He did, however, reveal some details about the plans for the upcoming electrocution, including the fact that he had received more than a thousand requests to witness the event.2

  For Exposition officials, October 19—Buffalo Day—signaled a big, final beam of hope. The press reminded people that Chicago Day had brought seven hundred thousand people to the White City, and they urged everyone to pitch in—close a business or shop, ask for the day off, head for the grounds—make this a “landmark” in Buffalo history.

  The event got off to a good start, and more than ninety thousand people had entered the grounds by 1 p.m. At the football game, between the Carlisle Indian School and Cornell University, people crowding the stadium gates fell and were stepped on, requiring Exposition police to use their clubs to restore order.

  The Exhibition halls and the Midway were mobbed. There were so many crowds outside Bostock’s show that the Animal King did something he hadn’t done all season: He called off advertising. He sent spielers home and asked the police to come. He was beside himself with delight. It was, said one reporter, “the Midway showman’s realization of earthly bliss.” And it allowed him a grand boast: “The attendance at the animal show yesterday breaks all records for any Midway concession at any Exposition.”

  The final number, 162,652, meant that Buffalo Day had surpassed expectations. And yet . . . and still . . . Pan-American directors knew they needed more people to spend more money. They added two days to the season to add revenue and would close on November second. For his part, John Milburn let on that he was open to new ideas for Farewell Day. “Just at present I am cudgeling my brain,” he said, for an event to “arouse popular interest.” Concessionaires also searched for a different act for Farewell Day. “They think,” said one newsman, “that by putting on some sensational features of an entirely new stripe . . . they can bring in trainload after trainload of people.”3

  They wanted something wondrous that would draw thousands. And above all, something altogether new. They had run through all the “Days” in their repertoire.

  But could they ever, in their wildest dreams, have conjured up the stout, dowdy, big-hatted woman who hoped to be the answer to their prayers?

  II

  THE NOMAD

  In early October, it seemed as though Annie Taylor would not even make it to the Niagara frontier. West Bay City Cooperage had barely begun to work on her order. And the barrel, such as it was, didn’t seem fit to do the job. A local newspaperman who called on the cooperage to survey the construction thought it wouldn’t hold much oxygen. Furthermore, he wondered whether Taylor would fit. She would have to “snuggle herself” into a space four and a half feet high and twenty-four inches wide. He did admit the barrel looked sturdy. Made of Kentucky oak, its staves were more than an inch thick and its iron hoops were bolted through the wood. But he remained unconvinced.

  Annie Taylor poses with her barrel and a cat.

  Yet less than a week later, the barrel, with an oiled and waterproofed cover, was done. Tussie Russell drummed up publicity by putting it on display in a Bay City storefront on October 8 and announced that he would leave Michigan the next day to make arrangements. Four days after that, on the evening of October 12, Annie Taylor stepped aboard a train and headed east on the Pere Marquette Railroad. Calm and unwavering, she bore no sign that she teetered on the edge of a self-made disaster. Or that the gruesome death of Maud Willard, just a month earlier, had dented her resolve.4

  The route that had brought Annie Taylor to this moment was neither straight nor smooth, but if we believe her, she was one of the most intrepid adventurers of her time. IF we believe her, that is. Later, people would discover that she lied about one of the basic facts of her life.

  We do know Taylor had been born as Anna Edson in Auburn, New York. The daughter of a well-to-do miller, she had grown up in a large family. She said she enjoyed the roughhouse company of her brothers and, sitting in the woods by herself, dreamed of a future befitting a boy: pursuing adventures and seeing distant places. She read Sir Walter Scott’s work, as well as stories about pirates, Indians, Ancient Rome, and the Australian outback. “My brain,” she said, “was teeming with Romance.”

  But real life intruded: her parents’ death before she was fourteen, and worries about money. Her father’s estate would not be divided until a younger brother came of age. She accepted help to attend a teachers’ training school in Albany and married a man named David Taylor in her late teens. She bore a son who died as an infant, and, after two years of marriage, was widowed.

  Soon afterward, around the middle of the century, Annie Taylor traveled to San Antonio, Texas, to see a school friend. There she became the associate principal of a school, and, by her account, whirled in high society. In the summer, she traveled in the Rockies and went overland to California in the company of the United States Cavalry.

  Several years later, she decided to move from San Antonio to Austin, and the peril that found her en route to the state capital would be the first of many escapades. Thirty miles outside of town, three masked gunmen attacked her stagecoach. Demanding money from two wealthy San Antonio men in the coach, they robbed them of several thousand dollars.

  Then they turned to her.

  “Have you any money?” one of the men asked.

  “Yes, a little.”

  “Then hand it over.”

  “I shall not,” she answered. “How am I to get home without any money?”

  The man held a loaded revolver to her temple.

  “I’ll blow out your brains,” he said.

  “Blow away,” she replied. “I would as soon be without brains as without money.”

  “They gave a ha ha,” she recalled, and “disappeared like magic into the forest.”

  The other passengers, Taylor reported, “congratulated me on my firmness.”

  After a while, she left Austin and began a wider odyssey in the late 1800s. She went to St. Louis, followed by New York City, where she learned to teach dance. Then Chicago and Chattanooga and Asheville, where her “reputation grew.” Chattanooga again, where she survived a flood. Charleston, where she kept her “presence of mind” during an earthquake that crumbled the city. Birmingham, Alabama. Back home to New York state, where her family said they didn’t understand her. Off to Texas again, where, with money she inherited, she bought real estate. Finally, she traveled across the Sonoran Desert to Mexico.

  Ultimately, Annie claimed she crossed the continent eight times. In 1900, either from exhaustion or illness, she entered a northern Michigan asylum. She had recovered enough by the following year to teach manners and dancing in Bay City, and there it was, during the summer of 1901, that she sat in a rocking chair, read a newspaper, and experienced an epiphany.

  Even with its hazy dates and missing details, Annie Taylor’s history of luck and pluck seems to have been accepted by the public. It wasn’t easily disputed, and there is evidence that at least some of it was true. Jesse James’s gang did hold up several stages in San Antonio after the Civil War. A Mrs. David Taylor did teach in San Antonio, and an Anna E. Taylor did buy an expensive piece of property there. But, above all, it must have been hard to tell a woman who had built a human-sized barrel that she could not have crossed the Mexican desert or stood up to a man with a gun. And if she took that barrel and plunged down the most famous falls in America, she probably could
have whatever past she claimed.5

  III

  LADIES OF CONVENTION

  On the afternoon of October tenth, about the time Annie Taylor was trying on her barrel for size and fit, the Board of Women Managers of the Pan-American Exposition were buttoning up more conventional attire. They stepped into gowns of silk and crepe de chine and ordered carriages to take them to the Women’s Building at the Exposition. There they seated themselves at tables graced with clusters of white carnations, ate ices and cake, and listened to a soloist perform Italian songs. The occasion was the visit of the first lady of New York State, Mrs. Benjamin B. Odell.

  If Annie Taylor could have been granted a wish, it would have been to join that company, making polite talk, handling her teaspoon with aplomb, and being complimented on her becoming dress and hat.

  She had a way to go. Not only had she arrived at Niagara Falls with a honky-tonk manager and a daredevil scheme, she had also accepted the attentions of the press. Still, she believed she belonged to high society. “I do not want to be classed with women who are seeking notoriety,” she asserted. “I am not of the common daredevil sort. I feel refined and I know that I am well educated and well connected.”

  In Buffalo in the fall of 1901, many of the arbiters of refinement were sitting with Mrs. Odell. Along with the men of their social class, these white women decided who belonged to polite society and who, emphatically, did not. Not all of the twenty-five women whom John Milburn had appointed to the Board of Women Managers were wealthy—some were distinguished through their work in education, the arts, or health professions—but many ranked among Buffalo’s upper crust. They led clubs or charities or were known for sophisticated hospitality.

  Just as it was elsewhere in America at the turn of the twentieth century, real sisterhood across race and class was in short supply at the Pan-American Exposition. The Women Managers did little public mingling with the Polish, German, or African American women who cooked, served, or cleaned at the fair; the clubwomen of color who gathered separately in the city; the suffragists who rallied in town; the women who entertained at the Midway by dancing or, like Chiquita, charming visitors.

  The Board of Women Managers embraced women of Latin America as “honorary” members, but it is unclear how much cross-cultural activity took place. And their beautiful Exposition building—to the dismay of Director-General Buchanan—was designed mostly for private use.

  The Women Managers attracted additional criticism by deciding not to feature women’s work in a distinct pavilion. This was, they declared, a progressive move. Hadn’t women advanced enough, become confident enough, to put their products side by side with the work of men? Besides, in Chicago, visitors had been able to avoid the separate women’s display. “Women who attended the World’s Fair,” explained one writer, “confess to a difficulty in persuading husbands and brothers to enter this sacred precinct.”

  Others disagreed. “Women are a great deal more interesting as women than they are as impersonal workers,” commented one visitor, “and their work is more interesting as women’s work than simply as manufactured articles.” What this woman did not say, but perhaps implied, was that as much as women might want mixed competitions, they had produced their work in unmixed settings. They lived with assumptions about gender differences. Seen as naturally maternal and domestic, they had fewer professional opportunities, fewer educational options, less money, and arguably less time. Female fairgoers could thus appreciate the obstacles that stood behind everything a woman produced.6

  However they defined progress, the distinguished women of Buffalo did not embrace the likes of Annie Edson Taylor. To some degree, though, Taylor betokened the future. White middle-class women were becoming more mobile—albeit not as wildly peripatetic as Taylor—but less bounded than ever before. Unlike working women, who had for years crossed cities or worked in fields or stared out the windows of streetcars before dawn and after dark, women of means had remained relatively sequestered. Yes, they went freely to church and club meetings, and visited urban settlement houses, and shopped in special districts, but it was only recently that they had moved about—really traveled—independently.

  The “New Woman,” as she was known, was a person of education, pluck, and daring, one who wasn’t afraid to go places. She was a promising match for the adventurous new outdoorsman, epitomized by Teddy Roosevelt, and she was not-too-subtly encouraged to bear the children of a “manly” sportsman to help sustain the hardihood of the white race. The popularity of this independent woman was underscored by the sensation of American reporter Nellie Bly, who circled the world alone (in under eighty days) in 1889.

  In the continental United States, the New Woman rode trains by herself, giving her even more freedom to cross the country alone than to navigate city streets. She occasionally took the wheel of an automobile, too. At the beginning of September 1901, in fact, before McKinley’s assassination derailed the attempt, four women competed in the Auto Endurance Race from New York City to the Pan-American Exposition.

  More than anything else, though, the spirited woman of the turn of the century rode bicycles. The invention of the safety bicycle, with wheels of equal size and inflatable tires that cushioned bumps, allowed women to wheel into areas that had once been off limits. Bicycle makers made it possible for women to retain their dignity, too; they dropped the frame so that women could wear their skirts while pedaling. This bicycle was less structurally strong than a man’s bicycle, and often weighed ten pounds more, but that seemed a small price for new freedoms. It was, claimed suffragist Frances Willard, a true “implement of power.” Inveterate fairgoer Mabel Barnes frequently traveled by bicycle. On September 28, she arrived at the Exposition after a “wild ride.” For a circumspect Victorian like the schoolteacher, this was excitement beyond measure.

  And yet limits remained. Women travelers were urged to be cautious and careful and warned not to go too far, literally. Female train travelers were expected to use “ladies’ cars” and to avoid attention. Women automobile drivers attracted particular suspicion. There were ten thousand cars on the road by 1901, but only a fraction of these were driven by women. Public officials, launching a campaign against women drivers that would carry on for decades, deemed women utterly unsuitable for the road: They couldn’t concentrate, they couldn’t master car mechanics, they were too emotional. By being on the loose in cars, they also endangered their virtue. If women persisted in wanting to drive, they were urged to use electric cars. These were quieter, and, because they needed to be tethered for power, had limited range. Keeping women off the roads would be a hopeless cause for the conservatives, however. Even President Roosevelt’s oldest daughter, Alice, hungered for the speed and power of gasoline engines and drove long distances unchaperoned.

  Mabel Barnes visits the fair by bicycle. Excerpt from her Exposition scrapbook.

  Women bicyclists were not immune to criticism. Urged to wear long skirts to cover their feet, they were ridiculed as “mannish menaces.” And while some doctors supported moderate bicycling for the fresh air it provided, other medical men railed against the practice. Riding astride endangered purity and awakened sexual feelings, they argued. Saddles, particularly when the machine was ridden uphill or speedily, encouraged masturbation. Furthermore, white women who persisted in such activity endangered the race. Bicycling stressed women’s reproductive organs and reduced the chances for healthy offspring.7

  The problem with Annie Taylor was that bicycles, cars, and trains—as dubious as they all were for women—were a bit too tame. She would ride a barrel instead, and take it through rapids and over a precipice. And the problem with Mrs. Taylor wasn’t simply that she wanted to enter a man’s domain. It was that she wanted to master that domain before he did.

  IV

  THE DEADLY WONDER

  Mrs. Taylor arrived in Niagara Falls on October 13, and, with her manager’s help, settled into a boardinghouse on First Street, on the American side of the river. Tussie Russell
put the barrel on display in a local hotel to drum up interest. For a duo who had boasted about careful planning, Taylor and Russell had left a few things until the last minute. They needed to find someone to navigate the barrel into the correct current. A misjudgment would mean that the cask would tumble over the deadly American falls and strike the massive rock slide at the base of the ledge. And Horseshoe Falls was hardly benign. Who would ensure that Annie moved close to the Canadian shore and captured the safest stream?

  Russell hoped that the answer lay with a duck hunter named Fred Truesdale, who, it was said, knew the river’s character and currents better than anyone. Officials were not convinced. They suggested she try the Whirlpool Rapids, instead, and reminded her that her stunt would be illegal. People couldn’t just kill themselves, they said. Others wondered whether that was perhaps her intention. Back in Bay City, she had sounded desperate. “I might as well be dead as to remain in my present condition,” she had told a newsman.

  “You don’t mean to say in so many words that you are contemplating suicide?” he had inquired.

  She had struck back. “Not by any means,” she had answered. “I am too good an Episcopalian to do such a thing as that. I believe in a Supreme Ruler and fully realize what self-destruction would mean in the hereafter.”

  And in Niagara Falls, when the mayor of the city had asked her whether she was “the fool that’s going over the falls,” she was taken aback. “The fact is,” she said, “I find people are very suspicious when one tells of going over the falls.”

  She reminded everyone of her barrel’s scientific construction: It contained cushions to shield her head and body from the blow of the descent; it offered handholds to give her a grip, no matter which way was up; it had a new harness to prevent the top of the cask from crushing her skull; it would contain a flask.8