Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  The following day the shooting vied for headlines with the death of still another stuntwoman, a burlesque performer named Maud Willard, who was a friend of Martha Wagen-fuhrer. Miss Willard and Carlisle Graham had worked out a double performance in which she would ride the same barrel through the Whirlpool. On her emergence, he would leap into the water and, wearing a life preserver and a ring to support his head, swim alongside and follow the barrel down the gorge to Lewiston.

  The plan failed because Maud Willard insisted on bringing along her pet fox terrier for company. When the barrel was sucked into the Whirlpool and held there by the current, the dog not only used up much of the air but also jammed the intake hole with his muzzle. Tossed and buffeted for six hours, and caught in an eddy in the vortex, she died of suffocation. The dog survived, and because a motion-picture company was filming the stunt, Graham was obliged to complete his swim alone for the cameras.

  Miss Willard’s death did not deter Annie Taylor. She was more concerned by the attitude of the authorities on both sides of the river, who wanted no more stunts. But she was confident she could give the police the slip. She kept her intentions secret until September 22, when Russell announced in the Bay City Times-Tribune that an unnamed client was planning to go over the Falls in a barrel. He declined to give her name or her motivations.

  On October 11, he arrived at Niagara Falls, New York – by this time a thriving industrial city of twenty thousand – to reveal to the press that Annie Edson Taylor was about to brave the cataract. “She is a widow, forty-two years old, intelligent and venturesome. She has scaled the Alps, made dangerous swimming trips, and explored wild, unknown countries,” he announced, slipping into the hyperbole of his calling.

  But when Annie stepped off the train at the Falls on October 13, she did not look like an experienced adventurer. She stood five feet four inches in her cotton stockings – a stout and almost shapeless figure in a voluminous black dress, her features fleshy and her greying hair concealed under a broad-brimmed hat. She was determined to make both her fame and her fortune. Fame she achieved; fortune eluded her.

  She lied about her age, admitting to forty-two years, believing that the press would prefer a younger woman to make the plunge. Some journalists went along with the charade. One described her as “agile, athletic and strong”; another said she cut a sturdy, graceful figure. But others, more sceptical, put her age at fifty. She was thirteen years older than that.

  Annie’s lie was a gross miscalculation. It would have been cannier for her to announce (lying again, but with more wit) that she was seventy-three. In the inevitable lecture series that followed, few would be intrigued by a grossly overweight, fortyish prude. But a seventy-three-year-old widow tempting the great cataract! That might have been different. One can imagine the newspaper stories:

  Annie Taylor, a septuagenarian widow, looking

  remarkably young for her 73 years, today became

  the first human being to conquer Niagara Falls in a

  barrel. At a time when most people of her age have

  a foot in the grave, the amazing Mrs. Taylor, active

  and bold, in spite of her advancing years …

  But Annie was no Barnum. She insisted on the proprieties. She would not, she declared, make her way through the town to the point where her barrel was to be launched already dressed for the trip. It would be unbecoming, she said, “for a woman of refinement and of my years to parade before a crowd in a short skirt.”

  Russell found an expert riverman to help launch the barrel: Fred Truesdale, a sturdy teamster with a bold black beard, who had been hired by previous thrill seekers to send barrels containing cats and dogs over the Horseshoe. No one knew whether or not the animals survived, but none of Truesdale’s customers had followed through on the feat itself.

  Truesdale tested the barrel, dubbed Queen of the Mist, on October 18, supplying a cat for the journey. Russell watched from Terrapin Point on Goat Island, accompanied by the ubiquitous Carlisle Graham and another daredevil, Bill Johnson, who had celebrated the Glorious Fourth that year by jumping, manacled, from the Maid of the Mist.

  Truesdale tossed the barrel into the river from the Canadian shore. Spinning, tumbling, tossed high on the crest of the waves, it wallowed through the rapids before being hurled over the brink. The barrel was retrieved, but whether or not the cat survived remained a matter of conjecture. The Niagara Falls Gazette and the Cataract Journal said it had. The Buffalo Express and the People’s Press of Port Welland said it hadn’t. Russell wasn’t saying anything.

  The crowd gathered on Sunday to watch Annie go over. She failed to appear, and Russell gave the press a confusing variety of excuses. The most plausible was that the photographs Annie had intended to sell on the site had not been developed. After all, she was almost broke.

  She apologized later to the reporters for her absence. “I do not wish to be classified with the women who are seeking notoriety,” she said. “I am not of the common daredevil sort. I feel refined and I know that I am well educated and well connected.” The barrel trip was postponed to Wednesday afternoon, October 23. “I have no fear whatever,” said Annie. “When I make up my mind to do a thing, nothing can stop me.”

  Heavy winds caused a second delay, and the presence of Carrie Nation, the axe-wielding prohibition advocate, shuttling between the exposition and the Falls, briefly crowded Annie out of the headlines. By this time, few believed she was prepared to make the trip. The People’s Press, in its headline, suggested it was all “A GIGANTIC HOAX!”

  But she was determined. “If I say I will do a thing, I will do it,” she said, her voice trembling. “I hate a weak, vacillating person who says they’ll do a thing and then backs out. I value my word of honor. If I thought it were necessary, and I had given my word that I would step in front of a cannon and be shot to pieces, I would do it!”

  She remained true to her promise. At half-past one on the afternoon of Thursday, October 24, she was ready.

  There was a small hitch when Truesdale’s assistant, Fred Robinson, bowed out. “I ain’t going to be a party to the murder of any woman,” he announced. The local police chief had scared him off by threatening to arrest him for manslaughter if Annie perished. Truesdale replaced him with a cheerful youth, Billy Holleran.

  Wearing a long black skirt with matching jacket and a black, wide-brimmed hat, and looking and acting “as if she were some plain, stout woman on her way to Sunday morning service,” Annie emerged from Truesdale’s house with her manager and walked to her boat as a crowd of well-wishers chorused goodbyes. “I will not say goodbye,” she said, “but au revoir” Peter Nissen, better known as “Bowser,” who had made headlines tempting the rapids the year before in his boat (aptly named the Fool Killer), was present to pump her hand.

  In order to elude the police, who were making a half-hearted attempt to stop what the authorities regarded as a potential suicide, Russell had decided that Annie should push off from Grass Island in midstream a mile and a half above the cataract. There she was photographed with her barrel, and there, at her request, the members of her entourage and the press retreated to the far side of the island while she, hidden in the reeds, modestly peeled off hat, jacket, and outer skirt. Then, attired in a short black skirt, blue-and-white shirtwaist, black stockings, and tan slippers, she pronounced herself ready for the ordeal.

  There she stood, with the waters swirling only a few feet away – a lumpy figure with a pudding of a face, resolute, unafraid, and totally confident that she, at sixty-three, could accomplish a feat that no other human being had managed, and from which younger and more athletic daredevils had shrunk. What was she doing here – a woman of “refinement,” as she constantly reminded the press – indulging in a common stunt mainly suitable for exploitation in the music halls that she despised? Many in the crowd that day must have seen her as a figure to be laughed at or pitied; that she was not. What Annie Edson Taylor was doing, as she prepared to enter her barrel, was to shake
her fist at Victorian morality, which decreed that there was no place but the almshouse for a woman without means who had reached a certain age.

  Her only concern was the Whirlpool, in whose grip Maud Willard had suffocated. She had a terror of the Whirlpool Rapids, she said, and had given some thought to the problem of air inside the closed barrel. “I will have the barrel filled with air by a bicycle pump,” she said. “I believe I can live fully an hour, or perhaps two, with the cover closed.”

  She squeezed through the opening of the barrel and buckled herself into the special harness, designed to hold her fast to the bottom. Protected from buffeting by two cushions and a pillow, she gripped a strap on either side as a further stabilizing precaution. Three airholes, stopped with removable corks, had been drilled into the barrel. After the two-inch thick cover was fitted into place, Billy Holleran worked away for twenty minutes with a bicycle pump at the airholes to replenish some of Annie’s air. “I’ll give her enough gas to last her for a week,” he cried enthusiastically.

  Truesdale heard her call in a weak voice that a chink was letting in light between the staves. He stuffed it with a rag. At 3:50 he rowed his boat directly for the Canadian shore, pulling the barrel with the help of another boat. As he reached the main current and the barrel was pulled alongside, Truesdale heard a faint tapping from within.

  “What is it?”

  “The barrel is leaking,” Annie said.

  “How much water is there in it?”

  “About a pailful.”

  “Well, that will not hurt you. You will be over the Falls and rescued in a few minutes and the water will help to keep you awake. We’re going to cast off now. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” replied Annie faintly.

  The crowd, having been put off twice, was thinner than it had been the previous Sunday, but the shores were still heavily lined with spectators as the barrel bobbed off in the current, heading directly toward the brink of the Horseshoe.

  On the inside, Annie Taylor felt the barrel glide away until it reached the suction of the rapids. It paused for a moment, and then, thrown into the angry waters “like a thing of life, fighting for its prey” (Annie’s words), it zigzagged through mountains of spray until it reached the first sudden drop – about forty feet – half a mile above the Falls. It caught on a fragment of driftwood, turned over, gave a lurch, and plunged to the bottom of the river. She could hear the hundred-pound anvil at the base grind in the riverbed, but then the barrel popped to the surface and continued its race downstream. She knew that if it moved too close to the huge rocks on the Canadian shore it would be dashed to bits, but she felt no fear, resigned “to whatever fate had in store for me. I knew that my motives were pure and exalted though my life were to pass.”

  The barrel paused in midstream. It turned over, from side to side, righted itself, and entered the smooth, swift current that rounds the bend in the river. Now the roar of the cataract, “like continuous thunder,” assailed her ears and she realized she was on the brink of the precipice. She placed a small cushion under her knees, clasped her hands tightly, relaxed every muscle, and dropped her head on her bosom as the barrel went over. The sensation, she said later, was one of indescribable horror. “I felt as though all Nature was being annihilated.”

  She felt no impact when the barrel struck the water; she simply knew it had dropped below the surface. No sound reached her. She felt alone, forsaken. About a minute passed and then she felt the barrel starting upward. It shot out of the water ten or fifteen feet into the air, dropped and plunged again, and was hurled back into the cavern behind the sheet of water. There it was picked up by the force of the waves, dashed around in midair and dropped onto the rocks. She could feel herself being whirled about and lifted like “butter in a churn.” She felt her strength ebbing but remained calm. The gusts below the Falls shot the barrel into the Maid of the Mist eddy, a minor whirlpool, in which she feared she would be trapped. But then she heard the barrel grate on the rocks and knew she was safe. Her head dropped forward but she did not hear the barrel being opened until a fresh breeze struck her.

  She heard a male voice: “The woman is alive!”

  “Yes, she is,” Annie gasped.

  Carlisle Graham and several others had been waiting on a big rock a few feet from the shore. “Kid” Brady, a well-known featherweight boxer and a good swimmer, had stripped to his trunks and, clinging to the rock, was able to grasp the rope attached to the barrel and with help pull it to safety as the crowd of onlookers cheered.

  Graham helped work the lid off the barrel and peered in, not knowing whether its occupant was dead or alive. A limp hand, blue and benumbed, gave a feeble wave. The crowd cheered again, but Annie was too far gone to squeeze out of the barrel by herself.

  A hoop was removed; it wasn’t enough. A saw was called for, and part of the barrel was cut away. Through this opening Annie Taylor was finally dragged, blood streaming down her clothing from a gash in her head.

  “Have I gone over the Falls?” she asked wearily. And then, “I’m cold. I’ve lost my power of speech. I want to go home.”

  She was so dazed that she had difficulty walking. Graham and another helper each took an arm and guided her across a plank from the rock to the shore. Bedraggled and unkempt, she looked her age as she was bundled into blankets, taken to her boarding house, and wheeled before a blazing fire. The scalp wound, caused by the incessant bumping of the barrel against the rocks, was superficial. There were no broken bones. She was, however, suffering badly from shock.

  She managed only a few words for the press. “If it was with my dying breath,” she said, “I would caution anyone against attempting the feat. I will never go over the Falls again. I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces than make another trip over the fall.”

  5

  Aftermath

  The local press went wild over Annie’s exploit. The Niagara Falls Gazette claimed that she deserved “foremost rank in the list of those who have dared to toy with Nature.…” To the Cataract Journal she was a “woman of indomitable resolve, of lion-like courage and a woman who had the strength of her conviction.” The Buffalo Courier declared that her exploit was “the climax of Niagara wonders.”

  The New York papers didn’t gush. Indeed, they almost missed the story because most editors refused to believe it was true. The Times, in its imperious fashion, made a habit of sneering at Falls stunters. When Robert Flack lost his life in the Whirlpool Rapids, the Times’ callous headline had read: “ANOTHER NIAGARA CRANK DISPOSED OF.”

  Annie’s home-town paper, the Bay City Times-Tribune, predicted Fame and Fortune for Mrs. Taylor. She received an immediate offer of two hundred dollars to appear during the closing week of the Pan-American Exposition, but her expenses in equipping the barrel and paying her helpers quickly gobbled that up. Russell managed to secure her a week at Huber’s Museum in New York for a fee of five hundred dollars, but, to his fury, she declined. Dime museums were not for her, especially in her emotionally drained condition.

  She returned to Bay City to be greeted by her long lost brother, Montgomery Edson, a blacksmith. The two, who hadn’t seen each other for twenty-five years, embraced warmly. But when Edson started to reveal his sister’s real age, she disclaimed all relationship. She was still intent on presenting herself as a woman in her early forties.

  Fame was fleeting, fortune illusory. Russell booked her into a series of store window appearances in Saginaw, Detroit, Sandusky, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. There she sat with her barrel and her black cat, advertised as the same animal that had survived the test plunge over the Falls. For this she grossed no more than two hundred dollars.

  Annie’s weight had dropped from 162 pounds to 135, and she was still feeling the bruises from her ordeal. She turned up at the Charleston Exposition, but heavy rains kept the customers away. Back in Cleveland, she and Russell found themselves broke, depending on the city’s charity. At this point, Russell de
camped with Annie’s only assets, the barrel and the cat. “If she had been a beautiful girl, why we could have made thousands,” he was quoted as saying. But poor, greying Annie failed to electrify the crowds.

  She was obsessed with getting her barrel back; it was, she felt, the key to financial success. Then she found that Russell had sold it to a Chicago theatrical company that was planning a stage play entitled Over the Falls. She raised some money by publishing a quickie pamphlet about her exploits, and with the proceeds she hired a lawyer to locate the missing barrel. Private detectives traced it to Chicago where on August 14 the stage company was displaying it in a department store window to advertise their play.

  Annie made straight for the city and with her lawyer’s help served a writ on the stage company, retrieved her barrel, and took it back to Niagara Falls. She estimated its temporary loss cost her fifteen hundred dollars, and she warned that if anybody tried to steal it again, “I have a pistol and I know how to shoot.”

  Now she discovered that Carlisle Graham had also betrayed her by staging a re-enactment of her Falls plunge to add to the film that had been made of his own adventures. Graham hired both Truesdale and Billy Holleran to set up the scene and sent his own empty barrel over the cataract while the cameras rolled. He did not hire Annie to play herself, probably because she objected to being portrayed in a medium that was considered socially disreputable. If the dime museums were indecent in her eyes, so were the raunchy nickelodeons. Annie saw herself as a lecturer on a platform, not a cheap sensationalist in a flickering peep show.