Only 16 people have survived going over Niagara Falls—either in a barrel, in a ball, or just by jumping in the water. The first and the last were from Michigan.
Annie Edson Taylor was the first. A music and dance teacher from Bay City, she made history on Oct. 24, 1901, by becoming the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and live to tell about it. And she did it on her 63rd birthday.
Kirk Jones was the last. A pudgy shlub from Canton who lived with his parents, the 40-year-old Jones went over the falls in 2003 with only the clothes on his back and survived. He told the cops it was a suicide attempt so they wouldn’t arrest him, but the truth is that it was a daredevil stunt. He tried to do it again in 2017, though, and this time it killed him. Since Jones’s successful plunge in 2003, nobody has managed to survive the Falls.
Thousands of people have attempted it through the years, but only a few have been daredevil tries. Most of the others were suicide attempts or even murders, and many go unreported because authorities don’t want to give them attention. It’s a highly illegal thing to do, and Canadian authorities will fine you and put you in jail if you somehow manage to survive the plunge.
Annie Edson Taylor went over the falls in an attempt to make money, and while the going-over-the-falls part was a success, the making-money part was not.
Annie Edson grew up in New York, the daughter of a flour-mill owner. Her father died when she was 12 and left enough money for Annie and the rest of the family to live on comfortably. She became a schoolteacher in New York and married a man named David Taylor.
When her husband died fighting in the Civil War, Taylor decided to move about the country working as a teacher of dancing and “physical culture.” She never remarried.
As the 1800s went on, Annie’s inheritance gradually started to run out and she began to worry about how she was going to support herself in her old age. By 1897 or so, she found herself in Bay City, sharing a house.
Annie turned 60 in 1898 and opened a dance studio in Bay City, teaching both children and adults how to move and dance with grace. She didn’t make much money at it, though, and she didn’t know how much longer she’d be able to teach. A proud woman, Annie wanted to be self-reliant in her golden years. She didn’t want to borrow money from friends, and as someone who fancied herself part of the upper crust, she didn’t want to become a cleaning lady. Instead, she was looking for a get-rich-quick scheme.
She read a story in the New York World newspaper about the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and nearby Niagara Falls. Hundreds of thousands of people were heading there for the event.
That gave her the idea.
“I looked around for something that nobody had done before as a means to make some money,” she told the Detroit Free Press. “That is rather difficult to find. The idea of going over Niagara came to me in an instant and I studied the conditions fully before I embarked on the trip.”
Annie, who had never been to Niagara Falls before, knew that nobody had ever gone over the falls and lived to talk about it. If she could somehow do it, she figured, it would make her rich.
“I am not of the common daredevil sort,” she said before the plunge. “I feel refined and I know that I am well-educated and well-connected. I am not going over the falls as a mere act of bravado. I feel that something may accrue from it in a financial way. I am trusting to my manager for that.”
Ah, yes. Her manager. This is where we meet Frank M. Russell.
Russell was a guy Annie had met in Bay City, and not much is known about his past except that he was involved with horse racing in some capacity. As it turned out, he was a first-class con man.
Annie told Frank about her plans to go over the falls in a barrel, and he volunteered his services as her manager. He said he would coordinate everything, that he’d handle all the pre-plunge preparations and publicity, and that after she survived the falls, he would book all her speaking engagements and everything else and would thus make her rich.
Hooking up with him proved to be a really bad idea.
Nevertheless, in summer 1901, Annie began planning her plunge in earnest. She did some calculations and figured out exactly how big the barrel would need to be. “I first made a barrel of paper in my room in my boarding house in Bay City, prepared myself as if for a trip and got into it,” she said.
She decided the real barrel should be made out of Kentucky oak, so she found a barrel maker in Bay City who would construct it for her. She decided to put a 200-pound anvil in the bottom of the barrel to keep it upright while she floated down the river on her way to the falls.
On Oct. 13, Annie and Frank made their way to Niagara Falls to prepare for the stunt. The big news at the Pan-American Exposition was that President William McKinley had been shot on Sept. 6 in Buffalo by another guy from Michigan, Leon Czogolsz, and died eight days later. Annie and Frank were hoping the assassination of the president wouldn’t upstage her big event.
Not wanting to take any chances, Annie decided to do a test of the barrel using her cat as the passenger. She sent the barrel over Horseshoe Falls, and when they pulled the cat out alive, she figured the barrel was good to go.
On Sunday, Oct. 20, Frank M. Russell called a press conference near the falls, where he introduced Annie and told everyone what she was planning to do. The media people who showed up didn’t believe she was actually going to go through with it.
During the conference, he made sure to read a letter to the media written by Annie that basically said, “Hey, if she dies, don’t blame me.” It said: “This is to certify that I fully exonerate Mr. F.M. Russell or any other persons from using influence with me in any way, shape or manner regarding the feat of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. The idea originated in my own brain and so far has been carried out by me alone.”
For whatever reason, Annie and Frank also decided to lie about her age, probably figuring that nobody would believe a woman in her 60s could be such a daredevil. She was going to make the plunge on her 63rd birthday, but they told all the reporters that she was only 50.
She was indeed 63, though, and on Oct. 24, 1901, her crew nailed her shut inside the barrel and sent her down the river toward the falls. Her cat was inside there with her.
It was totally dark inside the barrel, and Annie had no clue when she’d actually hit the falls. When the moment came, she arrived at Horseshoe Falls and plunged down 160 feet, water crashing all around her. When they pulled her out of the water 35 minutes later, Annie and the cat were both alive. She had a slight cut on her scalp but walked away mostly unscathed.
Let the cash flow begin!
Well, unfortunately, the money cannon never fired. Everything Frank M. Russell had promised Annie didn’t come to fruition. There was a lot of interest in her story, and a lot of people wanted to meet the woman who went over the falls, but nobody wanted to pay for it.
Not only did Frank fail to get her any paid gigs, but in early 1902, he decided to steal the barrel itself. While Annie was stuck in Buffalo with no money, Frank took the barrel back to Bay City and rented it out to a store owner to display in his window.
“Mrs. Taylor has written to friends in Bay City asking their aid in recovering the barrel and if it is forthcoming, she will begin legal action to compel Russell to give it up,” the Buffalo News reported.
Annie’s story has a mostly sad ending from there. She never got the barrel back from Russell (nobody knows where it ended up), but she had a replica made and earned a little bit of money posing for photos alongside it and signing autographs. She died penniless in a poorhouse in New York on April 29, 1921, at the age of 82.
Through the years, though, her legacy as one of America’s foremost daredevils has grown. There are memorials to her on the Canadian side of the falls and in her adopted hometown of Bay City, in the appropriately named Waterfall Park.
In 2011, her story was told in an Off-Broadway musical called “Queen of the Mist” that played for a month at the Judson Theatre in New York. In 2019, the musical was performed in London’s West End at the Charing Cross Theatre.
The musical is still performed by groups across the country, and in February of this year, it opened to rave reviews at Montclair State University in New Jersey. A full 124 years after she made history, people are still learning the story of Bay City’s Annie Edson Taylor.
While the fortune that Annie sought never came, the fame certainly did.
Buddy Moorehouse teaches documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College.
