Annie Edson Taylor survived Niagara Falls in a barrel at 63

On 24 October 1901, her 63rd birthday, Michigan schoolteacher Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive, plunging over the Canadian Horseshoe Falls in an oak barrel she had designed herself.

She did it for money. Her only child had died in infancy and her husband in the Civil War, and at 62 she was living alone in Bay City, Michigan, with teaching work drying up. “If I could do something no one else in the world had ever done, I could make some money honestly and quickly,” she later wrote; it would be “fame and fortune or certain death.” Daredevils had shot the rapids below the falls in barrels, and the gorge had been crossed by a tightrope walker, but no one had tried the falls themselves. Lying about her age, she hired a manager and timed the stunt for the crowds visiting Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition.

The barrel, built by a cooper under her supervision, was Kentucky oak, about four and a half feet tall and 160 pounds, with cushions, a harness and an anvil in its base to keep it upright. On 18 October she tested it by sending her cat over the Horseshoe Falls; the cat emerged with barely a scratch.

On the day she was rowed to Grass Island, about a mile and a half above the brink, sealed in and cut loose. Hauled out on the Canadian shore, bleeding from a cut to her scalp, she told reporters:

“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.” — Annie Edson Taylor, 1901

The fortune never came. She was paid $200 for appearing at the exposition and another $200 for store appearances with her cat and barrel, but the lecture tour never happened. One manager absconded with the barrel and toured it with a much younger woman posing as the heroine of Niagara. In 1921, aged 82, Taylor entered the Niagara County poorhouse at Lockport, where she died penniless.