Niagara Falls' Off-off Season by Nancy Lyon

“And all they ever found of him was a rib bone and a tattooed arm.” Niagara Falls newspaper clipping, 1920

It’s a gummy grey day in Niagara Falls, New York. Across the Niagara River, on the Ontario side of the Niagara gorge, the towering Casino Niagara and twirling 775-foot Skylon restaurant flashes over the skyline. But off-off season Niagara’s March skies and skeletal trees tend to brood on both sides of the raging white caps. The mood is perfect for damp blustery walks along the spumous edge of the thundering waters, and strolls through the Oakwood Cemetery.

I’m standing in front of a simple grey stone flecked with black. I’ve found it with the help of local historian Donald Loker. The inscription reads:

ANNIE EDSON TAYLOR
FIRST TO GO OVER THE HORSESHOE FALL IN A BARREL AND LIVE
October 24, 1901.

Very odd for a tombstone, there are no birth and death dates. But then this is a pauper’s grave. A photo and newspaper clipping at the Wax Museum shows that the schoolteacher of ample proportions did it on her 43rd birthday, in a long dress, with her hair in a bun, and died penniless and alone in the Niagara County Infirmary in the winter of 1921. Born sometime in 1858. Died sometime in 1921.

After she was pulled, exhausted and bleeding from her beaten-up padded oaken barrel, Annie Edson Taylor from Bay City, Michigan expected to make a fortune. She did get a manager, of questionable abilities, and did tour the USA. But never did she conquer the vaudeville stage. Never tapped a toe or twirled a cane.

If the City of Niagara Falls had any entrepreneurial sense, they’d replace the pauper’s stone that’s in this little potter’s field called “Stranger’s Rest,” with a huge granite barrel, like the one she plunged over in, displayed at the local Wax Museum. It would tower over these memorial grounds as a beacon - for feminists, for historians with a penchant for life’s odd things and people... and for those who come to Niagara pondering suicide over the Falls. Such a monument would fulfill poor old Annie’s lifelong dream - to be famous!

Annie Edson Taylor had no talent for the vaudeville stage, they say. She was a lacklustre person, they say. Someone came here a few years ago and wrote a film script based on her life, but it was so boring that Hollywood wouldn’t buy it, they say. But look what Annie did. She was the FIRST person, and a WOMAN, to brave the 180-foot falls’ atomic-bomb-force currents, in the frigid waters of October, in a crude wooden barrel, without a helmet, without an oxygen tank, without a two-way radio - and SURVIVE. And she had no precedent of hope to encourage her. Only the certainty that if she didn’t die, and weren’t maimed, crippled and disfigured, she would be rich and famous.

“Annie was desperate,” Donald Loker is saying, squinting at the writing on the stone. “Her husband had left her, which was a scandal in those days. She needed money. And she was naive. She didn’t know how powerful the falls really was. She got the idea to leap over it when she was on the train coming from Michigan and had the barrel made in Michigan and sent over. You’ve seen the falls today? You think that’s a lot of water going over the edge? When Annie’s barrel went over, 60 years before the Niagara Power Project, there was four times the volume and flow that there is today! Four times !”

Niagara Falls gets 4.5 million visitors a year. In summer it shows its frivolous face. Honeymooners frolic on round beds under mirrored ceilings. History buffs flock to re-enactments at historic Fort Niagara, where French, British, American and souvenir flags have successively flown since 1679. Maid of the Mist tour boats bloom with tourists in daffodil yellow rain slickers. Ferris wheels whirl. And gamblers gambol. But in the hush between winter and spring, Niagara Falls’ dramatic geology and the turbulent side of its history - French-British strife, US-Canadian border intrigues, slave-hiding days, industrial collapse, smugglers, ‘stunters’, suicides, and cliff-hanger rescues stands out like a jagged rock.

This town incorporated in 1892 as the City of Niagara Falls and now reduced to a post-industrial community of 30,000 souls was once the northern terminus of the Underground Railway. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, some 30,000 runaway slaves hid here and escaped by boat or along the Roebling Suspension Bridge to freedom in Canada.

Walking across the bridge to Goat Island, guarded by such ferocious rapids that it was once considered for an Alcatraz style prison, I gaze out at the once grand, now dilapidated frame houses along the vertical shoreline. Some have hideaways and connect to tunnels, now caved in, in which the slaves escaped.

The railing of this bridge over the rapids is barely three feet high. I’m not usually afraid of heights. I climbed to the top of a schooner’s swaying mast to get some good shots once. But watching the thundering rapids rush over the edge, I feel a vertigo rush to my throat. The waters taunt and beckon. I’m afraid some dark part of me might leap over the edge and drag the rest of me with it.

My grandparents brought my mother to Niagara Falls when she was five, and afterward she was terrified of even small trickling falls. Until the day she returned to Niagara in her 70’s to conquer her fear, and was oddly delighted to see, of all things, snagged on a cliff and ready to fall into the rapids, a barrel.

Looking way down, I don’t see any barrels. But after a tour of the charmingly old-fashioned, low-tech Aquarium of Niagara, featuring a one-eyed grouper which lost his bulging eye to a nibbling shark, and a staff which dresses up in tuxedos on Penguin Days to sell “paintings” made by waddling penguin feet, I headed for the wonders of the Wax Museum of History.

The little museum is cold and dark. I am the sole visitor, spending hours fascinated with the Niagara Falls geology, mooning over yellowed song sheets with musical patterns like waterfalls, and gawking at the contraptions Niagara’s daredevils have used to go over the Horseshoe Falls. There is a black cylinder like a windowless submarine, an orange metal sphere like a giant Orange Julius - a steel-reinforced rubber ball, a modified pickle barrel wedged inside truck inner tubes, a thing made of truck inner tubes webbed in fishnet, and barrels constructed of thick Russian oak... aluminium... metal... plastic.

Then there are the newspaper headlines and clippings, with photos of “rescued” ‘stunters’ in the emergency room of Greater Niagara General Hospital. Retrieving ‘stunters’ is so risky for Parks rescuers that the “unlawful performance of a stunt” gets a jail sentence and $25,000 fine. Until around 1984, it was a non-arrestable offence and the fine was only $100-500. In the days before Annie’s barrel, and when “The Great Blondin” from France strung his 1,300 foot long, three-inch thick, hemp tightrope 190 feet over the Niagara Gorge and teetered across, crowds gathered on both shores to gape at these spectacles.

“Astounding! amazing! Death-defying!” trumpeted the 1860 headlines announcing The Great Blondin. He performed this remarkable feat “blind-folded in a sack pushing a wheelbarrow on stilts with his manager on his back.” And I thought it was all at once, until I realized the Wax Museum text had left out all the commas!

Reading the bios, I notice that many of the 'stunters' were in their 40’s. Was it all mid-life crisis driven? John D. Munday was 48, George L. Stathakis, the Greek chef from Buffalo who suffocated while his barrel was trapped behind a wall of water for 22 hours, was 46. Charles G. Stevens was a 38-year old English barber. His barrel of thick Russian oak crushed on impact, and all that was ever found of him was a tattooed arm and a single rib.

And how’s this for irony:

Bobby Leach, the first man to survive a barrel plunge, on July 25, 1911 made it in vaudeville as “The Canadian Daredevil” but died in 1926 - after slipping on a banana peel!!! And Annie Taylor died penniless, yet underneath the waters where her barrel landed, was a fortune in coins!

In 1969 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a coffer dam to install seismic sensors to prevent earth-quaking rockslides. Scattered over the temporarily drained riverbed they found a carpet of fossils, Amerindian artefacts, human bones - and thousands of coins tossed by visitors from everywhere, nickels, dimes, francs, pesos, - and- ha! - even gold doubloons!