Annie Taylor went over Niagara Falls on October 24, 1901. She was a widowed schoolteacher of sixty-three, and she climbed into a padded barrel and let the current carry her to the brink. She was the first person to survive the falls.
She did it for money. Taylor was poor and facing old age without income, and she had read about the crowds that came to see the falls and thought a stunt might make her fortune. The barrel was built to her design, with cushions and an anvil for ballast, and she tested it first with a cat.
The ride was short and violent. The barrel was towed out into the river and cut loose, and it plunged over the edge and vanished into the spray, and rescuers pulled it out of the water below and cut it open. Taylor was alive, dazed, with a cut on her head.
She had expected fame. Instead she found that the men around her took most of the money and that the public, once the novelty passed, forgot her, and she spent the rest of her life poor and largely obscure. The fortune she had gambled on never arrived.
The stunt became a template. Others followed Taylor over the falls in barrels and worse, some to survive and some to die, and the falls became a stage for daredevils. The first of them all, an old woman seeking a way out of poverty, is remembered less than the men who copied her.