Niagara: A History of the Falls (33 page)

She survived fire and flood. She was in Chattanooga in March 1886 when the Tennessee River rose fifty feet and swept away hundreds of homes. She was in Charleston, South Carolina, the following August when an eight-minute earthquake caused 110 deaths and hundreds of injuries. Walls crumbled, buildings toppled, pavements heaved, but Annie merely rose from her chair to examine a thermometer and note that the mercury had fallen twenty-six degrees in an hour.

She claimed that she had survived “three ocean storms” and “three serious fires,” but “on none of these occasions did I ever for a moment lose my composure.” A boast, perhaps, but who can quarrel with it? A woman prepared to plunge over the Falls in a barrel is not the sort who trembles at a pointed pistol or panics when the elements turn ugly. But in 1892, a fire in Chattanooga wiped her out, and she was forced to resume her gypsy-like wanderings across the country, giving dancing lessons.

As she aged, grew grey, and lost her figure, there were fewer and fewer students. For one brief, exotic interval she travelled to Europe, the guest of a wealthy friend. When she returned to North America, she settled in the Michigan lumbering town of Bay City on the shores of Saginaw Bay, and there, by launching a furious advertising campaign, managed to open a dancing school. But she could do no better than break even and so closed her doors and set off once more to San Antonio, Mexico City, and El Paso, then back north to St. Louis, Chicago, and Bay City.

The pickings grew slimmer. “With the utmost economy and prudence I could not live decently,” she wrote. Younger, prettier, and more athletic instructors were getting the business. She could, of course, have become a scrubwoman, but that her pride would not allow. “I didn’t want to lower my social standard, for I have always associated with the best class of people, the cultivated and the refined. To hold my place in that world I needed money, but how to get it?”

She lived on the charity of her relatives, but it was given so grudgingly that she decided to have no more of it. For two years she had been obsessed by the problem of money and how to get enough to keep up appearances – for appearances meant a great deal to Annie Taylor. “I was always well dressed,” she wrote, “a member and regular attendant of the Episcopal Church, and my nearest neighbour had not the least idea of where I got my money.…”

But what could a woman in her sixties do for a living in 1901? “All kinds of wild ideas ran riot in my brain. My thought was, if I could do something no one else in the world had ever done, I could make some money honestly and quickly.” She might even be able to pay back what she had borrowed.

It was at this point that Annie Edson Taylor became an improbable aspirant for immortality of a sort at Niagara Falls.

4
Fame and fortune or instant death

Niagara Falls, when Annie Taylor arrived with her barrel, was known as the Honeymoon Capital of the World, but might as easily have been called the Suicide Capital of the World. By 1900, close to one thousand men and women were known to have hurled themselves into the abyss, either on the spur of the moment or after several days of careful planning. As one police officer noted that year, “there seems to be a hypnotism about it that allures people into its power. They go there in sound health and it seems to fascinate them with its grandeur and rainbow beauty. As soon as troubles come they begin to think about the place. When … bats begin to flit about in their belfries, they begin to think the Falls is calling to them. And although they are twenty-five miles away they cannot seem to shake off the influence, but head for the place as though they were bewitched, and then the papers report Another Man Missing.”

The policeman might easily have been describing John Lazarus, a stocky sixty-year-old from Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, who arrived at Niagara Falls, New York in February 1900, and engaged a hack to take him about for some leisurely sightseeing. First, however, he stopped at the United States Express Company, where he wrapped up all his belongings, including a gold watch, three pocketbooks, cash, and personal papers, and dispatched them to his brother, a doctor in Bloomsburg. He asked for pen and paper, wrote a letter, and sent that off, too.

He climbed back into the hack and asked the driver to show him all the points of interest – just another tourist doing the rounds. But that was not enough for John Lazarus. Everybody was talking about the new belt line, known as the Great Gorge Route, that had opened the previous July. This fifteen-mile scenic tour by electric sightseeing trolley ran along the base of the gorge to the new suspension bridge at Lewiston. From Queenston at the bridge’s western end, the trolleys rattled along the Canadian cliff and returned to the American side by the Upper Steel Arch Bridge. Even in winter the view was magnificent, and John Lazarus had no intention of passing it up. At the railroad office he bought a ticket but refused to take any change. For the next two hours he relaxed and enjoyed the spectacle that unwound before his eyes.

When he returned, Lazarus left his grip and topcoat at the station, announcing he would be back in ten minutes. He did not come back. Instead he set off for the bridge to Goat Island (successor to Augustus Porter’s original structure), stopped at the centre span and – a tourist to the end – spent some time gazing into the hypnotic waters below. He walked back to the first span, appearing totally unconcerned. Suddenly he climbed over the railing and hurled himself into the rapids to his death.

Like Lazarus, a remarkable number of suicides indulged themselves in a leisurely tour of Niagara’s attractions before steeling themselves to make that final leap. One such was a handsome twenty-year-old man, who arrived in wintertime wearing an expensive chinchilla coat and a silk hat, and registered at the Spencer House on the American side as C.R Stanley of Cleveland. In lieu of luggage he left a gold watch.

His real name was Karl Stevens. Four of his relatives had died of consumption, the great scourge of that era. Fearing that the disease would claim him, too, he decided to cheat it by ending his life, a wholly irrational decision since he himself suffered no symptoms. He enjoyed a midday meal at his hotel and then, like Lazarus, hired a carriage to take him on a tour of the Falls. He had never touched liquor, but now, to strengthen his resolve, he began to move from saloon to saloon, gulping down glass after glass. By four that afternoon he was wildly drunk and heading for Goat Island.

He spent two hours on the island before returning to the bridge that led to the mainland. It was closed for the night but an official offered to open it so that Stevens could leave the park. Seeing Stevens’s condition, he took his arm, but as the two walked over the bridge, Stevens broke away, climbed over the railing, and leaped into the rapids below.

But he still could not bring himself to end his life. Instead, he seized a projecting ledge of ice and climbed up on it. Rescuers arrived with ladders and ropes and were joined by John McCloy, the veteran ferryman who had already saved several lives.

Stevens waited, arms folded, perfectly still on his perch, standing out from the bridge’s pier on the upstream side. McCloy coiled a rope around his body and then made his way down the ladder fastened to the bridge railing on the downstream side. He landed knee-deep in the shallow rapids and started upstream toward his quarry.

Half an hour had elapsed since Stevens had made his awkward plunge. In all that time he had neither moved nor shown any interest in the rescue attempt. Fighting his way through chunks of floating ice, McCloy unwound the rope from his body, gained a secure foothold, and prepared to tie it around his victim. Just as he reached the ledge, Stevens plunged into the water, and with strong, steady strokes began to swim upstream. When McCloy tried to seize him, he rolled over on his back and was carried downstream out of sight and over the Falls.

Was Annie Taylor, too, attempting suicide? Certainly there were those who thought she was. But when a Bay City reporter asked the obvious question she snapped at him. “I am too good an Episcopalian,” she said. “My people were Christian people and I was brought up in affluence and properly educated and instructed.”

Still, there was a certain fatalism in her decision as she went about securing a suitable barrel that August. “I might as well be dead,” she declared, “as to remain in my present condition.” Death was certainly in her mind. “It would be fame and fortune or instant death,” she wrote. In one way or another, the barrel symbolized escape.

She went down on her hands and knees to sketch out a full-scale diagram of the barrel she wanted. She cut a number of staves out of cardboard, laced them together, and called a local cooper, John Rozenski, to come to her house. Always careful of her reputation, she suggested he use the side door so that the neighbours wouldn’t see him and suspect a scandal. She swore him to secrecy and asked him to build the barrel. Horrified, he refused. “Mein Gott, woman!” he said, “you will be killed, and me to help; I cannot do such a thing!”

He finally consented and the barrel was built. Annie picked out every stick of lumber herself, making sure that each piece was perfect – sturdy staves of Kentucky oak, each one an inch and a half thick and oiled individually to shed water. When it was finished, the barrel stood four and a half feet high, the staves secured by ten two-inch iron hoops, bolted to the barrel at four-inch intervals. It weighed 160 pounds.

Annie searched about for a suitable manager and found one, she thought, in Frank M. “Tussie” Russell of Bay City, who acted as a small-town promoter of high-diving carnival acts. Russell was thirty-five, a short man with slicked-down hair parted in the middle. Annie told him she was forty-two. In fact, she was old enough to be his mother.

She told Russell she needed money, not for herself – she did not want him to know of her straitened circumstances – but to help pay off the mortgage of a ranch somewhere in Texas. He was not to mention the matter of money to the press: that would be too venal. He was simply to say that she was shooting the Falls “in a spirit of bravado.”

She had only a vague idea of how money was to be attracted. Perhaps she thought that if she passed the hat the crowd would be generous. Russell knew better, but he was no Farini. It did not occur to him to approach the railways or to sell seats for a view of the spectacle. He talked only of later appearances in dime museums, and that was not quite what the refined Mrs. Taylor had in mind.

That September, a less discriminating woman, Martha E. Wagenführer, was packing in audiences on the vaudeville circuit by describing her thrilling ride through the Whirlpool Rapids. The wife of a professional wrestler, she had borrowed Carlisle Graham’s barrel and plunged into the turbulent waters to emerge badly battered and dreadfully seasick, but alive. She had chosen the afternoon of September 6 to perform the feat, for she had hoped that President McKinley, then attending the Pan-American Exposition, might be in the audience. McKinley, however, having seen the Falls, returned to Buffalo, where on that same day, in the Temple of Music, he was mortally wounded by a deranged anarchist.

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: