In 1859, the Great Blondin crossed Niagara Gorge on a tightrope. Then he did it with a wheelbarrow, blindfolded, on stilts, and carrying his manager piggyback. In 1876, Maria Spelterini crossed the same gorge by tightrope, the only woman to do so. And in 1901, Maud Willard rode the rapids in a barrel with a dog. She died of suffocation when the animal blocked the only air hole. And still they came to the Falls of the Niagara River.
Was Annie Edson Taylor a Real Maid of the Mist or Just a Nut?
There’s a much-publicized story going around about a Civil War widow whose only child died young. Lost and rootless, she gave up her schoolmarm life to give classes in dance instruction and physical culture as she wandered around for years. Finally, pretending to be 42 years old when she was really 63, Annie Edson Taylor decided she’d go over Niagara Falls in a barrel on her birthday. She wouldn’t be the first to try, but she’d be the first to succeed.
Annie Edson Taylor and her helpers custom-built a barrel to fit her, a 200-pound anvil fixed to the bottom of the barrel to keep it upright, lots of cushions, and her lucky heart pillow. To increase the barrel’s strength against being crushed by the fall and the rocks below, her assistants pumped in air with a bicycle pump, sealed the valve where the air hose connected, and banged the last air hole shut with hammers. Over went the barrel. The cat they’d strapped inside was recovered with minor physical damage.
Confident in her test results, Annie strapped in, ready to take the plunge, as they say
Onlookers watched as she picked up speed as the edge came nearer and then zip, over she went. There were long anxious minutes while the barrel was secured by boatsmen. Guinness World Records was there, reporting that it took men another hour to saw off the top.
Taylor did it thinking it would bring her great wealth. It did not. It brought a brief notoriety and then her fame was as gone as the mist Maid of the Mist.
Going over Niagara Falls in a barrel became a TikTok Challenge and six who have tried the same stunt survived
This is out of the more than 5,000 bodies found at the foot of Niagara Falls since 1850. These days we’re told 20 or 30 are found dead every year.
Wait a minute
If Annie’s not the Maid of the Mist, who is? The very first Maid of the Mist was a small ship that ferried passengers and light cargo back and forth across the Niagara River just below the Falls, between Canada and the United States.
Before long, the boat was carrying tourists, then suddenly there were lots of sightseeing boats named Maid of the Mist. All were carrying tourists back and forth just below a thundering waterfall higher than France’s Arc de Triomphe and 20 times as wide.
Again, there are conflicting stories
Some of them are told by the companies that sell tours. They’ve long ago learned how the tourists love a legend. One has an Iroquois maiden going over the falls to save her brethren and sistren from danger. Another story says she fell out of her canoe, and a third said she attempted suicide by paddling her canoe over the falls.
Each time she’s saved at the last possible second by a local god
He takes her to live behind the wall of water through which no one can see. There’s even a bit about that same god killing a giant poisonous snake whose death writhings and convulsions created the giant horseshoe rim.
Anyway, the maiden became the spirit of the falls as a reward for her bravery and as one tour company’s lore gushes, “The maiden’s presence in the mist gave birth to the name ‘Maid of the Mist,’ symbolizing the eternal connection between the falls and this mystical legend.”
One of the more spellbinding tour guides tells the paying customers in his best campfire voice
“If you happen to be along the river when the mist hangs just so, you might glimpse a white canoe, moving silently upstream without oar or rider. Just a whisper in the fog, where the old stories still live.” For fans of something grislier, there are tales of young virgin sacrifices by the savage peoples who lived along the shores of what the Iroquois called The Great Thundering Waters.”
My favorite Annie Edson Taylor quote came when she said after she’d struck rocks three times and had water bursting in everywhere, “I lost my senses just a minute.” The evidence suggests she might have lost them earlier than that.
Bonus
I could not help but notice two parallels with the early days of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. space programs.
Annie’s test cat put me in mind of Ham the Astrochimp that NASA sent for a test ride in a space capsule. And the Russian dog what was the first cosmonaut’s name, Laika? The one that died from overheating and panic only a few hours after Sputnik 2’s takeoff. Tass never reported that.
Again with the astronaut, I cannot read about the crew sawing open the top of a floating barrel without thinking of the first space capsule ocean splashdowns live on tv. After several minutes, the hatch would open and a g-suited astronaut emerged.
My name is David Allan Van Nostrand. That’s me below, swinging from a rope in a tough neighborhood. I wrote this story and more than 500 others posted on this site alone, so you’re bound to find some things you like and some things you don’t. Some are on the serious side, some show a glimmer of wit, and a few are eye-opening, but all are presentations of facts I was able to find during a couple of days of poking around.
I’ve investigated thousands of things big and small. What can I take a closer look at for you?
