Only one thing, she admitted, loosened her nerve, and that was the river itself. She remembered it well—she said she had visited Niagara Falls plenty of times while growing up. But she did not want to inspect the scene now. Had she actually taken another look, she might have paused. The thirty-seven-mile-long Niagara River, which separated New York from Ontario, put on a deceptive show. Flowing easily from the east end of Lake Erie, it ran quietly north, almost on a level with its banks. Its current was mild, and, at five miles in, it divided around Grand Island.
After converging again north of Grand Island, the river began to change character, and, about three-quarters of a mile above the falls, it quickened its pace and began to move furiously around rocks. As it approached the grand precipice, it divided again, this time around little Goat Island, and then it descended 170 feet over Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side and a shorter but more treacherous distance over the wider, rockier American cataract.
It was the water’s sensuous curve over the edge of Horseshoe Falls that captivated visitors. Produced by rock salts and pulverized limestone, the glasslike green was so entrancing to Pan-American Exposition designers that they tried to add a touch of it to almost every big Exposition building. If a hall was painted a primary red, it would still be trimmed in Niagara green; if its walls were ivory, it would still sport the wondrous translucence of the waterfall.
After cascading down into a pool, the water of the cataract moved through a high-cliffed gorge, creating the rapids that Martha Wagenfuhrer conquered and the Whirlpool that caught Maud Willard in its death spiral. Then, placid again, the river bent north toward Lake Ontario.
Annie Taylor came to Niagara Falls in 1901 because the Exposition crowds were there. And the crowds came because they wanted to see one of the world’s natural wonders before it shifted shape. At the turn of the twentieth century, they were told, erosion was moving the edge of the falls upstream toward Lake Erie at the rate of at least four feet per year. The diversion of river water to make electricity slowed the erosion but endangered the spectacle. Either way, it was time to visit.9
Back in the early nineteenth century, tourists had come to Niagara Falls with less urgency. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 gave travelers easier access to the area, and artists, writers, and honeymooners flocked to the site. By 1857, when landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church completed his Niagara, a seven-foot-wide work that drew thousands into exhibit halls in the United States and Europe, more than sixty thousand people a year were visiting the area. By the turn of the twentieth century, after the completion of more bridges, restaurants, hotels, and shops—not to mention hydroelectric plants—excursionists to the falls numbered over three hundred thousand a year.
Then there were the performers. The heyday of stunters began in 1859, when a Frenchman named Jean-François Gravelet, known simply as Blondin, stretched a rope two thousand feet across the Niagara Gorge and crossed over on it. At the halfway point, he lowered a bottle to a tour boat 160 feet below, waited while it was filled with river water, then pulled it up and drank it. He walked the tightrope again and again that summer. And he didn’t just walk it. He carried his manager across it, danced on it, and did handstands and somersaults. He traversed it blindfolded and in the moonlight. He took a stove across it, lit a fire, cracked eggs, and cooked an omelet. He took Champagne and cake.
Blondin became a sensation, and he attracted others who tried to outdo him, including a man dressed as a washerwoman who scrubbed laundry in a tub while on the tightrope and a woman who crossed the gorge with peach baskets on her feet. Every one of the fifteen tightrope performers survived.
By the mid-1890s, though, tightropes were passé and daredevils chose to prove their mettle in the Whirlpool Rapids, where the river flew by at forty miles an hour. Matthew Webb, a champion of the English Channel, was one of the first to try the rapids. He arrived in Niagara Falls in 1883, entered the river, and drowned. Others challenged the rapids with rowboats and barrels, and some of them, like Martha Wagenfuhrer, lived to tell their tales.10
If gut-wrenching horror was what crowds wanted at the falls, then two young men—an Englishman named Arthur Midleigh and a Canadian named Alonzo Gardner—topped it all in 1889. Their attempt to row across the rapids above the cataract was, said a reporter later, “the most awful and thrilling catastrophe that has ever happened at that scene.” The men misjudged the strength of the current, and, 250 feet from the brink of Horseshoe Falls, they scrambled onto a rock while their boat tumbled over the edge. People, including Gardner’s wife, gathered on shore to watch. Rescuers sent a boat to the rock, tethered to the shore. The boat smashed. Then they maneuvered a wooden raft to the beleaguered men. Midleigh leapt onto it, lost his footing, and fell into the water. Spectators, more than a thousand by now, watched his head rise above the water just before he went over the precipice.
The next day, tourist trains to the falls were full. Twenty thousand people gathered to see Alonzo Gardner be rescued or die.
Men rigged up another contraption. Hoping to secure Gardner against the powerful current, they crafted a harness out of a hotel fire escape, with a hook tethering it to another jury-rigged raft. They delivered it to the rock. Sluggishly, awkwardly, Gardner strapped it on. With no rest for three days, he seemed to move in slow motion.
Finally came the moment the watchers on shore dreaded. Gardner had to hook the raft. At first try, it launched out of the river and flew past him. He steadied himself. Once more, the raft shot up out of the froth. Then suddenly, in a second that must have burned forever in the minds of those looking on, the raft spun and knocked Gardner into the river. He went down, said a witness, like a bowling pin.
Like his friend before him, Alonzo Gardner was carried toward the edge. At the end, he raised his arms, and, in a turn of the current, seemed to give one long look at all the people on shore before he went over to his death.
It was events like this that discouraged daredevils. Instead, they used animals. In the late 1800s, dogs, cats, and even a rooster were sent over the cataract, with and without barrels. Some of the animals perished, and some, like Frank Bostock’s crocodile Ptolemy, were pulled out of the pool below the falls in shock, but still breathing.
Annie Taylor also sent an animal over the falls. On Saturday, October 19, the river man she had hired, Fred Truesdale, who had previously experimented with animals, caught a cat, placed it in Taylor’s barrel, and let it loose two miles above the falls. To his great satisfaction, the barrel plunged over the falls bottom first and appeared, undamaged, a minute and a half later. The captain of the Maid of the Mist tour boat pulled it out of the water. The cat reportedly jumped out, very much alive. Yet witnesses disagreed. One said the animal had suffocated. Another said it had drowned in water at the bottom of the barrel. He had seen the body.11
V
THE REAL THING
It was deep fall now at the Pan-American grounds, and the cool days and colder nights had a withering effect. Flower beds, once the pride of the formal courts, had yellowed and dried. Displays that had been resplendent with color only weeks earlier, had wilted. Even the asphalt was stained and spotted, where dung, grease, and human traffic had left their marks.
On the Midway, some shows, like Bostock’s, happily counted their cash, while others contemplated a shortfall. The Streets of Mexico, nearly bankrupt, had been forced to close early. The electric lights at the popular Alt Nurnberg Restaurant were temporarily shut off by the Exposition company, which claimed that the restaurant owed $8,000. The Esquimaux Village concessionaires, on the other hand, wanted money back: The Alaska exhibit had copied some of their acts. Darkest Africa didn’t have a grievance but just needed to pull out early: Its performers had to catch a steamer to Europe.
Even Director-General William Buchanan was leaving. Now considered an expert in Pan-Americanism, he was heading to Mexico City for a meeting of the Pan-American Congress, so he left others to close up the fair. Exposition officials, honoring him wi
th a farewell dinner on October 24, produced a large Tiffany loving cup for his two years’ hard work, and concessionaires bestowed on him a diamond ring—a “token of his kindnesses and fair treatment.”
Newspapers now became boldly pessimistic. On October 22, the Commercial said it outright: The Exposition was a financial “failure.” And it went further. Given “the beauties of the fair and the abundance of attractions round about Buffalo, the total number of admissions should have been 15,000,000.” The editor blamed the low admissions on the railroad rates, but wondered whether people were weary of fairs. It wasn’t just Buffalo—nobody could put on a big show anymore.
The Express demurred. Wait, it said. The fair would go out with glory. Farewell Day, November 2, would be an eye-popping spectacle guaranteed to fill the Exposition’s empty purse.
Bostock, as ever, seemed oblivious to the pessimism. Throughout October, he was a figure of animation and good spirits. In the third week of the month, he admitted thousands of children into his show for free. And he continued to advertise new animals. Trains brought in an emu, a group of Chilean armadillos, some cassowaries, and a family of baboons. The menagerist encouraged crowds to visit his celebrated acts, too, before the show closed. He made sure that Chiquita was as beguiling as ever in these final weeks, and he sent Jumbo II into Exposition parades, most recently plodding alongside a procession of fancily dressed babies.12
It was during the third week of October that rumors out of Niagara Falls gathered steam. Soon enough, they had the heft of a news story and their strange, startling content began to captivate the country.
Annie Taylor seemed serious about sending herself over Niagara Falls. As her plans materialized, reporters started following her from place to place, and, as they did so, they scrutinized her more thoroughly. There were some things about her that did not seem right. Besides the obvious madness of her barrel ride, she didn’t look the part of a daredevil. She was a dancing teacher, she said, and an instructor in physical culture. Yet she was a woman of sturdy proportions. One paper estimated her height and weight to be five feet four and 160 pounds and went so far as to declare her “quite stout.”
Taylor explained that she was more flexible than she seemed. She was, she said, “able to bend forward and touch her nose to the floor without bending her knees with perfect ease.” She said she could turn cartwheels, and, up to two years earlier, she could “draw herself up on a trapeze and hang by her toes.” She did not demonstrate. She was, she explained, “out of practice.”
She didn’t tell them the truth. She billed herself as forty-three years old.
In fact, she was sixty-three.13
Taylor told newspapers that she would make the plunge on Sunday afternoon, October 20. But the afternoon came and went. Watchers gathered and grew weary. By Monday, tourists and voyeurs and newsmen were becoming impatient. One reporter wondered whether the whole thing was a “gigantic hoax.”
Taylor and Russell offered excuses. They were having a few difficulties with the authorities—both Canadian and American—who had had the temerity to say they wouldn’t permit the life-threatening stunt. Her publicity was also unready. Taylor wanted to sell photos at the time of the descent, but her photographer had been delayed by a fire near his studio.
She bided the time with more interviews. She listed her barrel equipment again for skeptics and mentioned the weighted anvil at the foot of the cask that would help her land feetfirst. And she admitted some doubt. There was a possibility, she said, that the fall would “break my neck.” She also acknowledged that, in the dark of the barrel, she wouldn’t have any idea where she was heading. She was sure that she would know when the barrel went over the edge, though. And, she said, “I am quite positive I shall know when it strikes the water below.”
Indeed.
The day she promised for her stunt, Wednesday, October 23, opened sunny. The wind blew in gusts, however, and threw the fast-moving Niagara River into a chop. Sightseers crowded onto the shores by early afternoon, and reporters gathered over at Fred Truesdale’s house on a shallow inlet known as Port Day. Hoping to watch Taylor get into her barrel in the Truesdale woodshed, they were disappointed. Concerned about propriety, she crawled in privately, took a swig of brandy from her flask, and tucked it in beside her. She then welcomed photographers to see her, or at least her head, inside the barrel. The press was pleased. They wanted to be sure it wouldn’t be a con job.
Using long crowbars, four men carried the heavy barrel down to Truesdale’s dock and maneuvered it into his boat. A policeman appeared on the street above the house. The men hurried their work, said quick good-byes, and Truesdale and an assistant named Fred Robinson rowed the barrel from the shore.
The policeman shouted. Too late.
Meanwhile, gusts on the river had increased, forcing the men to row their cargo into a headwind, water spraying over the gunwales. Worried that their boat might founder, and that they might go over the falls with their passenger, the men beached the boat at the reedy outcropping of Grass Island.
From inside the barrel, Mrs. Taylor urged the men to proceed. The boatmen said they would not. She asked them to at least wait to see if the wind calmed down. They did, yet it persisted. Finally, she gave up, too. The boat’s intense rocking, the tilt of the barrel, and the close, dank smell began to make Annie sick to her stomach. She got out. And, sitting in the bow of the boat like an oversize and forlorn figurehead, she returned to shore.
To the crowds who had patiently waited, and who now began talking about “cranks and fakers,” she offered determined words. “I will make the trip tomorrow,” she said. “I think the people are convinced by this time that I do not intend to deceive them. I hate a weak, vacillating person whose yes means no and whose word cannot be depended upon.” Another report said she was so unhappy about disappointing people that she cried.14
The next day, Thursday, October 24, was a good-luck day. Or it would make for a nice, round ending. It was Annie Taylor’s birthday. She did not bring up the topic, of course. There was no need to fuel speculation.
The winds had died overnight, and the weather was clear and cold.
Hoping to avoid the police, who anticipated a late-afternoon event, Fred Truesdale decided to leave shore with the barrel around 1:30 p.m. Meanwhile, Tussie Russell allowed newsmen a last-minute meeting with Annie. “I believe that I can live fully an hour, perhaps two, with the cover closed,” she said. Once again, she admitted some concern. “I have a terror of the Whirlpool Rapids, and I do not want my barrel to escape the watchers below the falls and get into the Whirlpool.”
An hour passed. The boatman who had helped Truesdale the previous day was missing. Men carried the barrel down to Truesdale’s sailboat, and waited. One thirty. Two o’clock. The police were surely on their way. Reporters took up the slack. One from the Express asked Mrs. Taylor whether she had considered that this might be her last living hour. “I have made all arrangements,” she admitted. “I have told Mr. Russell to telegraph to my sister . . . and notify her of my death if I should not survive.”
The boatman arrived, explained his delay, and said he had bad news. The police had told him he was assisting someone with suicide, and he was scared. “I don’t want to get pinched,” he said. He was out. Fred Truesdale, acting fast, turned to Billy Holleran, a young fisherman experienced on the upper river, and pressed him to join him. Holleran agreed.
By the time Mrs. Taylor emerged from the Truesdale house and headed to the dock, she had to make her way through a channel of spectators. Peter Nissen, a stunter who had rowed a boat through the Whirlpool Rapids less than two weeks earlier, wanted to shake her hand.
“You are going to beat us all,” he told her with a smile.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied, “although I am going to try.”
She was helped to a seat in the boat’s bow—she would enter the barrel at Grass Island this time—and, just before shoving off, she turned to a reporter and handed him an empty envel
ope with her sister’s address. “Will you let her know?” she asked. “In case of accident and I should not come back?”
It was the surest sign yet that Annie Taylor knew she was likely minutes, an hour at the most, from dying.
But, just as quickly, the bravado was back.
“Good-bye, Mrs. Taylor,” the reporter said, as her boat began to move.
“I won’t say good-bye,” she replied. “It’s just au revoir, you know. I will see you all again.”
She was pulled away from the American shore.
Past a breakwater to Grass Island, a flotilla of photographers, reporters, and boatmen followed her. The water barely registered a ripple.
Her barrel was rolled into the reeds, and, looking ready for business in a dark tailored jacket, she posed for photographs. Meanwhile, noticing that the barrel had developed a small leak, Truesdale applied some caulk.
The men moved to the other side of the island while Taylor took off her jacket and overskirt and loosened her shirt. She pulled off her hat. The tall reeds on the island concealed her as she levered her heavy form into the barrel.
Annie Taylor inside the barrel.
Truesdale and the other men returned. They slid the lid shut and turned a wooden screw. The next time it would be opened was when it was all over. From the inside, Taylor uttered a muffled shout that there was another leak. She could see daylight. Truesdale fixed it.
Holleran worked a bicycle pump to put fresh air into the cask. When the pump began to work hard, Truesdale asked whether she still saw light. She did not. He told her he thought she had enough air.
The men rolled the barrel into deep water and tied it to the stern of Truesdale’s boat. They rowed to Hog Island, near the mouth of Chippewa Creek, brought the boat about one-quarter mile above the head of the rapids, and drew the barrel in close. There would be no returning now.
The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City Page 16
