Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  Their only hope of escape lay on the Canadian side. Grasping his companion’s hand, Misner started across the frozen river. Almost immediately he felt the ice part beneath his feet. Bessie Hall fell full length between two great ice boulders. Had Misner not been holding her with a sure grip, she would have gone to the bottom or been crushed between two grinding chunks of ice. He managed to pull her free just before the pieces collided.

  The ice was carrying them past the Upper Steel Arch Bridge. Near them on the moving mass was another person who hadn’t been able to reach the American shore, a boy who had saved himself by climbing onto an ice hillock. As he passed under the bridge he grasped one of the girders and climbed safely into the superstructure. But Misner and Miss Hall, unable to reach the bridge, were swept past and carried downstream for another two hundred yards. Misner could see on the American side the end of the tunnel from the power station. Its tailrace, shooting out at a rate of eighty-five miles an hour, created an undertow so strong that it sucked in anything that passed by. Astonishingly, they passed it in safety. A few yards later they heard a shout from the shore. For the first time in memory the ice bridge had come to a sudden standstill. It was now about 5 p.m.

  Looking up, they could see thousands of people lining the banks, urging them to hurry. They set off for the Canadian side, stumbling, often vanishing from sight in one of the gullies, then reappearing to the cheers of the crowd. Often they were forced to leap blindly into ravines five or ten feet deep. At one point, Bessie Hall tried to give up, but Misner persuaded her to keep going. From time to time he was forced to leave her briefly while he ran ahead to scout the best way to cross the ice. Some of the spectators, believing that he was leaving his friend to her fate, grew angry and began to shout “Coward!” One man announced that if Misner reached shore alone he would shoot him on the spot. But Misner was determined to save them both.

  At last, after forty-five minutes of struggle, they crossed a fifty-yard expanse of slush and reached the Canadian shore to a mighty cheer from the crowd. There, in Misner’s own words, “willing hands stood waiting to receive us and to congratulate us on our almost miraculous escape from certain death.”

  Within hours the waters of the river were again jammed solid. The new ice bridge was larger and stronger than any that season. It remained in place for a record seventy-eight days until April 11, when the spring thaw finally caused its breakup. To the very end, the ice bridge of 1899 became a target for acts of bravura. The day before it finally disintegrated, five adventurous Canadians managed to cross to the American side and return, dragging a scow with which they propelled themselves across the major gaps.

  3

  Annie

  Late in July 1901, Annie Edson Taylor sat in her dreary little room in a boarding house in Bay City, Michigan, and contemplated a bleak future. She was broke, lonely, and despondent. She knew she was too old to continue in her career as a dancing teacher. Who wanted to learn the arts of the ballroom from a bulky and shapeless woman of sixty-three, with coarse features and a rasping voice? Having exhausted her savings, Annie Taylor now faced the poorhouse. There was no social security at the century’s turn. You begged, you took charity, or you starved.

  All her life she had been a private entrepreneur, making her own way, traipsing from town to town, but always solvent. Now what was left for her? The three traditional women’s jobs – stenographer, teacher, telephone operator – were reserved for younger women. If only, she thought, she could do something that no one else had ever done, then perhaps the world would take notice and reward her. In this fantasy she was kin to Arthur Midleigh, though her purpose was fortune as well as fame.

  This was the year of the great Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and, as Annie’s copy of the New York World made clear, tens of thousands were heading for Lake Erie to take in the big fair and then go on to see the sights at Niagara Falls. Just a few days before, on July 15, Carlisle Graham, the obsessive cooper, had restored his tarnished reputation by taking a five-foot, cigar-shaped, metal barrel on another perilous ride – his fifth – through the Whirlpool Rapids. Trapped in an eddy, Graham was retrieved from the barrel badly bruised, just before he almost died of suffocation.

  Annie put down the paper and sat in thought. Then it came to her, as she wrote later, “in a flash.” Suddenly this flabby and overweight woman decided to do what younger and more athletic daredevils had shrunk from doing. She would become the first human being to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

  On the face of it, she seems the unlikeliest of candidates for the brief but blazing celebrity that such a venture would bring. Yet her career was that of a survivor. She was a nineteenth-century rarity – a determined and independent female entrepreneur who had suffered her share of misfortune yet had always overcome adversity.

  As a child she preferred playing games with boys to dressing up dolls. She devoured adventure stories, her brain “teeming with romance.” Her marriage to David Taylor, more than a dozen years her senior, was not happy. When he died of wounds suffered in the Civil War, she was left on her own.

  She enrolled in a four-year teacher-training course in Albany on borrowed money, completed it with honours in three, and decided to make her way to San Antonio, Texas, then on the very rim of the western frontier and unreachable by either rail or water. She left New York on a White Star steamer in 1870, stopped off for a month in Cuba, sailed on to Galveston, took a train to Austin, and arrived at her destination by stagecoach. There she was able to board with the family of an old school friend. She got a job teaching at a nearby public school and within a year was made vice-principal.

  For the next three decades she lived the life of a vagabond, moving restlessly from one city to another. In her autobiography, written after the Niagara adventure, she presented herself as a woman of pluck and audacity who was forever being set upon by miscreants. In San Antonio, she said, she was attacked in her boarding house by burglars who chloroformed her in an attempt to make off with the rent money she was collecting on behalf of the absent landlord, her friend’s father. In 1873 she left San Antonio and was scarcely out of town when the stage on which she was travelling was attacked by three masked robbers who ordered her to hand over all her money. “I’ll blow out your brains,” one threatened. “Blow away,” she cried. “I would as soon be without brains as without money!” They departed empty-handed, she recounted. There is, in her writing, a suspicious fuzziness, a lack of detail, and an absence of dates that encourages scepticism.

  She moved to New York City where she enrolled in a dancing school and emerged as a qualified instructor in dancing and physical culture. Off she went to practise her new profession in Asheville, North Carolina, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Birmingham, Alabama, and again, San Antonio. She travelled across Mexico, took passage to San Francisco, then headed back to New York by train. Once again masked gunmen appeared, lined up all the passengers, and emptied their pockets of valuables. Since Annie had hidden her money and jewellery she had nothing to show and so lost nothing; “nor was I a bit afraid,” she later wrote.

  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 st
aves 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.