The first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel took the historic plunge on Oct. 24, 1901 and lived to tell about it.

In fact, Annie Edson Taylor, who survived the death-defying stunt with nothing worse than a few cuts and bruises, talked about little else for the rest of her miserable life.  But the 63-year-old former schoolteacher from Texas might have been better off had she perished in the foolhardy attempt.

Annie had always been an independent woman.  She did not remarry after the death in the late 1860s of her one and only husband, choosing instead to stand on her own two feet and answer to no one.

As soon as she buried the late Mr. Taylor, Annie enrolled in a teacher’s training course in upstate New York.  Taking just three years to finish the four-year curriculum, she moved to San Antonio in 1870 and began teaching in the public schools.

Although Annie was made vice principal the very next year, the promotion was not enough to keep her in the Alamo City.  Her northbound stagecoach was held up by three masked men, who threatened to blow out her brains unless she handed over her purse.

“Blow away!” Annie retorted.  “I’d as soon be without brains as without money!”  Impressed by the nerve of the schoolmarm, the bandits relieved the other passengers of their valuables but left her alone.

The restless widow roamed the country before winding up in New York City, where she switched careers.  As a footloose dance instructor, she wandered from town to town throughout the South and West never staying any place very long.

Annie was a gutsy survivor, at least according to the autobiography written after her turn-of-the-century adventure.  She claimed to have cheated death in “three ocean storms” and “three serious fires” as well as the earthquake that gave Charleston, South Carolina a good shaking in 1887.

Annie’s closest call came five years later in Chattanooga, when a hotel went up in flames in the middle of the night.  The blaze burned everything but the clothes on her back, forcing her at 54 to start over from scratch.

For a dance instructor, who had lost her looks, that was easier said than done.  There were other occupations open to women her age, but Annie’s stubborn pride would not let her stoop to scrubbing floors.  “I didn’t want to lower my social standard,” she explained in retrospect, “for I have always associated with the best class of people, the cultivated and the refined.”

That was why Annie wound up destitute and despondent in a dingy boardinghouse in July 1901.  While reading a newspaper account of the huge crowds at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and a nearby natural wonder, an audacious idea came to her “in a flash.”

Annie would make history and hopefully a lot of money by going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.  The fact that she would be the first did not faze her one bit.

Annie designed the container and picked the pieces of thick oak a cooper fashioned into a barrel.  The finished product was four and a half feet high and weighed 160 pounds.

When a local reporter got wind of the perilous plan, he asked Annie whether the spectacular stunt was really a suicide in disguise.  It was a fair question since as many as a thousand poor souls had deliberately ended their lives at Niagara Falls.

“I am too good an Episcopalian!” was Annie’s angry answer.  “My people were Christian people and I was brought up in affluence and properly educated.”

The carnival promoter Annie hired as her manager held a press conference at the Falls on Oct. 11.  Under strict orders not to disclose his employer’s actual age or motive, he told the newshounds she was a 42-year-old world traveler risking her neck for the fun of it.

The reporters may have snickered when they first laid eyes on Annie two days later, but most went along with the gag.  “I do not wish to be classified with the women who are seeking notoriety.  I am not of the common daredevil sort.”

After two postponements, Annie slipped into the “Queen of the Mist,” the name given the barrel for the occasion, on Oct. 24, 1901.  She buckled herself into a special harness and grabbed two leather straps, as the water-tight lid was hammered into place.

The barrel bobbed like a crazy cork on the half-mile ride through the Whirlpool Rapids.  The roar of the Falls, which sounded “like continuous thunder,” was the signal for Annie to put a small pillow under her knees and hold on for dear life.

The “Queen of the Mist” dropped 170 feet and vanished from sight in the violent turbulence.  A minute later, it broke the surface, soared 15 feet into the air and settled in a tranquil pool a few feet from shore.

Spectators feared the worst as Annie was pulled from the barrel.  But to everyone’s amazement, she was alive and unhurt except for a superficial cut on her head and assorted bumps and bruises.

For 20 long and lonely years, Annie Edson Taylor lived on the streets of Niagara Falls, New York selling souvenirs and her autobiography to tourists.  Two months before her death in the county poorhouse, she said, “I’ve done what no other woman in the world had nerve to do only to become a pauper.”

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