Niagara Daredevil

Blue image on an oak-syle barrel going over a waterfall with blue text on a yellow background.

This is a light-hearted homage to a schoolteacher from Michigan, Mrs. Annie Edson Taylor, whose claim to fame had been her successful attempt to survive a plunge over Horseshoe Fall while in a barrel. She not only survived, but she climbed out without a single broken bone on that fateful day on October 21st, 1901. Although it's hard to imagine her motivation, Taylor's description of those fateful moments underscored the exhilaration and triumph her experience: "The awful rolling knocked my head first on the front of the barrel and then on the back. I expected to be killed at any moment, but even at that I was not sorry that I was where I was."

Following her death-defying stunt, Taylor attempted to make the most of her sudden celebrity. Years later, however, after a litany of appearances for tourists and other passerby—selling anything and everything with her name—Taylor found herself penniless, despondent, and blind. She was taken to the Niagara County Infirmary in March 1921, and, unfortunately, died several weeks later.