At 63, a broke schoolteacher rode a barrel over Niagara Falls on her birthday, survived with a scratch, and spent the rest of her life regretting it.
On October 24, 1901, her 63rd birthday, schoolteacher Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She went over the Horseshoe Falls in a custom oak-and-iron barrel padded with a mattress and emerged with only a small gash on her head.
She did it for money. By 1900 she had been burned out of her home and lost invested savings after years of jobs as a teacher, dance instructor, and music teacher. She shaved decades off her age, telling the census she was born in 1860, and bet that being the first over the falls would make her rich.
Before her attempt, a domestic cat was sent over the Horseshoe Falls in the barrel as a test. Rumors said it died, but it survived with a bleeding head and later posed with Taylor for photographs.
Friends compressed the air inside the barrel using a bicycle tire pump and corked the hole. Taylor carried a heart-shaped lucky pillow, was set adrift near the American shore south of Goat Island, and went over in less than twenty minutes. Fellow daredevil Carlisle Graham helped her out.
Afterward she warned others off: "If it was with my dying breath, I would caution anyone against attempting the feat... I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces than make another trip over the Fall."
Fame did not turn into fortune. Her manager Frank Russell ran off with her barrel, she spent much of her savings on detectives to find it, and it was stolen again after it turned up in Chicago. She ended up posing for photos with tourists at a souvenir stand.
Taylor died in 1921 at age 82, penniless, and public donations paid for her funeral. She is buried in "Stunter's Rest" at Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls, next to Carlisle Graham.