October twenty fourth, nineteen oh one, a little over a mile above Niagara Falls. A woman in a dress climbing into a barrel, not a metaphorical barrel, an actual oak barrel, the kind you'd put pickles in if pickles were five feet tall. She's a retired school teacher, she's a widow, and today is her sixty third birthday. She tucks a little heart shaped pillow in beside her for luck. Her helpers put on the lid, they screw it down, and then, so she can breathe, they pump air into the barrel with a bicycle pump. A bicycle pump. Nobody had ever gone over Niagara Falls and lived, and she knew that. Everybody watching knew that. Some of the men she asked for help already said no. As far as they were concerned, this was a suicide with extra steps. So why is a 63-year-old school teacher about to throw herself off the most famous waterfall on Earth? To understand that, we have to go back, way back, about 12,000 years back, because before this was Annie's story, it was the falls. Hi, welcome to That Wasn't the Plan. I'm your host, Emily White. And before we resume our story today, I just wanted to say thank you to all of our listeners and viewers out there for tuning into the little podcast that could. You being here every week makes life that much more bearable these days. I have been going through some difficult times myself, and this podcast has been going through difficult times, but we're here together to try and give you some pivot stories, some unplanned events in people's lives throughout history with our guests and these fun little short stories that I'm bringing you right now so that you don't feel less alone and so that you're able to go out and share your story with somebody else because life is never what we planned and we have to move through those difficult times. And I need to tell you all that some days when I'm having a tough day, signing on and seeing the downloads, your comments, getting some emails really makes my day. And that to me is enough to keep going, knowing that you all are out there getting something out of this, enjoying this, enough to keep tuning in every week. So we are restructuring the podcast a little bit and we'd love your feedback. So don't be shy. Please email us at that wasn't the planpod at gmail.com. You can go to our website at that wasn't the plan.com. You can reach out into the comments section here wherever you're listening or viewing. It's a safe place. Okay, now back to the story. Where were we? The falls. Let's start with the rock, because the rock is old, like really, really old. More than 400 million years ago. The land under Niagara wasn't land. It was the bottom of a warm, shallow sea. Tiny shells and sea creatures died, settled, and got squished layer on layer for millions of years until they became stone. So the cliff Annie is about to go over used to be a seafloor. Just so we're clear on what kind of days she's having. Fast forward a few hundred million years, ice ages come and go, glaciers a mile thick grind across North America like a slow cold bulldozer. Then about 12,000 years ago, the ice starts to melt. All that meltwater fills up the Great Lakes, Superior, Michigan, and Huron drain into Lake Erie. Erie has to empty somewhere, so it pours north toward Lake Ontario down a river, the Niagara River. And on the way, that river hits a cliff, the Niagara Escarpment, and the water goes over the edge. Congratulations, you're now a waterfall. The name, it is said to come from the Iroquois word on Cuillahara. Let me try that again. On Cuyara, I would love for someone who speaks Iroquois to write us in and give us a pronunciation of that word. But basically, it means the strait, which is a very calm name for something that would later become a honeymoon destination, a power plant, and a place where people kept trying to die in for publicity. But here's the thing, nobody tells you about the waterfalls. They don't stay put. This one has been on the move since the day it was born. So hold on to that. Annie Edson was born October 24th, 1838, in Auburn, New York, a town on the shore of Awasco Lake, one of the finger lakes, which were carved out by the same ice age that made Niagara. Same glaciers, different kind of trouble. She's one of eight kids. Her dad, Merrick Edson, owns a flour mill, and the family is comfortable, not rich, rich, but just comfortable. And then when Annie is 12, her father dies, he leaves enough money for the family to get by, and Annie does what smart, restless girls did back then. She goes to school and trains to become a teacher. Along the way, she meets a man named David Taylor. They marry, they have a baby boy. And this is where the ground starts to give way under her, just like it does the waterfall. Niagara is basically a layer cake. On top is a really hard rock called Lockport Dolomite. Underneath are softer layers, like shale, the crumbly stuff. The water roars over a hard top layer, slams into the bottom, and churns. That churning chews away at the soft rock underneath, year after year after year, until the hard top layer is just hanging there over nothing, like a diving board, and then crack, a chunk breaks off and falls into the river. And now the edge of the falls is a little further upstream than it used to be. Historically, the horseshoe falls has backed up about a meter a year. That's three feet every year for 12,000 years, which means the falls didn't start where they are now. They started way downstream and they've been slowly walking backward up the river ever since, carving out the whole Niagara Gorge as they go. Niagara Falls technically is in retreat and it's been in retreat for 12,000 years. Very relatable. And the scary part about erosion, you never see it happening, you only see the collapse. I feel that these days, my God. So Annie's baby boy dies in infancy, but then her husband, David, dies in the Civil War. She's young and she's alone, and the life she planned is gone before it really even started. So she does the only thing she can. She works for decades. Annie Taylor moves from town to town, teaching school and giving dance lessons. She lives in Texas, in New York, in the south, in Michigan. At one point, she tries Mexico City for work, but it doesn't pan out. She lands in Bay City, Michigan, wanting to teach dance. There's no dance school, so she opens one. That's who she is. If there's no door, she builds one. That's very relatable to me. I'm very tenacious like that. But by 1900, the soft layers are giving out. She's lost her home in a fire, she's lost her savings, money she'd invested with, of all people, a clergyman. There's no Social Security at the time, no pension, no safety net. For a single woman in her 60s, the end of the road has a name. It's called the Poor House. And she's getting closer to it every year, like the edge that keeps moving. And here's where it starts. In 1899, in Bay City, Annie hears a man, a local tavern owner, bragging that he once went over Niagara Falls in a padded rubber suit. That claim was never proven. He was most likely just a guy in a bar, but Annie hears it and she does the math. Because if a man in a rubber suit can do it, what could a school teacher do with a really good barrel? So while Annie's life has been eroding, the falls have been getting a new job. By 1901, people have figured out that all the falling water can make electricity and lots of it. And that summer, 25 miles away in Buffalo, the Pan American Exposition is open, a giant world's fair, more than 8 million people visit, and at night the whole thing lights up, powered by electricity made at Niagara Falls. The falls are a tourist attraction, a power plant, and a celebrity. Everybody wants a piece of them. Then on September 6th, 1901, at the same fair, President William McKinley is shaking hands in a receiving line. A man walks up with a revolver hidden under a handkerchief and shoots him twice. McKinley dies eight days later. So the whole region is rattled. Crowds, headlines, chaos. And six weeks later, into all of that walks a 63-year-old school teacher with a plan. And here's Annie's thinking in her own words. If she could do something no one else in the world had ever done, she could make money honestly and quickly. The something, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, survive, then go on a lecture tour and tell everybody about it. Fame, money, never worry about the poor house again. And she knew exactly what she was signing up for. She wrote, quote, It would be fame and fortune or certain death. She was not a casual woman. She told a newspaper she spent three months studying the problem. She designs her own barrel and has it built by a cooperage in Michigan. Oak, iron hoops, about four and a half feet tall, 160 pounds. Inside, cushions, a harness to hold her in place, and weight at the bottoms so it would land feet first instead of head first. She hires a promoter, a man named Frank Russell, and he puts the barrel in a store window and gives it a name, the Queen of the Mist. And then Frank Russell tells the press who will be writing in it. He describes her as quote, a widow forty-two years old, intelligent and venturesome. She was 62. Annie Taylor had a barrel, a promoter, and a brand new age. What she doesn't have is proof yet that the barrel works. The Niagara Falls as a waterfall is about 12,000 years old. The rock it's falling over is more than 400 million years old. And Annie Taylor is 62, standing next to both of them, telling reporters she's 42. Everybody on this riverbank is lying about their age. Annie's just the only one doing it on purpose. Now, Niagara isn't just one waterfall, it is three. There's Bridal Vale, the little one. There's the American Falls, about 70 feet of straight drop onto a big pile of rocks at the bottom, hard pass. And then there's Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side, about 170 feet tall and around 2,600 feet wide. And roughly 90% of the river goes over that one. At a high flow, more than 6 million cubic feet of water goes over Niagara every minute. I can't even make that comparison. It's just a lot of water. So you'd think a sane person would pick the small one. But a boatman told Annie that horseshoe was where the water was deepest. Deep water means a softer landing. Rocks do not. So Annie picked the biggest, loudest, most powerful waterfall in North America on purpose for safety. Then she found a volunteer to test it first. Volunteer was her cat. Something I do not agree with. I need you to know that I have a cat, and I've thought about this a lot. I would never put her in harm's way. But some people don't feel that way about their animals. So this does piss me off. A few days before her attempt, the cat goes into the barrel over the horseshoe falls. One source says the cat's name was Niagara, which is either very sweet or very threatening. And the cat, Niagara survives with a little cut on its head but alive. And afterward, the cat poses for photos with Annie. A little furry stunt double. Okay, the barrel is tested. And on October 23rd, Annie is ready to go. But the water is too rough, the boatmen call it off. And Annie cries in front of the reporters because she's 62, broke, and has psyched herself up to go over the biggest waterfall in North America, and now she has to go home and do it all again tomorrow. One newspaper called the whole thing a deliberate commission of a suicide. So the next day, October 24th, is her 63rd birthday. They row her out to an island just about a mile above the falls. She climbs into the barrel with her little heart-shaped pillow, they screw on the lid, they pump in the air with a bicycle pump, they plug the hole with a cork, and they push her into the current. The current takes her through the rapids first, thousands of people line the banks. She hits the edge of Horseshoe Falls, Lockport Dolomite laid down on the floor of an ocean 400 million years ago. And the barrel tips over 170 feet. 90% of a river, one woman in a pickle barrel, and from the riverbank, there is no way to know if anyone is still alive inside of it. Rescuers reach it, they take the lid off, they look inside, and somebody yells, My God, she's alive. At the bottom, Annie later said she felt the barrel shoot back up out of the water, then it drifts and gets stuck in an eddy near the Canadian River. Her only visible injury is a gash on her head about three inches long. She said that she blacked out for a bit. The whole trip from launch to rescue took about 20 minutes. Annie Edson Taylor, 63 years old as of that morning, is the first person in history to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and live. And her first big review of the experience, I will never go over the falls again. She added that she, quote, would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon than do that again. Five stars would not recommend. Then the fame shows up. The headlines go national. The fortune does not. She makes about $200 appearing at the Pan American Exposition and about $200 more from store appearances in Michigan and Ohio. The big lecture tour never happens. Maybe people pictured a daredevil and got a 63-year-old school teacher instead. Whatever the reasons, the crowds didn't come. And then Frank Russell, the promoter, disappears with the barrel. Annie spends most of what money she has left on private detectives to find it. One account says a manager ended up touring with her barrel and a much younger woman introduced as the heroine of Niagara. So somebody else got to be Annie Taylor, just younger, with Annie's barrel. Annie had a plan to never be poor again. It worked for about 20 minutes. Here's something about the falls that most people don't know. They've stopped before. On March twenty ninth, eighteen forty eight, ice from Lake Erie jammed up the mouth of the Niagara River and choked it off. For less than thirty hours, the falls went nearly silent. Mill workers noticed first because their water wheels stopped turning. People walked out into the dry riverbed, they picked up old muskets and weapons, thought to date back to the War of 1812, and some folks, who were sure it was the end of the world, that churches held special services praying for the water to come back. It did, the wind changed and the ice broke. And in 1969, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers turned off the American Falls on purpose. They built a 600-foot dam out of about 28,000 tons of rock and dirt so geologists could study the cliff. From June to November, tourists walked a path that looked at a waterfall with no water in it. And today, between half and three-quarters of the Niagara River never goes over the falls at all. It's diverted through tunnels to make electricity. A 1950 treaty between the U.S. and Canada decides how much. And at night when the tourists go to bed, they turn the falls down by about half. Niagara Falls has a dimmer switch. All that power in the falls don't get to decide where most of their water goes. Which brings us back to Annie because she didn't get to decide where her story went either. Annie spends the next 20 years near the falls that made her famous. She sits beside a barrel at a souvenir stand on the American side, selling postcards with her little autobiography and charging tourists to take a photo with her. She tries the stock market. She tries to write a novel. She talks about going over the falls again. She works as a clairvoyant. She offers magnetic treatments. She does what she's always done. If there's no door, she builds one. But on february twenty third, nineteen twenty one, Annie Edson Taylor walks into the place she risked her life to avoid, the Niagara County Poor House in Lockport, New York. She's eighty two, and when they ask her her age at the door, she tells them she's fifty-seven. She never stopped. I love her for that. Annie dies on april twenty ninth, nineteen twenty one, penniless. Donations from the public pay for her funeral. She's buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls in a section that has come to be called Stunter's Rest, right next to her old friend Carlyle Graham, the daredevil who helped pull her out of the river that day. And the falls, they're still walking, slower now since much of the water gets diverted, but in a few thousand years they'll reach Grand Island and split for a while into a triple waterfall. And long after that, they'll keep heading south toward Lake Erie the way they've been going ever since the ice melted. Annie Taylor's plan was never to be poor again, and it didn't work. Her other plan, to do something no one else in the world had ever done, she nailed that one. On her birthday at 63, in a pickle barrel with a bicycle pump and a heart-shaped pillow. The falls keep moving, and so did she. Thank you so much for tuning into our little story today. I hope it resonated with you guys. Um, please do reach out to us. You can email us, find us on social media, go to our website. Please rate and review and subscribe. It means the world to us during some difficult times. Remember to do something kind for yourself and for others this week. Until we talk to you next week. Take care. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to That Wasn't the Plan. If you found it helpful or at least mildly entertaining, a quick rating review and a click on the subscribe button would be lovely. 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