hunck
Antediluvian
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2011
- Messages
- 9,428
- Location
- Hobbs End
But why?
Again, if you read the article it tells you:
In the days before death benefits, pensions and social security, an aging widow had to fend for herself, even one who was a trained, experienced professional. Self-sufficiency or destitution. Sink or swim.
That’s how it was for Annie Edson Taylor, a schoolteacher from Auburn, N.Y. Her only child died in infancy; her husband died in the Civil War. In the ensuing decades, she moved from place to place, teaching school, giving dancing lessons, Texas, New York City, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Michigan, working incessantly to stave off poverty. By 1901 she was 62 years old, her prospects for continued employment diminished by advancing age in a world with no safety net.
So she hit upon a desperate idea – go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. If she lived, she could make a good living with a lecture tour, addressing big crowds eager to hear her describe her impossible achievement. If she died, well, that was another way to avoid the poorhouse.
Alas
At first, Taylor made some cash off her spectacular exploit. She received $200 for appearing at the Pan Am and another $200 making store appearances in Michigan and Ohio with her cat and barrel. But no lecture tour ever materialized, and she soon went broke. Another manager absconded with the barrel and started touring it with a much younger woman masquerading as the Heroine of Niagara. Within a couple of years Taylor was a fixture outside a restaurant on the American side, sitting alongside a replica barrel, selling postcards and her autobiography to tourists making their way to the Falls.
Taylor scraped by for several more years, an elderly widow on her own. In 1921, at 82, she entered the Niagara County poorhouse at Lockport, where she died, penniless. She was buried in the daredevils section of Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls, her grave and tombstone paid for by friends and admirers.