1867·United States
The Flag That Would Not Come Down
At the 1867 transfer ceremony in Sitka, the Russian flag stuck in its ropes; two eyewitness accounts record an awkward interruption to a carefully arranged exchange.
The barrel is painted with a title: Queen of the Mist. In a Bain News Service portrait, Annie Edson Taylor stands beside it with one hand raised toward a cat sitting on top. Dress, hat, barrel and lettering make a composed picture of an enterprise whose central event was considerably less orderly.
On 24 October 1901, Taylor went over Horseshoe Falls in a barrel and survived. It was her sixty-third birthday. The American schoolteacher and widow had set out to do something more practical than collect an extraordinary birthday memory. She hoped that public attention would provide money for her later years.
The equipment was an oak barrel with cushioning inside. Taylor was carried over the falls and retrieved alive. She was then helped ashore, with a cut to her head. The event made her the first recorded person to survive a journey over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
The photographs that remain give the story several different surfaces. One shows Taylor with a name painted onto a barrel. A stereograph shows men reaching toward her as she crosses a plank near the water. The posed portraits and the shore scene belong to the record, but none is an image of a woman inside a barrel passing over the brink.
The financial plan was less successful than the physical one. There were earnings from appearances, but they did not provide the security she had sought. Taylor’s later work remained tied to the tourist trade around the falls. A feat that could secure a place in the history of Niagara did not secure a comfortable livelihood.
That mismatch gives the familiar stunt its harder edge. The barrel was both equipment for a dangerous journey and an object around which to build a public identity. The lettering promised an attraction. It could not promise a dependable income.
Taylor’s survival is the fact that fixes the date in the calendar. Her reason for attempting it makes the story less easily contained. She solved the immediate problem of coming out alive. The longer problem, how to live afterward, remained.
