The many daredevils who have challenged mighty Niagara Falls in barrels or other contraptions have been mentioned in print literally countless times with one notable exception: Maud Willard.
She was an entertainer performing in a Buffalo theater when the fateful day, Sept. 7, 1901, brought her to the Niagara River. She was a friend of daredevil Carlisle Graham. He did not challenge the falls, but went through the slightly less dangerous whirlpool in the lower rapids.
Graham successfully shot the rapids in a barrel and had repeated the trip four times. When his friend Maud was in Buffalo, a new twist to the stunt came to him. He would put on a two-for-one show with Maud shooting the rapids in a barrel and he swimming behind her.
Shortly before 4 p.m. that day, Maud entered her barrel with her pet terrier at the Maid of the Mist landing. The barrel was then towed to mid-river and set free. She began the perilous trip down the treacherous stretch of white water with waves as big as houses.
She was whisked under the Whirlpool Rapids bridge and reached the whirlpool in five minutes. Graham took a position just below the whirlpool and put on a life jacket and neck ring. He planned to wait until the barrel was propelled out of the whirlpool, then swim behind it down to Lewiston.
But fortune did not smile on them that day. The barrel became trapped in the whirlpool, going round and round, but not being tossed back into the current. Graham figured the barrel would eventually be tossed out, so he decided to swim to Lewiston alone.
He made it to Lewiston without any trouble. He walked back to the whirlpool and was shocked to see that the barrel was still trapped there in the raging whirlpool. He thought it would be easier to retrieve the barrel from the Canadian side, so he hurried across the bridge.
Graham gallantly tried to swim out to the barrel, but the raging water was too much for him. He could not get close enough to snare the trapped barrel. Others came to help, but it was several hours before they managed to snag the barrel and pull it ashore.
When they open opened the barrel, a glimmer of hope emerged, because the dog was still alive. Unfortunately, Maud had suffocated to death.
Her friends arrived about 2 a.m. to bring the body up to the top of the gorge. They had either been celebrating in anticipation of a successful stunt or trying to drown their grief in booze.
A Toronto Globe reporter wrote about the recovery:
"They half carried, half dragged the body of the woman up by her feet and hair. Some were carrying burning embers and torches to light their way. Others were falling off the rugged pathways in their drunken stupor as they climbed up the narrow pathway. The worst kind of blasphemy resounded through the glen at the pool and, with flying embers before the high wind, presented a weird sight not unlike Dante's Inferno"
A month later, an undeterred Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to successfully go over the falls in a barrel.
Cross-border Visits -- A U.S. resident from Oneida, N.Y., one Pierrepont Noyes, frequently visited both sides of the falls in 1885. In his autobiography, he tells of a volatile religious camp meeting at the Wesley Park subdivision development in Niagara Falls, Ont. He attended a holy-roller meeting and described it thus:
"Those camp meetings were of the old=fashioned kind. The main service was held in a great barn-like auditorium surrounded by dense woods. The presiding cleric preached hell and damnation in no half-hearted way. When he had worked up the emotions of the congregation to a point where he thought a sufficient number was ripe for religious ecstasies, he called on all who wished to be saved to come down in front. One after another rose and went to the sawdust area. There they were stimulated further until they got the power. Men, women and even children danced and sang and shouted. The penitents would grovel in the sawdust for a time, then suddenly spring to their feet and emit terrifying yells. This might happen several times, paroxysms growing more violent with each demonstration. Finally, the frenzied contortionists passed out entirely, and the success of the meeting seemed measured by the number of human beings who, at the end, lay unconscious in the sawdust."
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