And That’s Not All …
ANNIE EDSON TAYLOR MAY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST person to shoot Niagara Falls in a barrel, but she wasn’t the first stunter on the river. That honor goes to Sam Patch of Passaic Falls, New Jersey. On October 7 and 17, 1829, Patch made leaps of 85 and 130 feet into the Niagara River at the base of Horseshoe Falls from a platform of tree limbs lashed together. He died later that year—on Friday, November 13—doing a high dive into the Genesee River at Rochester, New York.
Stunting didn’t take off at Niagara until 1859. In that year Charles Blondin of France (real name: Jean-François Gravelet), the greatest of all Niagara Falls daredevils and the only one to get rich, inaugurated the era of the funambulists, or tightrope walkers. Blondin strung a 1,300-foot manila rope across the Niagara Gorge between the United States and Canada and gave numerous performances before crowds of up to 100,000 people. He was as much at home on the wire as on the ground: he cooked, rode a bicycle, did somersaults, pushed a wheelbarrow, and walked with baskets on his feet, by day and by night, sometimes blindfolded. His greatest performance came on September 15, 1860, before the nineteen-year-old Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), when he carried his manager, Harry Colcord, across on his back.
A rival, Signor Enrico Farini (actually William Leonard Hunt of Port Hope, Ontario), appeared in 1860 and repeated most of Blondin’s feats. Once he dressed as an Irish washerwoman and did laundry in a patented machine he’d been hired to promote while balanced above the gorge, then hung it on the cable to dry. Farini’s first stunt was nearly his last. He climbed down from his rope to a waiting boat, a distance of about 125 feet, and then back up again. By the time he reached the top, he was nearly exhausted, and only through sheer willpower did he manage to get back on the cable and make it safely to shore again. In the following decades many funambulists performed over the gorge, including one woman, Marina Spelterini—unlike Farini, a genuine Italian. In 1873 a funambulist named Henry Bellini attached a rubber cord to his wire and took what may have been history’s first bungee jump.
Until the early part of this century, railroads often sent excursion trains to Niagara Falls to witness the stunters. Tightrope walking continued until 1910, when it became much harder to get a permit, but no later funambulist attracted the attention that Blondin and Farini had. (An attempt to revive the practice in the 1960s and 1970s came to naught when permission to string a cable across the river could not be obtained.) Meanwhile, in the gorge below, a new breed of stunters was developing: the Whirlpool Rapids shooters. Starting in 1883, men and women have been challenging what is generally considered the roughest and most dangerous water in eastern North America. They have swum and used wooden and steel barrels, boats, rafts, kayaks, and canoes. Carlisle D. Graham became the first to successfully shoot the Whirlpool Rapids in a wooden barrel on July 11, 1886. He eventually shot the rapids five times and was involved in the rescue of Annie Edson Taylor after her plunge in 1901. In the fall of 1866 a young man named George Hazlett took his girlfriend, Sadie Allen, through the rapids in a double barrel.
Some of those who went over Niagara Falls in barrels have also successfully shot the rapids; they include Bobby Leach, Red Hill, Jr., Karel Soucek, and Dave Munday. On one memorable day, October 11, 1987, eight people shot the rapids within an hour or two. First Munday went through in a barrel and sustained minor injuries; he later was fined for stunting. Six people then went through legally in kayaks; the last, also legal, was a canoeist named Nolan Whitesell. One of the kayakers called Whitesell “probably the best open boater in the world.” His canoe, which he built himself, had two buoyancy chambers; it flipped over once during the run. No one has shot the Whirlpool Rapids since.
