Victorville is a Southern California city located in what is known locally as the high desert, that part of the Mojave above 2000 feet.

Other than its desert life style, Victorville’s biggest attraction was the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum where, until 2003, Roy Rogers’ late horse, Trigger, was stuffed, mounted, and on display. Visitors paid good money to see him.

Flash back through the decades to 1921, when a Michigan daredevil, the first person to successfully ride over Niagara Falls in a barrel—and by successful I mean lived to tell about it—was laid to rest in a donated plot in an upstate New York cemetery.

Trigger, whose greatest accomplishment was parading in front of a camera with Roy Rogers on his back, was worth $8 a visit. Yet in the same country, a true American daredevil couldn’t make a tiny fraction of that speaking about can-do spirit and facing one’s fears.

Could the reason be that Trigger was a horse while the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel was a woman?

Annie Edson Taylor wasn’t your average daredevil when she went over Niagara’s Horseshoe Falls in 1901. She was a widow who feared taking the plunge into poverty more than she feared a plunge into rocks and rapids. Touring and speaking about such a great adventure, Taylor reasoned, would surely provide a source of income well into her golden years.

That might have been the case except for one thing. Taylor was already in her golden years.

Stepping onto a stage and standing next to the barrel she designed and then rode into fame and potential fortune, Taylor didn’t fit anyone’s image of a 43-year-old great American daredevil. Instead, she looked more like a frumpy, 63-year-old spinster who spent too much time in charm school.

It wasn’t from a lack of fashion sense.

Taylor went over the falls a shortly after her 63rd birthday. But it wasn’t the fall that took 20 years off her life, it was Taylor, herself. She decided that no one would come to see a daredevil who was a few years short of collecting Social Security—had there been Social Security—so while she survived the fall, those 20 years did not.

Her charm-school look came from, that’s right, charm school. But she wasn’t a student. She was the owner. Now, the business that had become her life was falling from grace, and she was determined not to go over the edge with it. Unfortunately, when The Queen of the Falls (as she’d become known) stepped on stage and took her place next to the barrel, it was the latter that attracted the most attention.

As audiences, and dollars, dwindled, there was increased interest in the cask that could have easily been her casket.

Taylor had hired Frank Russell to manage her tour and hustle up audiences. Russell smelled money, but when the scent faded he bailed—and took the barrel with him.

Fortunately, Taylor recovered the barrel in time to hire her second manager, Billy Banks. Banks smelled money, but when the scent faded he, too, bailed—this time with both the barrel and Maggie Kaplan, a winsome lass he’d hired to play Annie Taylor in hopes of drawing larger crowds.

Taylor never saw Banks, the babe, or the barrel, again.

That must have hit her harder than her sudden stop at the bottom of Horseshoe Falls. Taylor designed that barrel and oversaw its construction in her home town of Bay City, Michigan. She choose its planks of wood, designed the harness that held her in place, and built the cushioning system—which consisted of as many cushions as she could stuff under, around, and over her before the barrel’s lid was nailed shut.

After facing her second-greatest fear, a drop into nowhere, Taylor ended her life exactly as her first-greatest fear predicted. She lived her final days on display in a park next to the Niagara River, scrounging whatever money she could by selling postcards and pamphlets commemorating her first and last great ride some 20 years before.

Annie Edson Taylor was buried on May 5, 1921 in a plot donated by the Oakwood Cemetery, near the site of the great natural wonder that was supposed to save her from a pauper’s grave. It was an indication of how far she’d fallen.

But not in the way she planned.