Oh, it’s been a few months. Life has been busy, and there was that whole thing where AI bots swamped my sites and caused me to have to do a lot of technical work, which reduced my enthusiasm generally. But I’m getting back to it, and wanted to pick up with a story that caught my interest a few months back when I was working on the story of the Cataract House – the story of the times that Bobby Leach went over Cohoes Falls in a barrel.
Cohoes Falls and Niagara Falls could hardly be more different, but they do have some things in common beyond a river dropping from a fair height. They both had a very well known hotel known as The Cataract House. And Bobby Leach went over both of them in a barrel.
It would appear that the concept of going over a waterfall in a barrel, at least in the U.S., originated from P.T. Barnum, going back to 1856 when he announced he would go over Niagara Falls in a gutta-percha ball 30 feet in diameter…