Bobby Leach was not a man who feared death. A former Barnum and Bailey Circus performer, he once watched a stuntman die while attempting a 150-foot dive into a 5-foot pool — then successfully did the dive himself. He owned a restaurant near Niagara Falls, where he'd brag to customers that he could do anything Annie Taylor could do better.

Annie Taylor was the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1901. Leach became the second — and first man — on July 25, 1911, using a steel barrel of his own design. He survived, though it cost him six months in the hospital with two broken kneecaps and a fractured jaw.

Into his sixties, Leach kept pushing his luck. He tried multiple times to swim the whirlpool rapids below the falls, failing repeatedly and requiring rescue by l

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