Proletarian Daredevil

Paul E. Johnson.Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. xiii + 240 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $23.00 (cloth); $13.00 (paper).

On October 20, 2003, a middle-aged man named Kirk R. Jones drifted feet first over Niagara Falls wearing a parka and little else. Unemployed since his parents closed the family automotive business the summer before, he was depressed, aimless, and increasingly obsessed with the deadly challenge of surviving a plunge over the towering 173-foot falls. Emerging from the churning boil of rock and rapids below with amazingly few injuries, Jones became the first known adult to survive the descent unshielded by any kind of protection. Although he faced a stiff fine and strict orders from Canadian authorities to stay away from the Falls and surrounding parklands, he characterized his death-defying experience as a rebirth of sorts: "I left every problem I had at the bottom of that gorge that day." Like countless daredevils, oddities, athletes, and misfits before him, Jones has since "run away" from mainstream society and has joined a circus.¹

Prompted by economic and emotional uncertainty, Jones's decision to descend the waterfall echoes the story of an earlier waterfall thrill seeker named Sam Patch, a Jacksonian-era mule spinner-turned-jumper whose chilling exploits earned him fame and labor autonomy in an increasingly proletarian new market economy. Yet Patch, unlike Jones, did not simply close his eyes and slide over the brink: instead, he leaped artfully from cliffs, islands, and platforms—sometimes from heights as high as 120 feet. His exacting technique and skill were born out of years of labor and leisure in waterfall mill towns. Audiences of six to twelve thousand (equaling or exceeding the populations of the towns where Patch worked and lived) clamored to see his leaps. After his death in 1829, Patch entered the American lexicon as a mild cuss word ("What the Sam Patch?!"), a fixture in popular culture as the subject of plays, children's books, and as the name of a cigar brand and President Andrew Jackson's favorite horse. But Sam Patch represents far more than an antebellum antecedent to the contemporary world of extreme sports. Indeed, the historian Paul E. Johnson argues that the life of this thrill-seeker embodies key cultural currents of the Jacksonian age. In the same gemlike fashion that he analyzed the social and cultural milieu of the burned-over district of Rochester, New York, in A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (1978), Johnson expertly resurrects the brief life of this remarkable daredevil using Patch as a portal into the volatile world of labor, class formation, social mobility, celebrity, and the fractious growth of two-party politics during the nineteenth century.

Reconstructing Patch's life is a tricky business, as Johnson readily admits. In fact, Johnson is reticent to call his treatment of Patch a biography at all, instead characterizing his analysis as a "series of stories" about a life whose trajectory was episodic rather than linear (p. ix). Sam Patch kept no diary; he was born into a poor laboring family of declining means; he never married and had no children; he owned no property, nor did he write a will. For almost all but two years of his short, twenty-nine-year life, Patch worked anonymously in the mills of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Paterson, New Jersey. Consequently, the primary sources documenting the lives of Patch and his predecessors are similar to those of any other subaltern: vital statistics, tax lists, church rolls, wills, deeds, and court records (p. x). But from 1827-1829, Patch was a famous waterfall leaper. Consequently, his historical record changed—newspapers and handbills chronicled a new (albeit brief) public life (p. x).

Given the overall limitations of the extant primary sources, Patch himself remains a relatively remote subject. Johnson's account is peppered with speculation regarding Patch's drunkenness, his moody behavior, and his apparent death...