In Sam Patch, The Famous Jumper, Paul E. Johnson traces the life and career of Sam Patch as insight into the culture of Jacksonian America. Discussing Patch’s two most famous jumps at Niagara and Genesee Falls, Johnson argues, “These two waterfalls… were places at which (and about which) the more comfortable and enterprising Americans invented, acted out, and publicized lessons about material progress and spiritual uplift that they would carry through the century” (pgs. xi-xii).

Johnson links Sam’s first publicized jump at Passaic Falls with the changing forces of industrialization and shifting class consciousness. He writes that Patch’s jump was “a grand and eccentric gesture thrown into contemporary conversations about nature and economic development, class and masculinity, and the proper uses of waterfalls” (p. 43). Johnson continues, “When Sam Patch said that leaping waterfalls was an art, he tied his jumps to familiar notions of Anglo-American manhood. In Patch’s world a man’s art was his identity-defining skill” (pg. 53). Turning to Niagara Falls, Johnson discusses how the upper classes used visits to the falls to circumscribe ways of appreciating aesthetic beauty, particularly natural wonders (pg. 80). Patch added greater showmanship, incorporating clothing and symbols that reflected his tradesman background. Johnson concludes of his Niagara leap, “The immense power and the old vertical horrors of Niagara provided the backdrop. The skill, daredevil courage, and plucky nonchalance (with its touch of the morose and suicidal) of Sam Patch provided the action” (pg. 123).

The Genesee Falls at Rochester further dramatized the clash between natural wonder and industrializing development in the Jacksonian Republic. Despite the grand designs of the wealthy, a thriving working class established communities on both sides of the river. Johnson writes of Patch’s time in the Flour City, “Insofar as Sam Patch had a sponsor in Rochester, it was the town’s sporting crowd. More particularly, it was the loose fraternity of men who drank alcohol” (pg. 134). He continues, “A walk through Rochester was a play of story and memory that constituted another city – a city that had become a battleground between the respectables and the people who befriended Sam Patch” (pg. 142). The very place of Sam’s leap dramatized this clash. Johnson writes, “From where Sam’s audience stood, with Frankfort and Dublin at their backs, with the cracked limestone shelves on which the city stood clearly visible, and with the giddy disorder of the chasm at their feet, it was the landscape of progress that seemed somehow thoughtless and dangerously out of place” (pg. 153).

Following Sam Patch’s death, he transformed into a celebrity and figure out of folklore onto whom various writers projected their ideas of the American spirit. Johnson concludes, “Sam Patch won a new kind of fame. He was born into obscurity, and he did nothing that classicists considered worthy of renown. Yet he wanted to be famous and he succeeded: he made a name that everyone knew, deeds that everyone had heard of, virtues and peculiarities that were the stuff of boyhood fantasies and barroom jokes” (pg. 164). Johnson’s account of Patch’s life provides unique insight into the Jacksonian period, while his larger conclusions about class, gender, and celebrity speak to the nature of American mass culture in the twenty-first century, helping to shed light on its early origins in a readable and authoritative volume that describes events modern readers would recognize from their own diet of popular culture. ( )

Story of the daredevil jumper who like them all took one leap too many.

Paul Johnson was one of my professors in college. At the time, he'd just written A Shopkeeper's Millenium, but since, he's done more great work, culminating in this beautifully written social history of a waterfall-jumping mill worker from Pawtucket, RI.