Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper

In the fall of 1829, Sam Patch jumped at Niagara Falls as part of off-season entertainment organized by local hotel owners. Patch’s jump was the culmination of a day of spectacles including controlled explosions on the cliffs and a pirate ship being driven off of the falls. The entertainment drew a large crowd of working-class locals, who in turn attracted vendors and a variety of sideshows.

Colonel William Leete Stone, editor and co-owner of the New York Commercial Advertiser, was in Niagara at the time and wrote extensively about the entertainment. He had come to Niagara to experience the natural beauty and sheer scale of the falls. Like many upper-class, well-connected men of his time, Stone valued good taste: He read the best books, saw the most popular plays, followed English fashions, and had impeccable manners. His sense of taste and propriety—learned from his aristocratic family and wealthy peers—distinguished him from everyday Americans. In the 1820s, good taste also included an appreciation of beauty in the natural world, and scenic tourism (travel to see beautiful landscapes) became a popular pastime. The most fashionable spot for scenic tourism was Niagara Falls, which was accessible from New York via a journey on the newly finished Erie Canal.

Stone saw his journey to Niagara as an important education in aesthetics, the pursuit and appreciation of beauty in all forms. His journals reveal a specific interest in finding sublimity in nature. In the 19th century, Edmund Burke’s concept of sublime beauty offered new language for describing the combination of beauty and terror that characterizes natural phenomena like waterfalls. Stone’s description of the journey along the Erie Canal suggests that he was familiar with the concept of the sublime, that he took the journey to experience it, and that he recorded his memories in order to share them with others.

Johnson notes that the hotels and resorts surrounding Niagara Falls were developed in the early 19th century specifically to cater to elite tourists like Stone and his wife. These developers added landscaping, paved paths, stable walkways, bridges, and ferryboats that made the once-deadly falls easily accessible to upper-class tourists from Manhattan. The Stones stayed in a luxury hotel owned by William Forsyth, who boasted of the view of the falls from the rooftop lounge.

When Stone arrived, he went directly to bed without observing the view of the falls from his room. Knowing from his research that the most aesthetically pleasing and sublime views of Niagara were from eye level or below, Stone waited until the following morning to experience the falls. In his journal, Stone wrote that the sight of Niagara Falls was sublime enough to strike terror and joy in the hearts of anyone capable of perceiving beauty. His description of the scene echoes contemporary accounts of Niagara Falls, suggesting that he was intentionally adding to an existing tradition of natural appreciation popular among elite gentlemen of his time.

After recording his impressions of the falls, Stone transitioned from aesthetic tourist to newspaper reporter. Although Stone was deeply moved by the natural spectacle at Niagara Falls, he had a very different response to the scheduled entertainment, especially Sam Patch. Like most New York newspapers at the time, Stone’s Commercial Advertiser was aimed at upper-class men who could afford to purchase subscriptions. In the 19th century, many of these men were growing resentful of the increasing power of ordinary citizens, reflected most clearly in the push for universal suffrage, which promised voting rights to all white men over the age of 21. For Stone and other elite New Yorkers, men like Sam Patch represented the unruly character of the working class and threatened their social, political, and economic control.

While Stone’s journals are written in the self-consciously cultured tone of an elite gentleman, his report on Sam Patch is written in the invented voice of Hiram Doolittle Jr., an uneducated satirical character that would have been familiar to Stone’s readers. In 19th-century American literature and theater, the name Doolittle was attached to several characters united by their ignorance, bad business sense, and jealous resentment of the social and financial elites like Stone. Writing in Doolittle’s voice, Stone satirizes Sam Patch and the working-class people who traveled to Niagara to watch him as uneducated rustics unable to appreciate the aesthetics or sublimity of the falls.

In 1829, Niagara Falls was an expensive destination for elite tourists seeking to experience the sublime in nature. For years previously, however, working-class people living in the area experienced the falls in a very different way. During the War of 1812, the Niagara region was the site of intense fighting between British and American forces seeking to secure their borders. Remnants of these battles were visible for decades to come, and the falls held the memory of the war for many people. Because amateur fishers, hunters, and boaters sometimes died on the falls, locals also understood from experience the very real danger they represented. For these spectators, Sam Patch’s daring jumps were entertaining; they continued the tradition of danger that existed in the falls.

Shortly after the jump observed by Colonel Stone, Sam Patch advertised a second jump at Niagara. Advertisements for this jump show that Patch had learned how to be a true entertainer. On the way to Niagara, he jumped from the top of a steamer carrying elite tourists to the falls. At Niagara, he attached a black scarf to his all-white uniform to attract attention and earned nearly $75, an enormous sum for a working-class man at the time. Although interviews reveal that he was drinking heavily in Niagara, populist journalists admired Patch, describing him as a true athlete and artisan, and a man of the people.