How stern a moral may be drawn from the story of poor Sam Patch! Was the leaper of cataracts more mad or foolish than other men who throw away life, or misspend it in pursuit of empty fame, and seldom so triumphantly as he? –  Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835

The fad of jumping off or over things in nineteenth century America—counters, tabletops, fences—originated with Sam Patch’s leaps from heights into rivers, celebrated in poems, anecdotes, tall tales, and theatrical sketches. A spirited jump was “doing a Sam Patch.” 

Patch made three successful jumps over Niagara Falls into the Niagara River. A reporter for the Buffalo Republican described the second jump over the Falls as “the greatest feat of the kind ever effected by man. He may now challenge the universe for a competitor.” A Dayton, Ohio man weighing 360 pounds, attempted to jump over his bed in the middle of the night, landed on his sleeping wife, and killed her instantly. President Andrew Jackson named his favorite horse “Sam Patch.” A character in William Dean Howells’s Their Wedding Journey expresses dismay that his young wife had never heard of Sam Patch: “Isabel, your ignorance of all that an American woman should be proud of distresses me.” 

Someone asserted that Patch and his imitators shouted “Geronimo!” before leaping. There is no evidence of this. However, American parachutists are known to have done so during World War Two when jumping from planes. (This practice is believed to have originated among novice parachutists in the 82nd Airborne Division who shortly before their first jumps saw the 1939 action film Geronimo.). 

An oft-repeated non sequitur of Sam Patch’s, “If God can make cataracts, men can certainly jump over them,” was condemned by some as an impious challenge to Divine Providence.

Another saying of Patch’s, worthy of Yogi Berra, was, “Some things can be done as well as others.”

The Saturday Evening Post called him a “hare-brained fellow.”

Gerald Parsons described him as a young crackpot given to “feebleminded extravagance.” A contemporary newspaper editor urged Patch to run for Congress.

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Patch was born about 1807. His birthplace is uncertain. However, he lived as a young man in Pawtucket, Rhode Island with his mother Abigail Patch at 277 Main Street. The house later became Jones’ School where many of Pawtucket’s leading nineteenth century citizens acquired the rudiments of their education. The house no longer exists. However, the Pawtucket School Department’s administrative building is right down the street at 355 Main. 

As a boy of seven, Sam was working fourteen hours shifts at the Slater cotton mill in Pawtucket. Off-duty employees jumped from a nearby bridge over Pawtucket Falls into the Blackstone River. When the practice became competitive, they began jumping from the greater height of the Slater mill roof a hundred feet above the river. Later, the even higher roof of an adjacent building attracted their interest. When jumping from this roof, if one hoped to splash down in deep water rather than landing, thud, on the river bank, one had to make a running jump. Sam Patch succeeded in this. 

When authorities in Pawtucket learned of leaping at the mill, they forbade it as dangerous and immoral. Legend has it that when Sam heard this, he uttered an obscenity rhyming with Pawtucket, and left the city. 

Sam’s abandonment of Pawtucket may have been just as well. At the time, that city hadn’t much to offer a young man eager to rise in the world. Neither did Passaic, but Sam soon rose, precipitously, dropping from heights. 

Had he remained in Pawtucket, he might have seen his native city rebound to become in the nineteenth century a center of forge and nut manufacturing, tanning and leather belting, lace leather production, wadding (the process of compressing several layers of textile fibers to one another in order to stiffen fabric), book printing, dyeing fire engine construction, and paper and cardboard box assembly. 

But would he have availed himself of vocational opportunities associated with those industries? He would undoubtedly have lived longer. However, his remarks to the throng gathered at Genesee Falls in Rochester, New York, November 13, 1829, for his final, fatal leap, suggest otherwise.

“Napoleon,” he said, “was a great man and a great general. He conquered armies and he conquered nations. But he couldn’t jump the Genesee Falls. Wellington was a great man and a great soldier. He conquered armies and he conquered nations, and he conquered Napoleon, but he couldn’t jump the Genesee Falls. That was left for me to do.”

Or not. Sam had leapt the Falls successfully once. However, the audience for that leap had been disappointingly small, which was why he chose to do it again. To enhance interest in the second jump, he arranged for it to be from an even higher elevation than the first. A crowd estimated at six to eight thousand people were attracted to Rochester from as far away as Buffalo, Canandaigua, Batavia, and Syracuse, to witness it.  

While Sam did not conquer the Falls on his second try, his jumping companion, a black bear—by all accounts a very gentle dog-like creature—may have. Patch’s advertised jumps were ordinarily double features. In a reversal of Shakespeare’s stage direction in The Winter’s Tale, “Exit pursued by a bear,” the bear, given a shove, would exit an elevation first, with Patch following. 

One journalistic account of what happened at Genesee Falls on November 13 claimed that the bear was with Patch, but Frances Trollope in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) stated that Patch had left the bear behind in the care of a friend, having perhaps intuited that things might not go well that day.

Patch, when jumping, had always kept his arms clamped close to his sides, and his legs together, toes pointed downward. He would enter the water slick as a knife. He was said to have been drinking that day, which may explain why he lost control of his arms and legs in mid-descent and went into a spin. When he smacked down in the water noisily, onlookers groaned, and when he did not resurface from the water it was clear to most that Patch was a goner. A poet wrote in the Providence Journal a few days later:

Full six score feet they say he jumped,
And struck upon his side.
He sank beneath the roaring flood,
And thus, Sam Patch he died.

Deaths are always untimely, Sam’s especially so, since he had just arranged with a ship’s captain to entertain passengers bound for Liverpool with daily with leaps from a ship’s mast into the drink. He was also negotiating a jump from London Bridge into the Thames. 

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Patch’s body was not recovered immediately from the Genesee River. Certain of his fans, like Elvis’s, refused to believe he had perished. During the winter of 1829-30 there were Sam-sightings in Albany, Canandaigua and Pittsford. A letter ostensibly written by him turned up, stating that a proxy had leaped over the falls, not he. There were speculations that he lived on in a cave at the base of the Falls he had stocked with food and dry clothes. (An earlier prank of his in Rochester lent some credence to this notion. After jumping from the Fitzhugh Street Bridge there, he had swum underwater to a hiding place where he remained concealed for some time before reappearing.)

On St Patrick’s Day, 1830, four months after the jump at Genesee Falls, a hired hand at the Latta House downstream from Rochester was hacking through the frozen Genesee River seeking water for horses when Sam’s remains encased in a block of ice bobbed up. Identification would have been difficult, had it not been for the white pantaloons and black sash he had worn for his leap. 

He was buried in Charlotte Cemetery, near where his body was found. A wooden board placed over his grave read: “Here lies Sam Patch – Such is Fame.” The anthropocentric press did not report what became of Sam’s gentle bear.