| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper. By Paul E. Johnson. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. xiv, 240 pp. $23.00, ISBN 0-8090-8389-2.)

Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You've Never Heard Of. By David Carlyon. (New York: Public Affairs, 2001. xx, 506 pp. $30.00, ISBN 1-891620-57-6.)

As David Carlyon's witty subtitle, "the most famous man you've never heard of," points out, the now-forgotten Dan Rice was once the mid-nineteenth century's most prominent circus performer. The subject of Paul E. Johnson's work, Sam Patch, was once well known for jumping from waterfalls during the late 1820s. Although Rice and Patch gained celebrity at different times and for different reasons, their biographers share a desire to use these formerly famous performers to illuminate changing views of art, amusement, and decorum.

A Pawtucket, Rhode Island, factory worker since childhood, Sam Patch became one of the first native-born American mulespinners, the pinnacle of skilled labor in the new textile mills that emerged in the Northeast after the Revolution. But another skill made Patch famous, one developed near but not in the factory. Mill boys, Johnson tells us, sometimes jumped from the tops of the waterfalls that powered the mills, a dangerous sport that Patch mastered. The excitement he generated when he leaped at Paterson, New Jersey, in 1827 convinced the twenty-eight-year-old Patch that he could profit from his skill. He jumped again the following Fourth of July, this time for money, moving on to Hoboken (starting from a ship's mast) and finally to Niagara Falls and Rochester, New York. Each time, he became better known. Patch boldly advertised his November 1829 leap in Rochester as "Sam's Last Jump" (p. 156). Unfortunately, it was literally true. He leapt while visibly inebriated and did not come up again.

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