Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper

“Working again with what is available, I have tried to situate Sam Patch’s leaps in the social, cultural, and ecological histories of the waterfalls where they took place.”

In the preface, Johnson establishes the difficulty of writing a biography of a subject who left very little in the historical record. Johnson supplements this biographical information with cultural and environmental histories, fleshing out the narrative of Patch’s jumps.

“Mill labor was stigmatized, and artisans and farmers […] took their daughters and sons out of the mills. A widening flood of destitute migrants took their places, and the mill families became a separate and despised group of people.”

The economic and social distinction between farm laborers and mill laborers was important in 19th-century America. Sam Patch’s family demonstrates the difference between these groups: Although his father had been an independent farmer, bad investments and alcohol addiction forced their family into mill labor.

“Weston enjoyed relations of neighborly cooperation with other men and he was the head of a self-supporting household and an equal participant in neighborhood affairs. In eighteenth-century Massachusetts, these attributes constituted the social definition of adult manhood.”

Because the Patch family left few records, Johnson uses the journal of shoemaker James Weston to explore what the life of Greenleaf Patch might have been like. This passage identifies community, self-sufficiency, and civic participation as the hallmarks of manhood for men like Patch and Weston.