Oddlet: Sam Patch · 1 min read
Oct 8, 2026
The Bear Went First
Sam Patch's final act opened with him shoving a bear cub off a hundred-foot waterfall in front of eight thousand people.
By 1829, Sam Patch had a résumé. He had jumped the seventy-foot Passaic Falls in his pantaloons, having first escaped the basement a rival had locked him in. He had jumped Niagara twice, the second time from a hundred and twenty feet, in his Paterson spinners' uniform, in front of ten thousand people. His motto, "Some things can be done as well as others," was becoming a national catchphrase.
Between Niagara and Rochester, he acquired a bear cub.
He walked it around Rochester on a leash. On November 6, 1829, he took it out onto the ledge above the Genesee High Falls, where eight thousand people were waiting, grabbed it by the collar, and shoved it a hundred feet into the river. It paddled to shore. Then Patch, having warmed up his audience with a mammal, jumped after it and also survived.
One week later he was back, drunk, on a twenty-five-foot scaffold he had built on top of the same ledge because a hundred feet wasn't paying enough. He gave a short speech about Napoleon. Then he jumped. His arms came apart on the way down and he hit the water sideways.
They found him in March, frozen in a block of ice at the mouth of the river. The bear was fine.
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- Wikipedia — Sam Patch — Overview biography with dates, heights, crowd sizes, motto, nicknames, list of jumps (Passaic 1827, Hoboken 1828, Niagara Oct 1829, Rochester Nov 1829), body-recovery details, gravestone inscription, and literary references.
- Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame — Sam Patch — Details Patch's Rhode Island childhood, employment as a mule spinner in Samuel Slater's 'White Mill' beginning 1807, and his later position as boss mule spinner at the Hamilton cotton mill in Paterson, NJ.
- New York Almanack — Sam Patch: Early American Daredevil — Covers the July 4, 1828 Passaic Falls jump when Patch first advertised his motto 'Some things can be done as well as others,' and its later spread as a national catchphrase.
- Buffalo News — Oct. 7, 1829: Niagara Falls' first daredevil survives jump at the falls — Dates Patch's first Niagara jump as October 7, 1829, from the platform extended from Goat Island opposite the Cave of the Winds.
- Publishers Weekly review of Paul E. Johnson, 'Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper' (Hill and Wang, 2003) — The standard modern academic biography by historian Paul E. Johnson; source of the 1799 birth-year identification and the working-class/mule-spinner social context.
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