Category: Daredevils & Stunters

Sam Patch. Words and Music by Cornelius Eady

I’m the king of the Rochester Falls
Sam Patch has answered the call
This morning you’ll see it all.

The whirl of the water
That don’t bother me
Blood-thirsty crowd
That don’t bother me
Wind at my back
That don’t bother me
False friends cheering
That don’t bother me

cornelius
Poster Announcing Sam Patch’s Last Jump. Courtesy of Wikipedia

I’m the king of the Genesee
Every eye here is planted on me.
Roll up and see what you’ve
Never seen

The whirl of the water
That don’t bother me
Blood-thirsty crowd
That don’t bother me
Wind at my back
That don’t bother me
False friends cheering
That don’t bother me

Cho:
Fall and move on
Fall and move on
Fall and move on, boy,
Fall and move on
Fall and move on
Fall and move on,
Fall and move on, boy
Fall and move on.

The word has spread
The time has come
Come watch me leap
Into kingdom come
Come watch a day
That’s never been done.

The whirl of the water
That don’t bother me
Blood-thirsty crowd
That don’t bother me
Wind at my back
That don’t bother me
False friends cheering
That don’t bother me

The platform wobbles
Like a dancing bear
The foam and the spray
Rise like ghost in the air
Soon I will dance between
Here and there

The roar of the water
That don’t bother me
Blood-thirsty crowd
That don’t bother me
Wind at my back
That don’t bother me
False friends cheering
That don’t bother me

Will I fall and move on?

Cornelius Eady: Loops, and Vocals
Mitizie Collins: Hammered Dulcimer
Marvin Sewell: Electric Guitar
Emma Alabaster: Bass
Concetta Abbate: Violin

Source: The author.  First published in his music chapbook Book of Hooks, Kattywompus Press, 2013

About Cornelius Eady

Sam Patch jumped from a ladder at the base of Goat Island twice in the fall of 1829, and was killed later that year jumping at the Genessee Falls. Read more about Sam Patch.

Read Eady’s poem The Death of Sam Patch

Sam Patch in The Craftsman:

The Death of Sam Patch by Cornelius Eady

eady
Sam Patch’s Last Jump. By Internet Archive Book Images

No, there’s no mistaking Mr. Patch.
History will lead him to a watery grave
In my hometown of Rochester, NY.
He will disappear after he jumps
Only to return with the spring thaw.
There is so much in his brief fame
To ponder, that tugs at us.
Rochester, like any mill town
Is full of reckless death,
Yet the fate of Patch is on a par
With the local Native Americans, at least
When I attended grade school
We were taught the story
Of a man who made his living
Oddly, with a tame black bear
And calculation.
Any school child my age
Recalls his last moments on earth.
– Was there actually
A parade? A premonition?
Did he really waver at the top of the platform
Just before he jumped? Any contemporary of mine
Carries this, the language his body,
A wrong angle, recites
As it hits the gorge.
Here is the lesson of the
Tightrope walker, and of course,
A kid’s morbid curiosity –
A body, suspended in ice,
Worked over three months
By the elements –
What happens? One can only guess
How far away it must have seemed
From the energy of his last words,
No mistake in the way he brandished them
Against the spray.
William Carlos Williams
Will make much of the beginnings
Of our Icarus,
Who gets his start in Paterson, NJ,
To plunge headlong into my town’s
Settler past. What else have I learned
Besides the beauty of the dare?

Source: Prairie Schooner, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Fall 1993), pp. 12-13

About Cornelius Eady

Sam Patch jumped from a ladder at the base of Goat Island twice in the fall of 1829, and was killed later that year jumping at the Genessee Falls. Read more about Sam Patch.

Read the words and listen to a performance of Cornelius Eady singing his song Sam Patch.

Niagara’s Charms and Death of Webb by James McIntyre

charms

charms
Matthew Webb killed in the Whirlpool Rapids July 24 1883. Courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library

Gazing on rapids mighty sea,
Struggling fiercely to be free,
But drawn downwards in its course
By gravitation’s wondrous force,
O’er those perpendicular walls,
Hurled ’mong mighty rocks it falls,
Causing the earth to throb and shake
Like to the tremor of earthquake.

Thus the world’s greatest wonder
Reverberates like peals of thunder,
Enshrined with mist and beauteous glow
Of varied tints of the rainbow,
Most glorious sight the human eye
Hath ever seen beneath the sky,
Along these banks none ever trod
But did feel grateful to his God,
For lavishing with bounteous hand
Glories majestic and so grand.

The foaming billows soon are seen
Transformed into a beauteous green,
Plunged by whirlpools dread commotion
It becomes a seething ocean,
Where furies join in surging dance
From centre to circumference,
This is the favorite abode
Of Neptune, mightiest sea God,
He hath decreed none shall survive
Who will into this vortex dive.

Webb swam the English channel brave,
Like seabird he did love to lave
His breast upon the mightiest wave,
Alas, found here a watery grave;
Torrent onward rushes frantic
On its course to the Atlantic,
But on its way doth gently flow
Through blue lake Ontario,
Rejoicing on its way it smiles,
Kissing the shores of Thousand Isles,
Mingling with St. Lawrance motion,
It soon is blended with the ocean.

Source: Niagara’s Charms and Death of Webb was published in McIntyre, James. Poems of James McIntyre.  Ingersoll: The Chronicle, 1889.

This poem is featured in episode 3 of the Niagara Falls History and Poetry podcast

Biography of James McIntyre in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

Psalm by Matt Donovan

Sam Patch, Daredevil, 1800–1829

donovan
Sam Patch Jumped to Fame and Death. Boston Sunday Globe, August 12, 1928

The trick was breathing in, you claimed, as if that was all
they gathered to watch as you milked the crowd in your matador sash,
rum-slurring some speech no one could hear above the river’s thunder,
quipping your catchphrase long worn threadbare: Some things
can be done as well as others. But most things don’t sputter back
even once, like that waterlogged schooner two autumns before,
lunging over Niagara as billed, loaded with its Strange Cargo—
bison, two bears, a bonneted fox, raccoons, a wing-clipped eagle—
& disappearing into a wilderness of froth. Sam Patch, you dropped
arrow-straight, untethered from earth, for cash, for booze, a lay,
& yet here I am plundering your life for some path towards saying
in our water’s blind wrath, in the body from that roaring slosh
only a few times given back, despite nearly everything
we choose, somehow we are blessed. I might as well beg
for an ass-kick, I know. Scotch-soaked, fame-starved, cocksure,
you are long-dead, unbreakable until the river broke you too
& could stomach none of this. If it helps, forget the poem.
Forget I said anything before I turned to you—since today inexplicably
you’re all that will do—tottering sun-struck on the platform, preparing
to plummet into that luminous rage & whatever that might afford.

 

Source: Psalm by Matt Donovan first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, vol 84, #2, Spring 2008

About Matt Donovan

About Sam Patch

 

El Barril by James Thomas Stevens

barril
Annie Edson Taylor’s Tombstone in Oakwood Cemetery, Niagara Falls, New York. Image courtesy of James Thomas Stevens


In the one-time mecca of the hard-up honeymoon,
we were both born.

Yours, a life above the waterfall. Mine, below.

And Annie Taylor? We were all schooled in her story. How Miss
Michigan schoolteacher took on the cataract at sixty-three. In her
petticoats and lace-up boots, clutching her good-luck-heart-shaped satin
pillow, she stepped into the barrel where, two days earlier, she had
placed her cat to test pilot the way. Air pressured in by a bicycle pump,
bung in the hole, mattress wrapped. And the fall, fall, fall, emerging
twenty minutes later. Only head gashed and rib bruised to proclaim:
I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going
to blow me to pieces than make another trip over the Fall.

And in our two year, two year, two year fall. What was bruised if not
‡‡broken?

Your C-3 vertebra, out of whack.
Slack, from practice. Your tendons overwrought,
too taut from the bow, taught by the bow.

And my base pain, in the neck.
Now I know the days you play,
curse Bach and his concerto
for a doubled violin. 

Source:  El Barril was published in Prairie Schooner, vol 89, No. 4, Winter 2015

James Thomas Stevens, Aronhió:ta’s, (Akwesasne Mohawk) attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodies Poetics, and Brown University’s graduate creative writing program. Stevens, originally from Youngstown, NY, is the author of eight books of poetry, including, Combing the Snakes from His Hair, Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations, A Bridge Dead in the Water, The Mutual Life, Bulle/Chimere, and DisOrient, and has recently finished a new manuscript, Ohwistanó:ron Niwahsohkò:ten (The Golden Book). He is a 2000 Whiting Award recipient and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

View a far-reaching conversation between James Thomas Stevens and Prageeta Sharma in Bomb, issue 148, September 17, 2019, in which El Barril is discussed