My aunt and uncle live in Niagara Falls so I don’t see them that often but I did last week at another funeral. Their son worked for the tourism board there for a while and I wondered what my uncle thought about the upcoming Nik Wallenda tightrope walk over the Falls. I was thinking the circus like event would be good for the tourist trade on the struggling New York but my uncle said the morality of the whole thing really bothered him and he wasn’t even going to watch it. I was really struck by his answer and my own ever shifting moral line.
Sam Patch, the “The Yankee Leaper,” achieved nationwide fame when he jumped into the Niagara River near the base of the Falls in 1829. He made his last jump in Rochester on Friday the 13th in November of that same year from a 25-foot high platform over the 100 foot High Falls of the Genesee River. 8,000 people watched him land with a loud impact and never surface. His frozen body was found downriver in Charlotte the next Spring. Local ministers and newspapers were quick to blame the crowd for urging him to jump, and put the guilt of his death on them
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