Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  But life, for Sam, was work. He became a mule spinner himself. He heaved and guided the biggest machines in the plant, careful not to thrust too hard and snap the threads as they formed. The job required strength and delicate skill.

  Americans did not take easily to the servile conditions of factory work. In 1824, workers in Pawtucket walked off the job, protesting a decision by mill owners to cut wages by a quarter and extend the work day by an hour. Women and girls instigated the nation’s first industrial strike. Men, probably including Sam Patch, joined in. They blocked the doors of mills and marched to owners’ houses. In a spasm of anger, they threw stones and curses. The chaotic “turn-out,” as it was called, lasted only a week and ended in compromise. It was the harbinger of an endless struggle.

  Having acquired a skill, Patch traveled to Paterson, a prosperous mill town in New Jersey. On a whim, he interrupted the opening of a pleasure garden by leaping from the top of the Passaic River Falls. Maybe he was drunk. Maybe it was pure bravado—he would later call leaping “an art which I have knowledge of and courage to perform.” On the Fourth of July 1828, Sam again defied death at the Passaic Falls. When he completed the harrowing leap, he proclaimed the terse phrase that would become his motto: “Some things can be done as well as others.” It was the working man’s sneer at the pretensions of the elite.

  Two weeks later, Paterson mill workers, led by children, walked off the job to protest a change in their dinner time and to demand that the workday be cut from thirteen and a half hours to ten. The carpenters, masons, and mechanics of Paterson laid down their tools in sympathy. Sam scheduled a leap over the falls to encourage his fellow mill hands. Labor turmoil engulfed the city for three weeks. During August, the workers returned, with little to show for their defiance. The owners kept the grindingly long workday and fired the strike’s ringleaders. Sam Patch may have been one who lost his job.

  Now Sam traveled the country, jumping. In October 1829, he became the first of the Niagara daredevils, leaping from a platform into the seething cauldron at the bottom of the falls. He did a half turn in the air and created a mighty splash when he hit the water. “He’s dead!” came murmurs from the spectators. His appearance at the surface released a “flood of joy.” He waved off the boat sent to fetch him and swam to shore. With this feat, he “immortalized himself,” a newspaper said. He became “The True Sam Patch.” The Buffalo Republican declared, “He may now challenge the universe for a competitor.”

  A month later, Sam traveled down the canal to Rochester. He announced that he would leap from the terrifying precipice of the Genesee cascade on November 6. Word went out, handbills circulated. The sporting young men of the town band served as Patch’s unofficial sponsors. They put him up in the Recess, a downtown tavern and inn, and made sure he had no cause to complain of thirst.

  While in Rochester, Patch brushed against the Anti-Masonic agitation, which had spread like a fever across western New York ever since William Morgan had gone missing three years earlier. Supporters and detractors of the brotherhood had turned the mystery into a political fistfight. The year before, Anti-Mason Thurlow Weed, who was helping push the outrage toward political action, had been chased up State Street by a supporter of the brotherhood. His friend Frederick Whittlesey had pummeled a fellow lawyer at the Eagle Tavern during an argument over Morgan.

  Sam Patch set up a subscription at the Recess, inviting “gentlemen who feel disposed to witness the spectacle” to make contributions to help defray his expenses. Some of his supporters passed a hat at the site of his performance.

  The Genesee River flowed over a mill dam, then plunged down an abrupt, ninety-six-foot precipice just north of the canal aqueduct. Patch borrowed a rowboat and explored the pool at the bottom of the falls. He made soundings, judged distances, and hunted for any underwater hazards. Above him, the walls of the gorge formed an amphitheater, green with moss and decorated here and there with scarlet fans of sumac.

  Crowds swarmed into Rochester—more than ten thousand people, one visitor estimated. They came together “like an army drawn up in battle array.” Why take the time? Why travel for hours in a creaking wagon? What impulse powered the allure of celebrity? What fear spurred the fascination with mortality?

  Patch was scheduled to jump at two o’clock. He appeared an hour late. Bets had been placed whether he would have the courage to show up at all. The crowd buzzed with anticipation. He bowed, looked over the edge. The water hissed.

  Then he was gone. A gasp. He plummeted feet first. He crashed beneath the surface. Disappeared.

  The usual whispers sizzled through the mass of onlookers. “He’s dead!”

  Sam’s head bobbed above the water. Cheers echoed around the gorge.

  “This is the real Sam Patch,” he told the first to greet him along the shore. “No mistake.” The man handed him a bottle of rum.

  To the consternation of Rochester’s respectable citizens, Sam scheduled another jump one week later, Friday the thirteenth. He had a platform constructed to raise him even farther above the river, 120 feet. Word went out. There’s no Mistake in SAM PATCH, his handbills read. HIGHER YET! Sam’s Last Jump.

  Again the great mass of spectators. The mills shut down. Watchers crowded the windows and roofs of the factories. The sensation, one viewer noted, was “between a horse race and an execution.” The curious waited in the penetrating cold of a November afternoon under a slate-gray sky.

  For his performances, Sam Patch always dressed in the white togs that were the uniform of textile mill workers. He stepped onto the platform. He had imbibed, yes. He had taken enough of the water of life to make him sway a bit as he looked out on all those looking back.

  “Napoleon!” he said. He shouted it, knowing few could hear. “Napoleon was a great man. But he couldn’t jump the Genesee.” Sam paused. The wind bit through his cotton clothing and carried his words away over the housetops. “That was left for me to do. I can do it and I will.” Some things could be done. “I will!”

  Sam was kicking at the struts that held up the reputations of great men. Any man, even a wage slave, could do some things. Could be great. Could be celebrated. If he dared.

  Behind him, he could hear words of caution from those who suddenly saw in the tremendous height sure death. Don’t, Sam. For God’s sake. It’s your life. Don’t. Don’t.

  The anticipation had built long enough. Time, like the water, was rushing, tumbling. The watching eyes rounded. A man in the crowd bit his thumb. Sam stepped to the very edge of the platform. Each spectator drew a breath and held it. Sam looked into all their eyes, into the abyss.

  He jumped.

  Translation

  The Egyptian Pharaohs enjoyed sovereignty in the eastern Mediterranean for nearly three thousand years before Alexander the Great conquered them in the fourth century before Christ. Within a few generations, the Greek rulers had adopted many of the customs of the former kings. Soon after 200 b.c., Ptolemy V, an ancestor of the legendary beauty Cleopatra, was having difficulties controlling the country. Facing a rebellion by ethnic Egyptians, Ptolemy ordered his attendants to set up inscribed stones that declared him a god. The granite signboards also listed concessions to the priestly caste, a bit of political maneuvering by a hard-pressed potentate.

  Carvers inscribed the message on these stones in three versions. The first was written in hieroglyphics, the priestly writing that harked back to Egypt’s early history. A different script told the story in the colloquial Egyptian of the day. The third transcription was in Greek, the language of governmental administration.

  Traditional Egyptian culture continued its decline under the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, and finally the Muslims. The knowledge of hieroglyphics died out entirely. In the Mediterranean town of al-Rashid, Ptolemy’s ancient proclamation stone was incorporated into the foundation of a fort and forgotten.

  In 1798, Napol
eon Bonaparte conquered the country’s Ottoman rulers and their British allies. He brought scholars and antiquarians with him to study and to loot. They uncovered the inscribed stone at al-Rashid, a town they called Rosetta, and quickly saw its importance. This could be the key to reading the indecipherable hieroglyphics, within which knowledge of Egypt’s vast history was locked. Scholars copied and began to study the inscriptions. They lost the stone itself to the British, who forced the French army’s surrender in 1801. The victors shipped the Rosetta Stone to London.

  An Anglo-French competition began to see who could first break the code. Thomas Young, a brilliant British scientist and physician, spent more than ten years unraveling the colloquial Egyptian script. He identified figures within the hieroglyphics that represented Greek names, including that of Ptolemy, spelled out phonetically.

  In France, Jean-François Champollion, a language prodigy still in his twenties, strongly suspected that he could decipher all the hieroglyphics, not just the Greek names, into the components of words. The glyphs were a readable language, not a collection of pictographs. Taking cues from spoken and written Coptic, kept alive by Egyptian Christians, Champollion hammered away at the code. In 1822, he produced a table listing the meaning of some of the glyphs. It was a significant breakthrough. By 1828, he understood the system of writing well enough to travel to Egypt and read the history of the dynasties from the walls of the great tombs and monuments. The avalanche of discoveries thoroughly upset European ideas about the Egyptians. In the process, the new knowledge called into question Biblical accounts of the origin of the earth and of the timing of the great flood of Noah.

  During the 1820s, as scholars were deciphering the Rosetta Stone, Joseph Smith Jr. had recovered the bundle of golden plates. The message he found inscribed on them, he declared in 1827, was written in “reformed” Egyptian. The year before, a local newspaper had reported the discovery of Mexican manuscripts written in hieroglyphics. This suggested that early Mexicans and peoples from the Middle East must have had some connection. The fact that an American artifact from western New York would be written in hieroglyphics was plausible to many.

  Joseph and Emma had returned from Palmyra to Harmony. When Emma’s father, Isaac Hale, demanded to see the plates, Joseph refused. Annoyed by the secrecy, Hale would not allow the couple to live with him, but allotted them a two-room house on his farm. Joseph set to work deciphering the “gold Bible.” He hoped that he could enlist an expert to help him with the translation, or at least to verify that he was reading the markings on the plates correctly. To this end, he asked Martin Harris, who came to visit the young couple in February 1828, to find a scholar who could confirm Joseph’s own intuitive interpretation. He gave Harris a sheet of paper on which he had copied some of the “Caractors” from the golden plates.

  Harris traveled to New York City and met with one of the leading classicists of the day, Professor Charles Anthon of Columbia University. Harris said that Anthon verified Smith’s correct translation of the characters, affirming them to be a mix of Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, and Arabic. Anthon gave him a certificate testifying to the characters’ authenticity, but then destroyed it when Harris revealed the dubious source of the inscription.

  Anthon told another story. He had only given Harris a letter stating that the marks on the paper appeared to be just imitations of various alphabetical characters. He said he wanted to keep Harris from falling victim to a fraud.

  On discovering that no learned man would help with the translation, Joseph Smith cited a prophecy from Isaiah. It said that a sealed book would be read by “him that is not learned.” He continued to interpret the plates himself. Shunning the methods of scholars like Young and Champollion, he translated by inspiration. The meaning of the hieroglyphics came to him as a series of divine revelations. He spoke, Emma wrote down his words.

  Martin Harris returned to Harmony in April. Joseph allowed him to take Emma’s place as scribe. He hung a blanket across the room so that Harris could not see the plates, which were formed into a book by metal rings. Joseph dictated on one side, Harris scribbled furiously on the other.

  By June, they had managed to record 116 manuscript pages of the translation. Harris kept entreating Joseph: If he could not see the actual plates, could he at least take the manuscript back to Palmyra to placate his wife? She was convinced her husband was the victim of a dangerous hoax. Relenting, Smith granted his patron’s request.

  Emma gave birth to their son Alvin on June 15, 1828. The infant died the same day. Soon afterward, the spirit Moroni took back the plates and the magical diamond spectacles. He was imposing a punishment on Joseph for giving Harris the manuscript. When Harris did not return, an anxious Smith hurried to his family’s farm to search for his scribe. Called to the Smith home, Harris slouched through the door to relate a sad tale. Having promised to show the papers to only five family members, he had instead revealed the manuscript to practically any curious local who asked to see it. Then, somehow, it had gone missing.

  It was a fierce blow that meant months of work wasted. With the plates now gone as well, the whole project seemed, like so many treasure hunts, to have come to naught. But like his parents, Joseph Smith Jr. had a deeply resilient character. The Lord admonished him in a revelation to repent his casualness. He was promised that the plates and the translation keys would be returned. He did not lose his faith.

  Back in Harmony, the sacred materials restored, he continued the translation, Emma writing down his words. They worked all summer during breaks in their arduous farm chores. Joseph had returned to his familiar seer stone as a means of deciphering the plates. “I frequently wrote day after day, often sitting at the table close by him,” Emma would remember, “he sitting with his face buried in his hat, with the stone in it and dictating hour after hour.”

  He needed no screen when working with her. He did not even look at the plates, which lay on the table “wrapped in a small linen table cloth.” Yet the words flowed. Emma said the plates were like thick paper, and would “rustle with a metallic sound” when she touched their edges through the cloth.

  By September the couple were practically destitute. Joseph went begging to his friend Joseph Knight. The older man gave him food, a pair of shoes, and three dollars. Bad news kept arriving from Palmyra. In the autumn of 1828, Joseph’s siblings Sophronia and Samuel both suffered serious and expensive illnesses. Early in 1829, the Smiths’ landlord decided he wanted to move his daughter into their home, the frame house that Alvin had built for his mother and father.

  The Smiths, with their five younger children, were forced to move back to the two-room log cabin, now occupied by Hyrum and his wife. In spite of the cramped quarters, they took with them their boarder, a young man named Oliver Cowdery. Hyrum, who served on the district education committee, had hired Cowdery to teach at the local school.

  Cowdery was a native of eastern Vermont; his family had followed the same well-beaten path to western New York as the Smiths. His mother was a distant relation of Lucy Smith, and Oliver had won the family’s confidence. Hearing their stories of Joseph’s renowned abilities, he wanted to learn more about the gold bible.

  When Samuel finally recovered from his illness and talked of visiting his older brother, Cowdery asked to go along. They departed on foot at the end of March 1829, just after school was out for the year. Along the way, they stopped at the Whitmer farm in Fayette, thirty miles east of Palmyra. David Whitmer, a friend of Cowdery, shared his fascination with Smith’s purported treasure. Cowdery told him he would tease out the truth of the matter and report back.

  Trudging along muddy spring roads, the two young men covered another hundred miles before they reached Harmony. They arrived at Smith’s modest farmhouse on April 5. Joseph said he was not surprised to see them. An angel had let him know that a scribe “should be forthcoming in a few days.” The greeting impressed Cowdery. He and Joseph “sat down a
nd conversed together till late.” Cowdery was also a diviner, with a “gift of working with the rod.” Joseph, his head teeming with visions and ideas, found it easy to confide in this man, who was a year younger and of similar background and interests.

  Cowdery prayed, asking the Lord if the plates contained a genuine revelation. He was assured they did. Almost immediately, he and Joseph began one of the most remarkable literary collaborations in history. Between April 7 and the middle of June, they would together translate, at a rate of almost ten pages a day, a complex, multilayered historical and spiritual record that explained the peopling of America and unfolded details of God’s plan for the salvation of mankind. The text would run to nearly six hundred pages in book form.

  Joseph Knight, who occasionally brought Smith and his wife provisions, said that the young seer translated the plates by putting the Urim and Thummim into his hat and staring intently. A sentence “would apper in Brite Roman Letters,” Joseph would dictate it to Cowdery, then the next sentence would manifest.

  Cowdery tried and failed to do some of the translating himself. The Lord had explained the process to Joseph: “You must study it out in your mind, then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right, I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you . . . but if it be not right, you shall have no such feelings.” Cowdery never acquired the knack. There would be only one prophet.

  Yet the two men served as catalysts for each other. It was a marvelous time. On May 15, they went down to the Susquehanna River and experienced joint visions of John the Baptist. They declared themselves members of a new priesthood. They baptized each other as elders in a church of their own invention. “We experienced great and glorious blessings,” Smith remembered. “Our minds being now enlightened, we began to have the Scriptures laid open to our understanding.”