The preface introduces Sam Patch, an American factory worker who became a professional daredevil in the 1820s. Johnson notes that the book is not a biography in the traditional sense: Patch’s obscurity before he became a famous jumper means that the resources of a typical biography are not available. Instead, he offers a series of fragmented stories detailing Patch’s family history, celebrity, and death. Johnson suggests that Patch’s celebrity was connected to important industrial and labor movements in 19^th-century New York and that his jumps changed the way Americans thought about the great waterfalls at Rochester and Niagara.

Sam Patch’s story begins in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the small milling town where his family moved when he was seven years old. Pawtucket was the site of the first water-frame cotton-spinning mill in America, founded in 1790 by Samuel Slater. Slater had promised residents that the mill would be small, hiring only the wives and children of local farmers, but the labor needs of the mill soon grew, and impoverished families from beyond Pawtucket began to crowd the town. Sam Patch’s family were among these newcomers.

Patch’s father, Greenleaf Patch, came from an established New England family.