COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL AUGUST 23, 2017
7A
Offbeat Oregon History: Evel Knievel of the 1920s
The 1920s were
the
era of daredev-
For The Sentinel
ils: from Ormer
Locklear hanging
upside down from the wings of his war-surplus
Curtiss biplane, to Edmondo Zacchini getting
shot out of a cannon, to Harry Houdini getting
dropped upside down and manacled into a narrow
tank of water and emerging triumphant.
To that list of high-risk adrenaline artists can be
added Al Faussett, the only person in the history
of the universe to have paddled over Willamette
Falls in Oregon City, Celilo Falls near The Dalles,
and 186-foot South Falls at Silver Falls State Park
— and lived to tell about it.
The story of “Daredevil Al” Faussett is an in-
teresting one; and nobody who knew him as a
young man would ever have accepted a bet that
he’d dying in bed of natural causes at the end of a
long life. Even before his waterfall-jumping days,
he was an adrenaline junkie. He made a living as
a logger, but was always up for extracurricular
high-risk hijinks.
Then in 1926, Twentieth Century Fox expressed
interest in working with someone who could make
it down Sunset Falls on the Skykomish River in a
canoe. Sources differ on the nature of the offer,
with some claiming there was a $1,500 prize of-
fered and others claiming it was Al’s idea and that
it had been him who approached Fox. But either
way, he soon was making plans, and building a
special boat to carry him to the bottom of the 104-
foot plunge in (relative) safety.
The boat was a fully enclosed thing made of a
32-foot hollowed-out log, lined and padded with
inner-tube tires and equipped with bottled ox-
ygen. Al teamed up with his old friend Charles
“Cap” Elwell, a steamboat skipper, to build it.
If there was a deal with Fox, the studio backed
out — although there were fi lm crews there to
capture the scene. Still, Al’s design called for him
to be fully inside the boat at all times, so it would
have looked on fi lm more or less like a log going
over the falls; it wouldn’t have looked like much
in a movie.
Al made it, a little battered and bruised but ba-
sically OK. Sunset Falls is about halfway between
a waterfall and a horrifi cally unnavigable rapid;
the Skykomish River roars at speeds of up to 80
miles per hour down an incline of 20 to 70 de-
grees, dropping 104 feet in less than 95 yards. So
By Finn JD John
Al wasn’t just falling through space. Impacts with
boulders and side currents fi lled the boat with wa-
ter and broke the line to his air tank, and he had to
hold his breath and hope for the best.
It worked out, and Al Faussett was instantly fa-
mous.
He wasn’t instantly rich, though. Most of the
witnesses of the event had snuck in, evading his
ticket booth and the $1 admission fee. This would
continue to be a problem for Al throughout his
career.
Al had found his calling, and he immediately
set about one-upping himself. The fi rst thing he
did was to try to get permission to shoot 268-foot
Snoqualmie Falls. Probably the second was to see
about traveling to New York and doing the big
one — Niagara, at 176 feet. He would continue to
chase these two big waterfalls for years, but could
never get the needed permissions to do them.
Later in 1926 Al shot 28-foot Eagle Falls on the
Skykomish, and the next year tackled Spokane
Falls — his tallest yet, at 186 feet. This one left
him in bad shape, with a concussion and numer-
ous bad bruises.
Willamette Falls, in Oregon City, was next for
Al. The falls are only 42 feet high, but the Wil-
lamette River makes up for any defi cit in height
with sheer mass. Al showed up to shoot Willa-
mette Falls on March 30, 1928, close to the height
of the spring run-off. The hydraulic pressure burst
the hatch open when he hit the splash pool, fi lling
the boat with water and battering Al around. The
boat couldn’t sink, of course, with all the inner
tubes in it; but the action in the splash pool at the
base of Willamette Falls is quite rough, and kept
Al underwater for several long, terrifying min-
utes. Al needed a few days in the hospital to re-
cover from this one.
By this time Al was starting to notice something
vexing: He was getting famous, but he wasn’t get-
ting rich. Again, in Oregon City, the vast majority
of people who watched him shoot the falls had
dodged his ticket booth and watched for free. He
decided what he needed to do was fi nd something
truly spectacular — a really tall waterfall on re-
mote private property, to which access could be
completely controlled.
And that’s what led him to the biggest waterfall
in what’s now Silver Falls State Park: South Falls.
South Falls takes little Silver Creek over a 177-
foot drop into a splash pool that looks, from the
top, just a tiny bit larger than a child’s wading
pool. It’s way out in the middle of nowhere, far
away from any towns, and in 1928 it was still
owned by Daniel Geisler of Silverton; it wouldn’t
become public land until 1935. It was perfect.
Geisler, who already was making small amounts
of money charging folks admission to watch him
shove junk cars off the top, was amenable to Al’s
plan; but he was worried about liability. So the
two men made a deal: Al would “buy” the falls
and surrounding land, own it for one day, and
Geisler would “buy” it back after the stunt (or in-
herit it in Al’s will, if things went really badly).
To make it work, Al and his partner, Keith Mc-
Cullagh, dammed up Silver Creek at the top and
rigged a chute to push Al’s boat out over the rocky
lip. Then they rigged a cable that would guide the
boat into that pint-size splash pool so it wouldn’t
end up splattering on the nearby rocks instead.
The big day was July 1, 1928. Thousands of
spectators were there to watch, and soon they
started getting restless; it seemed like they’d been
waiting a long time. One spectator, Bryan Gordon
of Silverton, said he went to investigate and found
Faussett “sitting in the canoe bracing himself with
spirits for the ordeal ahead, for which you could
not blame him.”
That was, of course, bootleg spirits, as Prohi-
bition was still going strong in 1928. There was a
rumor that Al wanted to back out and McCullagh
was helping him change his mind “with a little
help from a bottle of hand-crafted gin,” as Brekas
puts it. Given Al’s track record of waterfall jumps,
though, this seems unlikely. It’s far more likely
Al was just having a drink or six while waiting
for confi rmation that the huge crowd gathered to
watch didn’t include freeloaders.
Finally, Al gave the signal. The dam was
opened. (Some sources say the dam never worked,
and he had to be pushed.) The water roared and
Al shot out into space as the spectators “caught
their hearts in their throats and held their breath”
(Brekas again).
But 30 feet above the water, the boat hung up
on a splice in the guide cable, which snapped it to
a momentary halt in midair. Then the guide ring
ripped off the boat and it dropped to the water,
where it landed fl at with a terrifi c crack.
Brekas compares this to a high diver doing a
belly fl op. The boat had been intended to knife
into the water like a torpedo and then pop back
to the surface again with a soggy but triumphant
Faussett ready to jump out and shake some hands.
Instead, a badly injured Faussett barely managed
a feeble wave before being brought to shore and
rushed to the hospital.
And while he was there recuperating, McCul-
lagh skipped town with the entire $2,500 pro-
ceeds from the gate.
After shooting Silver Creek Falls, Al considered
quitting. Instead, he re-engineered his system, de-
signing a cigar-shaped boat in which he would lie
at full length, surrounded by inner tubes, like the
Michelin Man. In this, he successfully shot his
tallest waterfall yet — 212-foot Shosone Falls in
Idaho — and fi nished off with a trouble-free nav-
igation over 83-foot Celilo Falls on the Columbia
River.
But Celilo would be his last jump. It just wasn’t
penciling; gate receipts just wouldn’t cover his
construction expenses and hospital bills. He went
to Hollywood to seek employment as a stunt man,
but that didn’t work out either; by 1934 he’d
moved to Portland, where he quietly lived for the
next 15 years, making a living with his mechan-
ical skills and regaling anyone who would listen
with tales of his past glory. He died at the age of
68, in bed.
But even at the time of his death, he was still
working on a new boat for that long-delayed at-
tempt on Niagara Falls.
AL FAUSSETT POSES FOR A PHOTOGRAPH WITH SOUTH FALLS IN THE
BACKGROUND
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at 541-689-1503
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