The Legends of Jimmie Angel.

• Author: Angel, Karen
• Position: HISTORY

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This is the second article about James Crawford Angel (1899-1956) to appear in Américas magazine. John Hall's "Angel on Silver Wings," published in 1980, was also about Jimmie Angel, the man for whom Angel Falls--the world's tallest waterfall--is named. Recently Mr. Hall reflected that, "in doing research for the article, I could find no full biography, authorized or unauthorized, of the man. Almost 30 years later, I am still interested in finding more about him."

The life of aviator Jimmie Angel is a tangled collection of true stories and legends. According to these various stories: he taught himself to fly at age fourteen; he was a Royal British Flying Corps Ace in World War I; he created an air force for a Chinese Warlord in the Gobi Desert; he worked as an aviation scout for Lawrence of Arabia; and he flew a mining engineer named McCracken to a secret river of gold on a Venezuelan plateau. All of these stories remain unverified. It has been difficult to sort truth from legend for several reasons. For one thing, various authors have repeatedly published these legends over the years. For another thing, actual records that may have helped to verify the World War I legends have been destroyed. And finally, Jimmie Angel himself, and those close to him, helped to perpetuate the legends.

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As a young child, I was introduced to the adventures of Jimmie Angel by my father, Clyde Marshall Angel, who was Jimmie's youngest brother by eighteen years. My father was too young to be a member of the Angel Family Flying Circus in the 1920s and was the only one of five brothers who did not learn to fly. When my father died in 1997 and his obituary was published in a northern California newspaper, I was amazed to begin receiving calls and messages from people who knew Jimmie Angel in the 1920s through the 1940s. For the first time, I had a group of people to interview who had known Jimmie Angel and worked with him. I had pursued such interviews in the past but had run into many dead ends. These new informants provided me with fresh insights into Jimmie's character and gave me new avenues of research to pursue.

Jimmie Angel first saw the falls on a solo flight while he was working in Venezuela's southeastern Great Savanna for the Santa Ana Mining Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma. On November 18, 1933, he recorded in his pilot's log: "Found myself a waterfall." But how did the falls come to be named for my uncle? My...