The presence of sheer cliffs and dangerous precipices in America are often paired with romanticized legends regarding doomed, often Native American, lovers who fall to their deaths. These romantic tales have little basis in actual native folklore and have often been used to encourage business for local tourist sites.
One of the earliest recorded legends of a lover’s leap is set in ancient Greece. Sappho, a female poet in the sixth century BCE, was said to have leaped to her death from the White Rocks of Leukas out of desperation over her love for Phaon. American legends of leaping lovers are similar to Sappho’s classic story; many of the situations and their resolutions are driven by the heroine’s decision to jump. Often, it is solely the woman who meets her death at the bottom of a waterfall or rocky cliff.
Stories of leaping lovers usually take one of three conventional forms. The first version involves a pair of Native American lovers who are forbidden to marry. As a result, they take their lives in an act of amorous rebellion against their families or tribes. The second account involves a white man and a beautiful, often light-skinned, native maiden who cannot be together because of cultural differences, resulting in the leap to their deaths. The third, and most common, version constructs the story of a heartbroken Native American woman who jumps to her death because of her lover’s disinterest or demise. In any case, the lovers, singularly or together, meet their intended fate.
One notable exception to the legend’s predictable motif is the legend of Blowing Rock in North Carolina. The story begins familiarly with a pair of Native American lovers. The young man, who is torn between his love for the unnamed maiden and his own tribe, leaped off the rock as a result of his divided loyalties. However, the leap failed. The young woman prayed to the sky gods, and the wind blew her lover back into her arms. The ending is a happy one in this twist of fate, thanks in large part to a quirk of nature. The strong winds at the site of this particular lover’s leap have been known to cause rain and snow to blow upward. The legend of this romantic pair also serves as an origin tale to explain the natural phenomenon of the wind at Blowing Rock.
Many American authors have taken up their pens to describe the situation of an unfortunate Indian maiden. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow memorialized one such tale in his poem “Lover’s Rock,” published in 1825. Longfellow included a brief note before the poem to identify the cliff’s location on Lake Sebago in Maine. Then, the body of the poem went on to describe a brokenhearted Indian maid who, on the occasion of her true love’s marriage, sang her own funeral song and proceeded to throw herself off the cliff. “She stood upon the rocky steep, / Grief had her heart unstrung … and in the deep cold wave / The Indian Girl has made her grave” (Longfellow 1825).
Tales of lover’s leaps became exceedingly prevalent in the nineteenth century. The accounts of doomed love often drew tourists to notable local attractions, so much so that Mark Twain satirized them in his book Life on the Mississippi. Twain took the well-known legend of the Native American maiden, Winona or We-no-na, and twisted the tale to his own comedic devices. Usually the legend ended in the maiden’s death. However, in this case, Winona’s leap killed her interfering parents. Winona went on to live happily with her true love, no longer under the cruel influence of her guardians. The storyteller in the novel stated that it was a “distinct improvement upon the threadbare form of Indian legend … the only jump in the lot that turned out in the right and satisfactory way” (Twain 1883, 519). Twain poked fun at the seriousness of such legends and their overabundance in the tourist industry. Interestingly, Twain’s brother, Orion, published the first printed account of the Lover’s Leap in Hannibal, Missouri. Possibly influencing his brother’s later satire, Orion’s version contained no trace of irony or sarcasm.
Tales of suicidal lovers leaping from cliffs are not as widespread as in the nineteenth century. Yet, “more than forty cliffs in the United States retain Lover’s Leap as their official name” (Farmer 2009, 318). Statues, plaques, postcards, and oral retellings keep this facet of American folklore alive.
Josianne Leah Campbell
See also Fakelore; Legend Tripping; Women in Folklore
Further Reading
Farmer, Jared. 2009. On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gillespie, Michael. 2000. “Lover’s Leap, Myth or Legend?” Lake History website. http://www.lakehistory.info/loversleap.html. Accessed July 21, 2015.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. 1825. “Lover’s Rock.” Portland Advertiser.
Pound, Louise. 1949. “Nebraska Legends of Lovers’ Leaps.” Western Folklore 8 (4): 304–313.
Rozema, Vicki. 2007. Footsteps of the Cherokees. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair.
Twain, Mark. 1883. Life on the Mississippi. London: Chatto & Windus.
Lover’s Leaps—Primary Document
Charles M. Skinner, “Storied Cliffs and Lovers’ Leaps” (1903)
The Native American has often been a romanticized figure in European American folktales. Of considerable distinction among these stories is the lover’s leap: a prominent rock formation from which many an ill-fated couple leaped to their deaths. Many of these stories were told as though they came directly from Native American legend, while in reality nearly all were fabricated by white settlers. Regardless of their origins, however, these stories became a mainstay of nineteenth-century American folklore. Their proliferation eventually led to their ridicule. Common motifs in lover’s leap stories appear in the examples below: the white man and the Indian maiden, the jealous admirer, and forbidden love.
On Brandywine Creek, below Reading, Pennsylvania, is Deborah’s Rock, that once a year, in the middle of the winter and the middle of the night, becomes a thing of terror to certain persons thereabout, by reason of the wails and cries that seem to come from it. In spite of her name, Deborah was an Indian girl who lived near the place in the Revolutionary days and who had exchanged vows with one Donald Kingston, a Scotch peddler who had appeared among the Indians, trading cheap trinkets for their furs. The young Chief Ironhawk had chosen the girl for his wife, and her preference for this cozening white stranger maddened him with jealousy.
Knowing how vindictive her people could be, Deborah warned Kingston to go quickly to a neighboring settlement and she would follow that night, as soon as the camp was quiet. She was watched, however, and when she stole from her wigwam Ironhawk was moving steadily after. Her quick ear caught the sound of pursuing footsteps. There was one moment of hope when a figure arose in her path, for even in the starlight she recognized her lover. Before she could speak to him an arrow hissed by her head and Donald fell, lifeless, at her [feet]. A desperate terror came upon her then. Hardly knowing and not caring whither she went, she climbed the rock, sixty feet above the stream, and hearing Ironhawk still behind her, no longer slinking through the wood but pressing onward to lay hands upon her, she uttered the cry that still echoes from the cliff and flung herself into the creek.
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Beside the cliff known as Lover’s Leap in Mackinac is Arched Rock, where the moon’s daughter, Adikemaig, awaited every evening the return of Siskowit, the sun’s son, who had gone to battle. It was the first time in nearly six weeks that there had been a war, so that both sides were spoiling for a fight; and the contest was sharp and long. Siskowit’s delay in returning encouraged The Climber, a rival for the hand of Adikemaig, to attempt her abduction. He and his friends tracked her to the waiting place, crept through the bushes, and were about to lay hold upon her when, seeing her danger, she called loudly to Siskowit and leaped to certain death. It was one of Fate’s ironies that her lover, with his party, was at that moment urging his canoe across the lake, glad in his victories. A half-hour later a mist broke and he sprang ashore with a cheery hail to his sweetheart. What was that on the rock—blood? And that mangled form? Adikemaig! Some feet above was the body of The Climber, who in reaching toward the girl had slipped, fallen, and been impaled on the broken limb of a blood-maple—a tree which has ever since been the first to redden in the fall. Siskowit understood. He picked up the girl’s embroidered blanket from the earth, and, holding it to his heart, sang his death-song as he climbed the cliff. The sun veiled his face in cloud. As the young man leaped a shower of lightning fell from the sky, battered the rock, and tumbled a mass of earth, stones, and trees upon the bodies, also closing the gate to the hall of sprits but leaving the arch as a monument of the tragedy.
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Independence Rock, near the right bank of the Sweetwater, Wyoming, was a conspicuous mark in the western emigration over the Salt Lake trail. The first Americans that crossed the continent by way of the Platte Valley, under Thorp, celebrated the Fourth of July at the foot of this granite uplift. Hence its name. It bore many Indian pictographs, names of hunters and trappers, and Father De Smet carved “I.H.S.” on its face. Near it lived Crouching Panther, chief of the Pawnees, a big, strong, kindly fellow who had taken a great liking to Antelope, the prettiest damsel in the North Platte country. He would lie on a hill-side, hidden in the brush, watching her by the hour as she went about her work among the lodges below; and when he killed a deer or a buffalo the tenderest steak and the best piece of the tongue were for her. That they should be married was quite in order. On the night before the wedding the village was surprised by the ancient enemies of the Pawnees, the Sioux, who killed many of the unready people, took several prisoners, including Antelope, and rode away toward their retreats in the Medicine Bow Mountains. The prisoners were to be tortured and put to death, those of their captors who had lost sons and brothers in the raid being privileged to apply the torch. Arrived at what appeared to be a safe and secluded spot, they bound the unfortunates and gather[ed] brush and wood for their immolation, when a ringing war-whoop startled them, and before an active defense could be prepared Crouching Panther with a band of followers dashed among them, plied spears and axes right and left, seized Antelope by the wrists almost at the moment when the slash of an axe had cut her bonds, swung her into the saddle, rescued several other of the captives and pushed them upon the backs of led horses, and were off in a minute. The Sioux, however, were in force, and they were not the sort of people to endure tamely an assault like this. They were quickly in pursuit, and although the other Pawnees escaped, Crouching Panther and Antelope, who were mounted on the fleetest and strongest horse in the company, were overtaken at Independence Rock. Realizing that his steed could go no farther, the young man caught the girl about the waist and scrambled up the height, so closely followed that he clove the skulls of half a dozen more the more rash and bitter of his enemies who tried to take him alive. At the top he paused and looked about. Escape was hopeless. It was a choice between instant extinction and a lingering, ignominious death at the stake. Seizing Antelope in a close embrace and burying her face on his shoulder, that she might not guess his intent, he moved slowly to the edge of the precipice. Then, crying with a mighty voice, “The spirits of a hundred Pawnees follow their leader to the happy hunting-grounds,” he sprang from the rock with Antelope in his arms. The bodies fell from the ledge, and hawks and eagles gathered there next day.
Source: Skinner, Charles M. “Storied Cliffs and Lovers’ Leaps.” In American Myths and Legends. Vol. II. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1903, pp. 249–265.