It is but natural that the Indians who for centuries have peopled the banks of the Mississippi, should have many legends attaching to prominent or unusual features of the river scenery. Where the Indians may have failed, imaginative palefaces have abundantly supplied such deficiencies.
There is one legend, however, that seems to have had its foundation in fact—that of the tragedy at Maiden Rock, or Lover's Leap, the bold headland jutting out into Lake Pepin on the Wisconsin side, some six or eight miles below the head of the lake. Dr. Bunnell devoted much study to this legend, and his conclusion is that it is an historic fact. Divested of the multiplicity of words and metaphor with which the Indian story-teller, the historian of his tribe, clothes his narrative, the incident was this:
In the days of Wah-pa-sha the first, chief of the Dakota band of that name, there was, in the village of Keoxa, near the site of the present Minnesota city of Winona, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, a maiden whose name was Winona (Wi-no-na: first-born daughter). She had formed an attachment for a young hunter of the tribe, which was fully reciprocated by the young man. They had met often, and agreed to a union, on which all their hopes of happiness centered. But on applying to her family, the young suitor was curtly dismissed with the information that the girl had been promised to a warrior of distinction who had sued for her hand. Winona, however, persisted in her preference for the hunter; whereupon the father took measures to drive him out of the village, and the family began to use harsh measures to coerce the maiden into a union with the warrior whom they had chosen for her husband. She was finally assured that she was, with or without her consent, to be the bride of the man of their choice.
About this time a party was formed to go to Lake Pepin to lay in a store of blue clay, which they used as a pigment. Winona, with her family, was of the party. Arriving at their destination the question of her marriage with the warrior again came up, and she was told that she would be given to him that very day. Upon hearing this final and irrevocable decree the girl withdrew, and while the family were preparing for the wedding festival she sought the top of the bluff now known as Maiden Rock. From this eminence she called down to her family and friends, telling them that she preferred death to a union with one she did not love, and began singing her death song. Many of the swiftest runners of the tribe, with the warrior to whom she had been sold, immediately ran for the summit of the cliff in order to restrain her; but before they reached her she jumped headlong from the height, and was dashed to pieces on the jagged rocks a hundred and fifty feet below.
This story was in 1817 related to Major Long, of the United States Army, by a member of Wahpasha's tribe, Wa-ze-co-to, who claimed to have been an eyewitness of the tragedy. Wazecoto was an old man at the time, and his evident feeling as he related the tale went far toward convincing Major Long that the narrator was reciting the tale of an actual occurrence.
Maiden Rock itself is a bluff about four hundred feet in height. One hundred and fifty feet of it is a sheer precipice; the other two hundred and fifty is a steep bluff covered with loose rocks, and grown up to straggling scrub oaks. Some versions of the legend state that Winona in her grief leaped from the bluff into the waters of the lake and was drowned. On my only visit to the top of the Leap, in company with Mr. Wilson, the mate, we found it somewhat difficult to throw a stone into the water from the top of the bluff. If Winona made it in one jump she must have been pretty lithe, even for an Indian.
I hope that I may not be dubbed an iconoclast, in calling attention to the fact that Indian stories similar to this have been localized all over our country. Lovers' Leaps can be counted by the score, being a part of the stock in trade of most summer resorts. Another difficulty with the tale is, that the action of the young pair does not comport with the known marriage customs of Indians.