To add to their grief, White Cloud issued an order forbidding marriages while the tribe was preparing for its attack of vengeance, for the most cherished plan of the lovers was that they should be married on the day preceding Mewanee’s departure. Now, however, their plans were broken. All Winona’s pleadings were in vain. White Cloud, her father, shook his head in obstinate refusal of their marriage. At their farewell meeting, even Mewanee allowed his love for Winona to show as he comforted her and promised eternal faith. His love, he told her, would reach out to her from the Happy Hunting Grounds and beckon her to him. And Winona whispered that she would come at his slightest call. As their lips met in a last, long, unaccustomed kiss, the drum signaled the inevitable separation.
And so, among the other braves, Mewanee rode away to the north to begin the raid on the mission. Winona was left at camp—to wait. Days passed with no word of the warriors or of the result of their undertaking. Then suddenly, just at noon, when the watcher on the summit of the cliff could see farthest over the valley toward hated Menard, he gave a mighty shout. He could discern the returning warriors. They traveled swiftly, and in a short time reached the camp. Even at a distance the watchers perceived that the raid from which their braves were returning had been successful. Each was weighted with plunder from the soldiers and from the mission. But their faces and their scanty number gave the lie to all these signs of success. [[167]]It was at once evident that fewer men, by far, were returning than had gone out. Winona’s quick eye gave her instant proof that her lover had not returned.
His companions told her of his death at the hands of a Spanish soldier who had stabbed him in the back while he was engaged in a violent hand-to-hand combat with his enemy, Don Juan. Winona heard the story as in a dream. More real to her was a spirit voice calling, calling insistently.
When the moon rose over the cliff that night it outlined a solitary figure upon the bluff. Only for an instant, however, did the silhouette remain stationary. With a gesture of grief and longing, the figure flung out its arms and dropped over the edge into the vast darkness below. The water flowed on, lapping against the rocks upon which Winona lay, broken and lifeless. Her soul had answered the call from the Happy Hunting Grounds. And to this day the cliff, called “Lover’s Leap” because of this wild plunge, stands as an everlasting monument to the exceeding love and faith of the simple Indian maiden.
Some facts relative to the legend follow. 1. The headwaters of the Llano River were once a refuge for Indians. 2. There was a mission near Menard. It was destroyed by Indians. 3. Evidences of the camp at the foot of the cliff are plain. 4. In tribal emergencies marriage was sometimes (perhaps rarely) forbidden. I realize that there are slight grounds for such a statement, but it is a part of the legend as given by my informants. 5. The legend is given as told me by Frank H. Wilson and N. R. Skaggs (about seventy-five years old) of Junction.
[1] Originally there were two Spanish sites in the Menardville vicinity, both founded in 1757: the presidio, San Luis de Las Amarillas, on the north bank of the San Saba River, and the mission, San Sabá, three miles south. In 1758 the Comanches destroyed the mission; then the presidio was strengthened and maintained until 1769. The remains of it are yet to be seen at Menard. The mission was established for the benefit of the Apaches; their hereditary enemies, the Comanches, from the north, regarded the Spanish policy of trying to Christianize the Apaches as an act of war. In the middle of the eighteenth century, it is hardly necessary to say, the Comanches and Apaches were not yet “remnants.” The Cheyennes and Arapahoes never got as far south as the San Saba. The whole story of the San Saba settlement is to be found in two monographs by William Edward Dunn: “Missionary Activities among the Eastern Apaches Previous to the Founding of the San Sabá Mission,” Texas State Historical Association Quarterly, XV, 186–200; and “The Apache Mission on the San Sabá River; its Founding and its Failure,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, XVI, 379–414. Dr. Bolton in his Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, pp. 78–101, gives a succinct account of “The Apache Missions and the War with the Northern Tribes.”—Editor. [↑]
THE WAITING WOMAN
By John R. Craddock