The OddWay News
Case Study No. 5 · · 2 Min Read
Seven of them are in this index. The story is identical at every one, it is almost always attributed to Native Americans, and the folklorists are fairly clear that it did not come from them.
Mark Twain, writing about the Mississippi, reckoned there were fifty cliffs along that river alone claiming to be a Lover's Leap.
He was not exaggerating for effect. There are seven in this index, in five states, and this index covers a fraction of them.
Two young people from groups that are at war. A forbidden attachment, discovered. A cliff. A jump, taken together rather than face separation.
Sometimes it is one person rather than two — a woman leaping after a lover who did not return from a hunt, or rather than marry a man chosen for her. The details move around; the shape does not.
Hawks Nest in West Virginia has it. Breaks in Virginia has it. Patrick County has it with a name attached, Morning Flower. Waco has it as Wah-Wah-Tee. El Dorado County has it as Osaho. Chattanooga has it as Sautee and Nacoochee.
Not from the people it is attributed to.
The scholarly position, which Wikipedia states plainly, is that these are post-contact tales — they appear in the place-name lore of North America after European arrival, not before it. They are apocryphal.
The form is much older than America. Cliff-leaping for love runs back through European literature to Sappho and the Leucadian rock. Settlers arrived carrying the story, found a dramatic cliff, and attached it — then, in the fashion of the nineteenth century, dressed it in what they imagined were Native American clothes.
You can sometimes watch it happen. At El Dorado County the cliff is called Lover's Leap in a newspaper in 1857; the full legend of the "Indian maiden Osaho" appears in the same paper in 1900, forty-three years later. At Waco the version everyone knows was popularised by a named author, Decca Lamar West, in a booklet published in 1912.
The name comes first. The legend is written afterwards to explain it.
Because the attribution is not harmless.
These stories put a particular idea into circulation: that Native people were romantic, doomed, and conveniently in the past tense. That is a nineteenth century literary fashion, and it was doing work at the time — a nation displacing living people found it comfortable to imagine them as tragic figures who had already vanished off a cliff.
The nations these tales are hung on had, and have, their own literatures. Treating a settler invention as their story does them no favours.
The cliffs are real and often magnificent, and none of the above is a reason not to stand on one.
But the interesting thing at a Lover's Leap is not the couple who did not jump. It is that you are standing at one of at least fifty identical scenes, each convinced it is the original, and that you can date most of them to a newspaper office rather than a tradition.
