Myths and Legends
"Purgatory," the chasm at Newport, Rhode Island, through which the sea booms loudly after a storm, was a scene of self-sacrifice to a hopeless love on the part of an Indian pair in a later century, though there is an older tradition of the seizure of a guilty squaw, by no less a person than the devil himself, who flung her from the cliff and dragged her soul away as it left her body. His hoof-marks were formerly visible on the rocks.
At Hot Springs, North Carolina, two conspicuous cliffs are pointed out on the right bank of the French Broad River: Paint Rock—where the aborigines used to get ochre to smear their faces, and which they decorated with hieroglyphics—and Lover's Leap. It is claimed that the latter is the first in this country known to bear this sentimental and tragically suggestive title. There are two traditions concerning it, one being that an Indian girl was discovered at its top by hostiles who drove her into the gulf below, the other relating to the wish of an Indian to marry a girl of a tribe with which his own had been immemorially at war. The match was opposed on both sides, so, instead of doing as most Indians and some white men would do nowadays—marry the girl and let reconciliation come in time, he scaled the rock in her company and leaped with her into the stream. They awoke as man and wife in the happy hunting-ground.
In 1700 there lived in the village of Keoxa, below Frontenac, Minnesota, on the Mississippi River, a
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