I was watching The Most Haunted Places in America or something on the Travel Channel, and one of the stories they profiled involved the daughter of an Indian chief way back in the day falling in love with a white settler. Her father forbid her from seeing him, and long story short she wound up killing herself in despair. This reminded me of a local legend in the Virginia Blue Ridge area that was practically the same thing, only the two lovers committed suicide together, jumping off a cliff (now known as Lovers’ Leap).
Anyway, the whole “Indian woman falling in love with a white man…blah, blah, blah…suicide” story seems to be a pretty common theme in American folklore. Is there any concrete basis? Or, at the very least, can you name other instances of this legend?
There are similar local legends in Panama too, such as about La India Dormida, a hill near El Valle.
These legends don’t necessarily involve a white lover, either. I’m sure I’ve heard lots of “Indian legends” about a chief’s daughter who fell in love with a warrior from another tribe and died or committed suicide and gave her name to some local landmark.
My home town of Spirit Lake, Idaho had this same stupid “legend”-two warring tribes, star-crossed lovers, they meet in the middle of the lake and drown tragically yadda yadda yadda.
I suppose the race of the lovers doesn’t matter as much, though many of the legends I’ve heard frame it as a Native girl in love with a white man. It seems to be a universal legend, the race and ethnicity of the characters tweaked and changed where needed.
There’s a cliff overlooking the Russian River with some similar legend. It’s called Indian Rock, IIRC, and it right alongside U. S. 101 at the at the southern end of Mendocino County.
Wait, I just googled it to find a pic. It seems that it was called Squaw Rock but a few years ago the name was officially changed to Frog Woman Rock.
Well yeah, it crops up in that particular version in the Americas because those two ethnicities happen to be handy, but even there, how many stories do you know where one of them (usually but not always the boy) is “from the wrong side of the tracks”? How many tons of romcoms where the couple belong to social groups that despise each other? The two cases I’m familiar with irl were a case of “boy from the wrong side of the river” and one of “the fathers just hate each other’s guts”.