Essay | The Death of a Beautiful Woman: Unpacking the Legends of Winona

WINONA – The statue of Winona, created by Isabel Moore Kimball in 1902, hardens the loose details of the “Princess Winona” legends into a solid myth. Many of the “facts” about the various Winona stories do not chime well with each other, and their basis in verified history is not well established. One fact is clear: The term “Winona” refers to “first-born daughter.”

A portrait drawing of Zebulon Pike. (Photo courtesy of Independence National Historical Park)

The “Princess Winona” story was first invented by Zebulon Pike (said to have “discovered” Pike’s Peak), who writes what his Indigenous guide told him sometime in 1805 as they were paddling on the Mississippi.

“I was shown a point of rocks from which a Sioux maiden cast herself and was dashed to a thousand pieces on the rocks below. She had been informed that her friends intended matching her to a man she despised; having been refused the man she had chosen, she ascended to the hill, singing her death song, and before they could overtake her and obviate her purpose, she took the lover’s leap! This ended her troubles with her life. A wonderful display of sentiment in a savage.” 

Four sentences.  No names, no “princess.”  Native Americans did not have kings, queens or princesses.

Most of the stories about “Princess Winona” no doubt went up as talk like smoke from campfires. In popular myths and legends the difference between truth and make-believe is hardly clear. The many versions of the Winona legend vary in basic ways, with only one feature common to almost all of them: A young Dakota woman, grief-stricken by frustrated love, leaps to her death from a high rock.

Version one from William Keeting

William Keating published the first version and based his story on Major Stephen Long’s notes and what he said he was told by an Indigenous person named Wazecota (Red Wing). In this version Winona, or Wenonoh, loves a young Dakota hunter, but her parents disapprove. Winona ascends a crag (now called Maiden Rock, near Lake City), sings her death-song, ignores the pleadings below and jumps. Wazecota claimed to have witnessed the event as a child. This version became a familiar one, often retold by those trying to explain the naming of the town Winona. 

Iconic Maiden Rock along the Mississippi River and Lake Pepin. (Photo by ©melissamn-images, via Canva.com)

Version two by Joseph Snelling

The second early version, “The Lover’s Leap,” appears in Joseph Snelling’s Tales of the Northwest (1830). This writer gives it important twists. 

Snelling tells us that Winona’s father wanted her to marry a white trader, so “she would be exempt from labor, and have plenty . . . to bestow on her aged parents.” Then, her father says, she could lead “the lazy life of a white woman, and [you could] have a white dog to do your bidding.”   

In this tale, when French trader Raymond woos her, Winona begins wishing she were dead. She contemplates death by hanging, and death by water. She and her lover, Chakopee, plan to elope, but a jealous woman betrays her. 

Winona is beaten and tied to the poles of her lodge. In exchange for two blankets, her father gives Winona to Raymond, but soon she is spotted atop the high rock. “Death I prefer,” she sings. “Look how despair can prompt the forest girl to dare.”

Winona’s father dies of a fever, and Chakopee, after thrusting splinters through his arms as a sign of mourning, has two wives within the year. 

Version three by Mary Henderson Eastman

Mary Henderson Eastman, who next records the legend (with a different spelling) as “The Lover’s Leap, or Wenona’s Rock,” gives us Wenona as a fourteen-year-old happily married to the man of her choice, “But . . . she had no child.” 

The husband brings home another wife, who then bears a child. He routinely beats Wenona, who cannot forget the love of her early youth while taking care of her drunken husband. For Eastman, Wenona’s Rock is “a monument in memory of woman’s love,” but there is no mention of a lover’s leap. Wenona’s life is dashed instead on the hard knocks of a rocky marriage. 

“In an enlightened country,” Eastman writes, “woman is . . . not only wife and mother but also the poet, the heroine, the prophetess and even the judge.”  

Version four by Hanford Gordon

In 1901 Hanford Gordon then elevated into “fact” a lengthy verse of the legend. In this version, Winona is “the belle of the village,” and desired by an undesirable warrior, Tamdoka (Buck-Deer). The scene is St. Anthony Falls (Minneapolis) rather than Wapasha’s village (Winona), and the occasion for the drama is the visit, in 1679, of Daniel DuLuth. 

After Winona falls in love with DuLuth, the jealous Tamdoka works as a guide for DuLuth, even after Winona warns DuLuth of Tamdoka’s treacherous jealousy. Winona’s father, old and weak, insists she marry Tamdoka so his family will have enough provisions to survive.

We then find her in the wilds stalking prey, eating raw meat and bringing it home to her starving family, believing that her “White Chief,” DuLuth, is coming soon. 

Instead, Tamdoka returns for her, and she flees to Lake Pepin where she invokes the white man’s God atop a cliff, sings her death song and leaps, moments before the oars of DuLuth’s boats appear just around the bend.

Wait, there’s more?

The accounts described above are just a few of the fifty or more versions of the Winona legend passed down, including a hilarious one by Mark Twain in which Winona’s leap from a cliff has crushing consequences for her parents. 

Many other locations in the U.S., some named Winona, also have “Lover’s Leaps” sites. The town named Winona, Minnesota, is stuck with the story’s elementary plot-line, and no doubt some parents there wonder what to worry about if their teenage girl’s latest romance goes sour.

After watching his young wife die of tuberculosis in 1847, Edgar Allan Poe declared the “death of a beautiful woman” as unquestionably the most poetic subject imaginable. 

Oh? 

Or is it that when we speak of “falling” in love – of abandoning ourselves to a delirious flight from the world’s troubles –  we (perhaps) learn that such a flight can rudely let us down.