One of the stops along the 2.3-mile-long Kenduskeag Stream Trail in Bangor is an observation deck perched atop the remnants of an old sawmill, overlooking the stream and, beyond that, the 150-foot cliff known as Lover’s Leap.
The name comes from a local legend about two lovers — a beautiful young Penobscot girl and a white settler, as the sign at the observation deck states — who were forbidden to be together. Unable to bear the burden of a life without each other, they leapt to their deaths, sometime in the distant past.
It’s a romantic story, for sure, and one with enduring allure for its drama and tragedy, even as the story specifics have morphed over the years. But as with the spot in Bangor and the more than 35 other places around the country also called Lover’s Leap, it is almost certainly not true.
“The story of star-crossed Penobscot lovers who jumped to their deaths is pure fiction, but it’s part of the city’s folklore and lots of fun to read over,” Bangor historian Dick Shaw said in a 2016 interview with the Bangor Daily News.
Locations called lover’s leap have been around for centuries. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the earliest usage of “lover’s leap” to sometime in the 18th century. The idea of a lovesick person choosing suicide over life without their loved one goes back far longer, however.
One of the earliest examples is the legend that ancient Greek poet Sappho, distraught over unrequited love for a man, leapt to her death from a cliff, though many scholars believe this story was either a mistranslation or an intentional attempt to downplay Sappho’s homosexuality. Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” is also, of course, a famed example of the suicidal lovers literary trope.
Later, legends developed around the apocryphal character of Winona, the daughter of a chief and a so-called “Indian princess” from the Dakota Sioux tribe — despite the fact that North American Indigenous cultures do not see their leaders as royalty and do not have an equivalent word for “princess.” In tales that almost certainly stem from stories told by white settlers, Winona was also one of those lovesick young women who jumped from lover’s leap.
By the mid-1800s, stories of leaping lovers and their cliffs were widespread all across the country. In West Virginia, the Lover’s Leap cliff at Hawks Nest State Park is named for young Indigenous lovers, as is one on Lookout Mountain in Georgia. In those cases, the lovers were from differing tribes, while at Maiden Rock in Wisconsin, it’s only the woman who leaps.
The legend has even made it as far as Guam, with one of the island’s most famous landmarks, Two Lovers Point, named for a Spanish and Indigenous Chamorro couple who, knowing they could never be together, tied their hair together and leapt from the cliff into the ocean. And a version of it exists in Jamaica, with the leaping lovers this time being enslaved Africans who chose to die rather than be separated by the man who owned them.
The legend is so widespread that Mark Twain himself commented in “Life on the Mississippi” that “there are fifty Lover’s Leaps along the Mississippi from whose summit disappointed Indian girls have jumped.”
So it’s not surprising that Bangor would also have its own take on the lover’s leap legend. Poems in magazines and books published in Bangor as far back as the 1860s use flowery language to describe the goo-goo eyes that the smitten young Bangor couple made at each other, before being separated by society and driven to self-destruction.
Later publications, including the 1904 book “A National Paean: Poems and Songs” by Bangor author Walter Allen Rice, make more specific mentions of the doomed couple, who have been variously named Tahiti and Shawano, or Raven Hair and Iron Hand. All made-up names, of course, and quite culturally insensitive, given that Tahiti is an island in the South Pacific and not a word in any Wabanaki language.
And yet, the name for the cliff remains, and the legend continues, even though nobody believes it’s true. And the fact that, in nearly all of these stories, the couple in question is composed of people who have been historically oppressed and marginalized by white society cannot be a coincidence.
Fiction sometimes tells us more about the world than the truth can — whether it’s an uncomfortable reality, or a reminder of the power of love.