Texas Tales: Lover's Leaps

Knowing their love can never be, the young couple stare at the swirling river far below. One last kiss, and then, holding hands, they leap off the cliff, united forever in death - and legend.

Texas has at least four landmarks known as Lover's Leaps, and probably more. Telling the story of the Lover's Leap at Junction, in 1916 J.E. Grinstead fell back on verse in his magazine, Grinstead's Graphic:

"Thus they stood a single moment, On that rocky, towering heap; Then, they named the place forever-As they made the Lover's Leap."

The tales associated with precipices are touching, to be sure, but believing them takes a considerable leap of faith. Unrequited love has produced many a suicide, but jumping couples are far less common in fact than fiction.

Even so, mankind has been enthralled by Lover's Leap stories for a long time. Sappho of the Isle of Lesbos leaped into the Ionian Sea from a towering white rock because she had fallen in love with Phaon.

In another ancient story, Hero, a young priestess of Apollo, hurled herself into the sea when she learned of her lover Leander's death. Marlowe transformed Hero's story into poetry in the 16^th century.

The basic story crossed the Atlantic to North America, then slowly moved west with the development of the continent. Americans Westernized the tale in an interesting way: Instead of American girls and boys leaping from cliffs, most of the legends centered on the double suicide of Indians.

Why Indians? Some scholars have suggested the preoccupation came from the American desire to romanticize the displaced noble red man. In other words, we will take your land but give you some enduring legends.

The best known Lover's Leap in Texas is the cliff overlooking the Brazos River in Waco's Cameron Park. It's such a well known landmark that there's a church named after it - Lover's Leap Baptist. (No, this column is not a work of fiction. Check the Waco phone book.)

As one early account summarized the story of this spot, "Here an Indian brave and his sweetheart jumped to their death because their parents would not let them marry."

A hundred miles south of Waco, Austin's Lover's Leap is Mount Bonnell. Austin being notable for doing things its own, weird way, the story here is backward.

The woman who plunges to her doom from Mount Bonnell, a prominent feature above the Colorado River, is one Antonette, a European woman captured by the Comanches from the Spanish settlement of San Antonio. When her lover came to rescue her from the Indians, they killed him. Seeing that, Antonette opted for death.

The Austin story may be Texas' oldest example of a variety of the Lover's Leap legend. Newspaper writer and novelist James Burchett Ransom told the story for the first time in "Antonette's Leap and the Death of Legrand, or, A legend of the Colorado," in the Austin Gazette of March 18, 1840.

West Texas has two Lover's Leaps. One the precipice two miles from Junction in Kimble County, first written about by Grinstead.

Texas' least-known Lover's Leap is a cliff on the Devil's River. Again, the story here is a little different: An overly-protective Indian chief and his warriors attacked the chief's daughter and her lover, both of them having fallen out of tribal favor.

The smitten couple leaped to their death in the river just ahead of dad and his friends.

The chief got to the bluff just in time to see the love sick couple sink beneath the water for the final time. At that, the chief called out that this must be the Devil's river and dropped dead, taken by a guilty conscience-induced heart attack.

Of course, Indians of long ago did not practice Christianity and had no concept of hell. In truth, Texas Ranger Capt. Jack Hays is credited with giving the Devil's River its name, but that's another story.