In Lover’s Leap Legends we devoted 66 of 352 pages to the Maid of the Mist legend. These sob stories of a beautiful Indian maiden (usually pictured nude), sent over Niagara Falls in a canoe as a sacrifice to appease various gods, are not technically Lover’s Leaps but they clearly derive from the same indifference to ethnological truth. In both, a “dusky maiden” dies in the end—usually.

Maid of the Mist narratives were hugely popular and had many spinoffs. Recently, we acquired a 1910-1911 New York Hippodrome souvenir program. On the cover is a flakey adaptation of James Francis Brown’s naked Indian girl in a canoe cresting the falls. Curiously, the theater’s dance version does not result in her death. Twice she is in her canoe headed for destruction but is rescued both times. To sweeten the conclusion even more, the two warring Indian tribes grasp the futility of their conflict and the enemy tribes “bury the hatchet.” Princess Ioneta and the handsome young chief are united in marriage.

With seating for 5,300 (the largest playhouse in the world) the New York Hippodrome opened in 1905 with “A Yankee Circus on Mars,” complete with space ships, elephants, a Spanish clown, a baboon named Coco, and hundreds of singers and dancers.

The Ballet of Niagara was less surrealistic and spectacular. Its rendition of Niagara Falls did draw press praise for its realism and there was a snake dance featuring lovely Indian maidens handling large, presumably fake serpents. The relation of handling snakes to the plot is unknown.

The gigantic theater’s overhead was so enormous it never made a profit and was demolished in 1939.