There are several variations of the story. Winona's father is sometimes said to be Chief Wabasha (Wapasha) of a village identified as "Keoxa", now known as Winona, Minnesota, or perhaps Chief Red Wing of what is now Red Wing, Minnesota. Rather than marry a suitor she does not love, Winona chooses to leap from the cliff of Maiden Rock to her death. The story is very similar to the apocryphal legend of a young Cherokee woman of Noccalula Falls Park in Gadsden, Alabama, as well as events in James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans".