Tahquamenon Falls - Michigan's Corner of Paradise

The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem, in trochaic tetrameter, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, featuring an Indian hero and loosely based on legends and ethnography of the Ojibwe (Chippewa, Anishinaabeg) and other Native American peoples contained in Algic Researches and additional writings of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Algic Researches. New York, Harper, 1839 In sentiment, scope, overall conception, and many particulars, the poem is very much a work of American Romantic literature, not a representation of Native American oral tradition, although Longfellow insisted, "I can give chapter and verse for these legends. Their chief value is that they are Indian legends."Mentor Williams, ed., Schoolcrafts Indian Legends. East Lansing, Michigan State University Press, 1956, p. 316.

Longfellow had originally planned on following Schoolcraft in calling his hero Manabozho, the name of the Ojibwe trickster-transformer in use along the south shore of Lake Superior at the time, but in his journal entry for June 28, 1854, he wrote, "Work at Manabozho;' or, as I think I shall call it, 'Hiawatha'?that being another name for the same personage." Mentor Williams, ed., Schoolcrafts Indian Legends. East Lansing, Michigan State University Press, 1956, p. 314. Hiawatha, was not, in fact, "another name for the same personage" (the mistaken identification was actually made by Schoolcraft then compounded by Longfellow), but a probable historical figure associated with the founding of the League of the Iroquois.Stith Thompson, The Indian Legend of Hiawatha. PMLA 37, 1922, p. 129 Because of the poem, however, Hiawatha came into use as a name for everything from towns to a telephone company in the upper Great Lakes region where predominantly Ojibwe, not Iroquois, reside.Eliot A. Singer, ?Paul Bunyan and Hiawatha. In C. Kurt Dewhurst and Yvonne R. Lockwood, eds. A Michigan Folklife Reader''. East Lansing, Michigan State University Press, 1987.