The Song of Hiawatha of Longfellow's poem nevertheless led to the name "Hiawatha" becoming attached to a number of locales and enterprises in areas more historically associated with the Ojibwe than the Iroquois. The poem was published on November 10, 1855, by Ticknor and Fields and was an immediate success. In 1857, Longfellow calculated that it had sold 50,000 copies. Longfellow chose to set "The Song of Hiawatha" at the Pictured Rocks, one of the locations along the south shore of Lake Superior favored by narrators of the Manabozho stories. The "Song" presents a legend of Hiawatha and his lover "Minnehaha" in 22 chapters
Hiawatha Hiawatha Hiawatha (also known as Ayenwathaaa, Aiionwatha, or "Haiëñ'wa'tha" [ha.jẽʔ.waʔ.tha] in Onondaga) was a colonial American Indian leader and co-founder of the Iroquois Confederacy. He was a leader of the Onondaga people or the Mohawk people or both. According to some accounts, he was born an Onondaga but adopted into the Mohawk. Hiawatha was a follower of the Great Peacemaker (Deganawida), a Huron prophet and spiritual leader who proposed the unification of the Iroquois peoples, who shared common ancestry and similar languages, but he suffered from a severe speech impediment which hindered him from spreading his proposal. Hiawatha was a