The Song of Hiawatha 1950). American landscape painters referred to the poem to add an epic dimension to their patriotic celebration of the wonders of the national landscape. Albert Bierstadt presented his sunset piece, "The Departure of Hiawatha," to Longfellow in 1868 when the poet was in England to receive an honorary degree at the University of Cambridge. Other examples include Thomas Moran's "Fiercely the Red Sun Descending, Burned His Way along the Heavens" (1875), held by the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the panoramic waterfalls of "Hiawatha and Minnehaha on their Honeymoon" (1885) by Jerome Thompson (1814 – 1886). Thomas Eakins made
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