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, the Messiah of the Ojibway Hiawatha, the Messiah of the Ojibway Hiawatha, the Messiah of the Ojibway is a 1903 dramatic short film shot in Canada directed by the American pioneering cinematographer and director Joe Rosenthal, based on the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous poem, "The Song of Hiawatha", made in Desbarats, Ontario, with a cast of Ojibway First Nations people. According to the "Canadian Journal of Film Studies", it was the first dramatic narrative film to be shot in Canada. At 15 minutes, "Hiawatha" was considerably longer than the usual productions of 1903, which rarely exceeded three minutes. The film's subtitle was "The Passion Play