Minneapolis–Saint Paul Grand Excursion, a trip into the Upper Midwest sponsored by the Rock Island Railroad, brought more than a thousand curious travelers into the area by rail and steamboat in 1854. The next year, in 1855, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published "The Song of Hiawatha", an epic poem based on the Ojibwe legends of Hiawatha. A number of natural area landmarks were included in the story, such as Lake Minnetonka and Minnehaha Falls. Tourists inspired by the coverage of the Grand Excursion in eastern newspapers and those who read Longfellow's story flocked to the area in the following decades. At one time,
The Song of Hiawatha the time, and the mutilated score was not revised and recorded until 2009. The other instance was the poem's connection with Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, "From the New World" (1893). In an article published in the "New York Herald" on December 15, 1893, he said that the second movement of his work was a "sketch or study for a later work, either a cantata or opera ... which will be based upon Longfellow's "Hiawatha"" (with which he was familiar in Czech translation), and that the third movement scherzo was "suggested by the scene at the feast in Hiawatha where