Hiawatha, Kansas Hiawatha, Kansas Hiawatha (Ioway: "Hári Wáta" pronounced ) is the largest city and county seat of Brown County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 3,172. Hiawatha was founded in 1857, making it one of the oldest towns in the state. John M. Coe, John P. Wheller, and Thomas J. Drummond were instrumental in organizing the city, and the site was staked out February 17, 1857. B.L. Rider reportedly was responsible for naming Hiawatha, taking the young Indian's name from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, "The Song of Hiawatha". Hiawatha became the Brown County Seat in
The Song of Hiawatha "Vision of Columbus" (1787) (rewritten and entitled "The Columbiad" in 1807), were considered derivative. Longfellow provided something entirely new, a vision of the continent's pre-European civilisation in a metre adapted from a Finnish, non-Indo-European source. Soon after the poem's publication, composers competed to set it to music. One of the first to tackle the poem was Emile Karst, whose cantata "Hiawatha" (1858) freely adapted and arranged texts of the poem. It was followed by Robert Stoepel's "Hiawatha: An Indian Symphony", a work in 14 movements that combined narration, solo arias, descriptive choruses and programmatic orchestral interludes. The composer consulted with