Hiawatha, Kansas 1858, and the first school opened in 1870. The main street was designated Oregon Street after the Oregon Trail. Parallel streets north of it were named after Indian tribes north of the Trail, and streets south carried tribal names of those south of the Trail. Hiawatha is named after a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called "The Song of Hiawatha". In the poem is legendary Onondaga and Mohawk Indian leader Hiawatha. Adjacent to the former Ioway-Sac reservation and the present-day Ioway Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, Hiawatha is called "Hári Wáta" in Ioway, meaning "I am looking far away". This
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