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 Bridge (long poem) Brooklyn Bridge, and which was actually the first part of the overall poem finished despite its reservation for the end. Upon its publication, "The Bridge" received mostly negative reviews. Yvor Winters, a contemporary and friend of Crane's who had praised Crane's previous book, "White Buildings", wrote one such review, in which he associated Crane's book with Modernist works by James Joyce and William Carlos Williams. Due to his disparaging views toward Modernism as a whole, Winters viewed such an association negatively. In Winter's own words, "The Bridge" "has no narrative framework and so lacks the formal unity of an epic."