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 Great South Land : An Epic Poem noted: "To say that a poem stirs the mind and heart is to give it high praise. To be able to say that it gives a new and truer significance to a subject means that it has the greatness of creative writing. This is my judgment of "The Great South Land", which is Rex Ingamells' major work and a notable achievement in Australian poetry. The greatness of it is first of all in the vision, and its special interest to us is that it is an epic—an epic for Australia." "The Age" reviewer found that the book's subject was history,