Ojibwe of the key trade languages of the Great Lakes and the northern Great Plains. The popularity of the epic poem "The Song of Hiawatha", written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1855, publicized the Ojibwe culture. The epic contains many toponyms that originate from Ojibwe words. According to Ojibwe oral history and from recordings in birch bark scrolls, the Ojibwe originated from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River on the Atlantic coast of what is now Quebec. They traded widely across the continent for thousands of years as they migrated, and knew of the canoe routes to move north, west
The Song of Hiawatha bronze statue, "Hiawatha carrying Minnehaha", for the Columbian Exposition in 1893. It was installed in Minnehaha Park, Minneapolis, in 1912 (illustrated at the head of this article). In the 20th century Marshall Fredericks created a small bronze Hiawatha (1938), now installed in the Michigan University Centre; a limestone statue (1949), also at the University of Michigan; and a relief installed at the Birmingham Covington School, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Early paintings were by artists who concentrated on authentic American Native subjects. Eastman Johnson's pastel of Minnehaha seated by a stream (1857) was drawn directly from an Ojibwe model. The English artist