Hiawatha and Minnehaha Hiawatha and Minnehaha Hiawatha and Minnehaha is a sculpture by Jacob Fjelde that has stood in Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis since the early twentieth century. Now a popular fixture of the park, its placement there was originally controversial. In 1855, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published a book-length poem entitled "The Song of Hiawatha". Longfellow never visited Minnesota, but he set his poem among the Ojibwe and Dakota of the region. The poem's story line was based on traditional Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tales, as recorded, sometimes incorrectly, by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. "The Song of Hiawatha" was widely read and had significant cultural influence
The Song of Hiawatha most influential book of 1855. Lydia Sigourney was inspired by the book to write a similar epic poem on Pocahontas, though she never completed it. English writer George Eliot called "The Song of Hiawatha", along with Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", the "two most indigenous and masterly productions in American literature". Longfellow's poem was taken as the first American epic to be composed of North American materials and free of European literary models. Earlier attempts to write a national epic, such as "The Columbiad" of Richard Snowden (1753–1825), ‘a poem on the American war’ published in 1795, or Joel Barlow's