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 Hiawatha Story Historical Society presented an "Award of Merit" to Scribbins for "The Hiawatha Story". "The Hiawatha Story" was first published by Kalmbach Publishing in 1970. The dust jacket featured a watercolor by Gil Reid, art director at Kalmbach, called "Roaring Through Rondout", depicting a Milwaukee Road class A passing through Rondout, Illinois, at speed. In 2007 the University of Minnesota Press published a reprint of "The Hiawatha Story" as part of its Fesler-Lampert Minnesota Heritage series. In place of Reid's watercolor is a nighttime photograph of a Skytop Lounge. The Hiawatha Story The Hiawatha Story is a 1970 non-fiction book on