Hiawatha, Kansas Hiawatha, Kansas Hiawatha (Ioway: "Hári Wáta" pronounced ) is the largest city and county seat of Brown County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 3,172. Hiawatha was founded in 1857, making it one of the oldest towns in the state. John M. Coe, John P. Wheller, and Thomas J. Drummond were instrumental in organizing the city, and the site was staked out February 17, 1857. B.L. Rider reportedly was responsible for naming Hiawatha, taking the young Indian's name from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, "The Song of Hiawatha". Hiawatha became the Brown County Seat in
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."