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 absurd, and savage as the groundwork is, Mr. LONGFELLOW has woven over it a profuse wreath of his own poetic elegancies." But, he concludes, "Hiawatha" "will never add to Mr. LONGFELLOW's reputation as a poet." Thomas Conrad Porter, a professor at Franklin and Marshall College, believed that Longfellow had been inspired by more than the metrics of the "Kalevala." He claimed "The Song of Hiawatha" was "Plagiarism" in the "Washington National Intelligencer" of November 27, 1855. Longfellow wrote to his friend Charles Sumner a few days later: "As to having 'taken many of the most striking incidents of the Finnish