The Song of Hiawatha The Song of Hiawatha The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem in trochaic tetrameter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that features Native American characters. The epic relates the fictional adventures of an Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha and the tragedy of his love for Minnehaha, a Dakota woman. Events in the story are set in the Pictured Rocks area on the south shore of Lake Superior. Longfellow's poem, though based on native oral traditions surrounding the figure of Manabozho, represents not a work of transmission but an original work of American Romantic literature. Longfellow's sources for the legends and ethnography
The Song of Hiawatha his "Hiawatha" (c.1874) a visionary statement superimposed on the fading light of the sky. Toward the end of the 19th century, artists deliberately emphasized the epic qualities of the poem, as in William de Leftwich Dodge's "Death of Minnehaha" (1885). Frederic Remington demonstrated a similar quality in his series of 22 grisailles painted in oil for the 1890 deluxe photogravure edition of "The Song of Hiawatha." One of the editions is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dora Wheeler's "Minnehaha listening to the waterfall" (1884) design for a needle-woven tapestry, made by the Associated Artists for the Cornelius Vanderbilt