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 house, was also epic. The monumental quality survives into the 20th century in Frances Foy's "Hiawatha returning with Minnehaha" (1937), a mural sponsored during the Depression for the Gibson City Post Office, Illinois. Parodies of the "Song of Hiawatha" emerged immediately on its publication. "The New York Times" even reviewed one such parody four days before reviewing Longfellow's original poem. This was "Pocahontas: or the Gentle Savage", a comic extravaganza which included extracts from an imaginary Viking poem, "burlesquing the recent parodies, good, bad, and indifferent, on "The Song of Hiawatha."" The "Times" quoted: In 1856 there appeared a 94-page