Hiawatha and Minnehaha and recited parts of Longfellow's poem as part of the program. Fjelde's Hiawatha and Minnehaha sculpture soon became a visitor attraction in the park, and postcards depicting it were widely available. As of 2011, the sculpture remains in its location along Minnehaha Creek and is one of Fjelde's best-known works. Hiawatha and Minnehaha Hiawatha and Minnehaha is a sculpture by Jacob Fjelde that has stood in Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis since the early twentieth century. Now a popular fixture of the park, its placement there was originally controversial. In 1855, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published a book-length poem entitled "The Song
The Song of Hiawatha most influential book of 1855. Lydia Sigourney was inspired by the book to write a similar epic poem on Pocahontas, though she never completed it. English writer George Eliot called "The Song of Hiawatha", along with Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", the "two most indigenous and masterly productions in American literature". Longfellow's poem was taken as the first American epic to be composed of North American materials and free of European literary models. Earlier attempts to write a national epic, such as "The Columbiad" of Richard Snowden (1753–1825), ‘a poem on the American war’ published in 1795, or Joel Barlow's