Minneapolis–Saint Paul Grand Excursion, a trip into the Upper Midwest sponsored by the Rock Island Railroad, brought more than a thousand curious travelers into the area by rail and steamboat in 1854. The next year, in 1855, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published "The Song of Hiawatha", an epic poem based on the Ojibwe legends of Hiawatha. A number of natural area landmarks were included in the story, such as Lake Minnetonka and Minnehaha Falls. Tourists inspired by the coverage of the Grand Excursion in eastern newspapers and those who read Longfellow's story flocked to the area in the following decades. At one time,
The Song of Hiawatha of Hiawatha)". During World War I, Owen Rutter, a British officer of the Army of the Orient, wrote "Tiadatha", describing the city of Salonica, where several hundred thousand soldiers were stationed on the Macedonian Front in 1916–1918: Another parody was "Hakawatha" (1989), by British computer scientist Mike Shields, writing under the pen name F. X. Reid, about a frustrated computer programmer. The poem was also parodied in three cartoon shorts, all of which featured inept protagonists who are beset by comic calamities while hunting. The connection is made plain by the scenes being introduced by a mock-solemn intonation of lines