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 "The arrow-maker and his daughter", later called "The Wooing of Hiawatha", was modelled in 1866 and carved in 1872. By that time she had achieved success with individual heads of Hiawatha and Minnehaha. Carved in Rome, these are now held by the Newark Museum in New Jersey. In 1872 Lewis carved "The Marriage of Hiawatha" in marble, a work purchased in 2010 by the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. Other 19th-century sculptors inspired by the epic were Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose marble statue of the seated Hiawatha (1874) is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Jacob Fjelde, who created a