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 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