Hiawatha, Kansas 1858, and the first school opened in 1870. The main street was designated Oregon Street after the Oregon Trail. Parallel streets north of it were named after Indian tribes north of the Trail, and streets south carried tribal names of those south of the Trail. Hiawatha is named after a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called "The Song of Hiawatha". In the poem is legendary Onondaga and Mohawk Indian leader Hiawatha. Adjacent to the former Ioway-Sac reservation and the present-day Ioway Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, Hiawatha is called "Hári Wáta" in Ioway, meaning "I am looking far away". This
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