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 (Coleridge-Taylor) was published as The Song of Hiawatha and had its first complete performance in 1900, at the Royal Albert Hall. The later parts of the overall work were not nearly as successful as the first part, "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast", which continued to be regarded as a work in its own right and received many hundreds of performances in the UK and overseas countries such as the USA, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand. It became so famous in Britain that for many years it rivalled Handel's "Messiah" and Mendelssohn's "Elijah" in the public's affections. Nothing else he ever wrote equalled