Ojibwe of the key trade languages of the Great Lakes and the northern Great Plains. The popularity of the epic poem "The Song of Hiawatha", written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1855, publicized the Ojibwe culture. The epic contains many toponyms that originate from Ojibwe words. According to Ojibwe oral history and from recordings in birch bark scrolls, the Ojibwe originated from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River on the Atlantic coast of what is now Quebec. They traded widely across the continent for thousands of years as they migrated, and knew of the canoe routes to move north, west
The Song of Hiawatha an artistic production, Longfellow ... omitted all that aspect of the Manabozho saga which considers the culture hero as a trickster," this despite the fact that Schoolcraft had already diligently avoided what he himself called "vulgarisms." In his book on the development of the image of the Indian in American thought and literature, Pearce wrote about "The Song of Hiawatha": Apparently no connection, apart from name, exists between Longfellow's hero and the sixteenth-century Iroquois chief Hiawatha who co-founded the Iroquois League. Longfellow took the name from works by Schoolcraft, whom he acknowledged as his main source. In his notes to