The Myth of Hiawatha and Other Oral Legends: The Source of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha

The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, featuring an Indian hero and loosely based on legends and ethnography of the Ojibwe (Chippewa, Anishinaabeg) and other Native American peoples contained in the writings of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. In sentiment, scope, overall conception, and many particulars, the poem is very much a work of American Romantic literature, not a representation of Native American oral tradition, although Longfellow insisted, "I can give chapter and verse for these legends. Their chief value is that they are Indian legends." Longfellow had originally planned on following Schoolcraft in calling his hero Manabozho, the name of the Ojibwe trickster-transformer in use along the south shore of Lake Superior at the time, but in his journal entry for June 28, 1854, he wrote, "Work at 'Manabozho;' or, as I think I shall call it, 'Hiawatha'"that being another name for the same personage." Hiawatha was not, in fact, "another name for the same personage" (the mistaken identification was actually made by Schoolcraft then compounded by Longfellow), but a probable historical figure associated with the founding of the League of the Iroquois.