Longfellow and Hiawatha

Rick Morain

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,

By the shining Big-Sea-Water, . . .

— from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha”

Kathy and I are spending a few days at the beautiful lakeside cabin of one of Kathy’s relatives. I’m sitting in a comfortable Adirondack chair, taking in the expansive southward view near Lutsen, Minn., from the north shore of Lake Superior. At least that’s what the lake was called when we arrived.

The U.S.-Canada border runs through the middle of four of the Great Lakes: Lake Superior, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and (shhh) Lake Ontario. I realize I’ll probably have ICE agents pulling up outside as soon as this is published, but I’ll continue to call it Lake Ontario instead of Lake America, even if they grab me with those electrified gloves and ship me off to Eswatini or someplace.

Who knows? Lake Superior may be next to receive a Donald Trump rechristening. Maybe he’ll want to name it in his own honor, as he so enjoys. Maybe Lake Inferior.

Lake Superior is the closest water within a day’s drive where we Midwestern landlubbers can get to anything like an ocean. The giant lake, although freshwater, certainly resembles the rocky-shored sea looking eastward from the New England coast. Its widest north-south stretch is 160 miles, about the distance from Jefferson to Iowa City. Its east-west distance is 350 miles, just slightly shorter than Jefferson to Chicago. Its maximum depth is 1,332 feet, about a quarter of a mile, straight down.

Today its surface is peaceful, almost serene. But it can quickly turn rough, with huge crashing waves, also much like the New England coast in a nor’easter. (Cf: Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”) I’ve done a lot of canoeing on North Woods lakes. I would never venture to paddle far from shore on Lake Superior.

Most of us from our school days probably remember Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem “The Song of Hiawatha.” Published in 1855, the poem is often described as interminable: 22 chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue, more than 5,000 lines of verse, some 55,750 words. Takes about 3½ hours to read aloud at an average speed, plowing through 110 to 300 pages, depending on font and page size.

Gonna go a little wonky on you here:

The poem creates a biographical fable about an Ojibwe (sometimes Ojibway, or Chippewa) hero, Hiawatha, from birth until he paddles off into the West. “Ojibwe” is not the original designation for the tribe: the tribal name is Anishinaabe.

“Hiawatha” is written in trochaic tetrameter: four two-syllable “feet" per line, with the first syllable of each foot stressed and the second syllable unstressed. Listen in your mind to the couplet at the start of this column: “BY the SHORES of GITCHee GUmee, BY the SHINing BIG-Sea-WAter, . . .” That meter continues unabated through the entire poem.

Longfellow had been reading the Finnish epic poem “The Kalevala,” which also is written in trochaic tetrameter, and found the cadences stimulating. They also resemble the steady drumbeat of native American chants, providing another impetus for adopting the meter. (Trochaic is also the same meter as the old Hamm’s Beer theme song.)

Gitche Gumee is Longfellow’s interpretation for the Anishinaabe word gichi-gami, which, as Longfellow accurately stated, means “great sea.” And the name refers to Lake Superior. Longfellow placed Hiawatha’s home on the lake’s south shore.

So how did an American poet living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, learn so many Anishinaabe words, for people’s names, animals, trees, weather, etc.? That question stumped me, so I looked into it. Here’s what I learned, and it’s fascinating:

A few years before the Civil War, the time when Longfellow wrote “Hiawatha,” he had been excitedly reading the multivolume works of Great Lakes federal Indian agent and ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, whose wife Jane was half Anishinaabe and contributed translations of tribal legends and stories to her husband’s works. Longfellow studied Schoolcraft’s writings for three years before putting pen to paper for “Hiawatha.”

(Note: Jane Schoolcraft’s Anishinaabe name was “Baamewaawaagizhigokwe.” Try signing that on your driver’s license.)

Longfellow was also a longtime friend of a prominent Anishinaabe tribal chief and writer whose English name was George Copway. The chief visited Longfellow’s home from time to time, as well as frequenting other meetings of the Boston literary community. Copway taught Longfellow specific details of the Lake Superior environs and culture.

But the real Hiawatha was not Anishinaabe. Instead, he was an Iroquois who lived in upper New York State, 300 or 400 years before Longfellow’s poem was published. The real Hiawatha helped to form the Iroquois Confederacy of Five Tribes which raided American frontier settlements for many years before and after the Revolutionary War, and which sided with the British in that war.

The actual basis of the Hiawatha of Longfellow’s poem was a legendary Anishinaabe trickster named Nanabouzhou, about whom Longfellow learned from the Schoolcrafts and Copway.

Why substitute Hiawatha’s name “Hiawatha” in the poem for the name of the original guy? Simple: Longfellow thought “Hiawatha” was a more poetic name than “Nanabouzhou.”

So the fictional hero of the long, long poem, which was an instant success in the late 1850s, was given a name stolen from an Iroquois hero. To make it weirder, the Iroquois and Anishinaabe tribes warred bitterly against each other to control beaver trapping territory in the 17th century.

Longfellow knew what would sell. Much of the Hiawatha poem is dedicated to the tragic love story of Hiawatha and Minnehaha, a beautiful Dakota woman whom Hiawatha marries to bring peace between their two tribes. Minnehaha dies in a deep winter famine, and Longfellow milks that sad episode for all it’s worth.

He also knew how to appeal to his audience’s religious bent. At the end of the poem, when the “Black-Robe chief” (the French Catholic missionary) arrives at Gitche Gumee, Hiawatha converts to Christianity and urges his people to do the same. He then bids his people farewell, launches his canoe for the last time, and paddles into the sunset toward the “Islands of the Blessed” and the “Land of the Hereafter.”

It was perhaps one of the earliest “westward into the sunset” story endings used in so many later tales, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and innumerable Hollywood Westerns.

There’s at least one more source for Longfellow’s poem, and it has an Iowa connection.

After American troops defeated the Sauk tribe in the Black Hawk War of the early 1830s, Black Hawk himself and several of the Sauk tribal leaders were brought east as prisoners in 1833, to sign the peace treaty in Washington, D.C. The chief and the others then toured several Eastern cities, including Boston.

Longfellow met personally with Black Hawk and was highly impressed. The Sauk leader described Sauk traditions and stories to Longfellow, and the poet later credited those conversations with a significant amount of the detail with which he embellished the Hiawatha poem. The Sauk language is an Algonquin dialect similar to the Anishinaabe tongue.

Greene County was part of the land cession forced on the Sauks and Mesquakies by their defeat.

I know this essay is long, as you do also if you’ve stayed with it this far. Probably my longest column ever. But there’s one more nugget I want to share.

“The Song of Hiawatha” has lent itself to many parodies down through the years. I’ll close with my favorite:

He killed the noble Mudjokivis,

With the skin he made him mittens,

Made them with the fur side inside;

Made them with the skin side outside;

He to get the warm side inside,

Put the inside skin side outside.

He, to get the cold side outside,

Put the warm side, fur side inside.

That’s why he put the fur side inside,

Why he put the skin side outside;

Why he turned them inside outside.

Rick Morain is a reporter and columnist with the Jefferson Herald.