The Song of Hiawatha, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was written in 1855 and set on the southern shore of Lake Superior, the largest of the five Great Lakes and the largest fresh water lake in North America. The poem is connected to the Pictured Rocks area of the lakeshore. Hiawatha, a Chippewa warrior, and Minehaha, his true love, played out a tragic love story in the beautiful poem on the Pictured Rocks Seashore.
The poem is also connected to Lake Superior because of one of the most famous lines in the poem……”by the shores of Gitche-Gumee, by the shining Big-Sea-Water…”. Gitche-Gumee was the Chippewa name for Lake Superior or the Big Sea Water.
Pictured Rocks Seashore is a beautiful place on an exquisite lake….a place I’ve visited many times since the ancestral home of my father is quite near the area and is itself near the shores of Gitche-Gumee.
Here is The Song of Hiawatha, compliments of YouTube:
*Image by Laurel Gillespie 2014
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