Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in London in 1875, his mother English, his father from Sierra Leone. He grew up in Croydon, Surrey, and began learning the violin at the age of 5, with his mother’s father as his first teacher. At 15, he began studying violin at the Royal College of Music in London. In his third year he changed his focus to composition, studying with Charles Villiers Stanford. He became a professional musician, professor, and conductor—and then a wildly popular composer. Currently, Coleridge-Taylor may be best known for his fame during his short lifetime (37 years): only Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah were as popular as his cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast. Also, inspired by three tours of the United States—which increased his interest in his father’s heritage—and by Johannes Brahms, and Antonín Dvořák, he developed European classical music with influences from traditional African music.

Hiawatha: Longfellow’s Literary and Ethnographic Playground
by Penelope Corbett, University of Minnesota Honors Student

Hugely popular, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha was published in 1855 and sold 30,000 copies in six months. Capturing European-American readers’ imaginations, the poem also generated numerous parodies, including Lewis Carroll’s “Hiawatha’s Photographing.” Carroll prefaced his much shorter poem with a condescending note about the trochaic meter Longfellow had chosen.

In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy. Any fairly practised writer, with the slightest ear for rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running metre of The Song of Hiawatha. Having then distinctly stated that I challenge no attention in the following little poem to its merely verbal jingle, I must beg the candid reader to confine his criticism to its treatment of the subject.

These literary pranks should have been the least of Longfellow’s concerns considering the long-lasting impacts of the poem’s inaccurate representation of Native American communities. Although Longfellow asserted that the “Indian legends” that inspired the poem were authentic, his sources were confused at best. Henry R. Schoolcraft, a well-known American ethnographer at the time, published Algic Researches in 1839 after completing his work as an Indian agent—representing the United States government—with the Anishinaabe people in Michigan. Decades later, American folklorist Stith Thompson suggested that in Schoolcraft’s “many volumes of undigested material, material that was sometimes inaccurate but always rich with the poetic lore of the tribal mythologies,” Longfellow found a treasure trove of purportedly authentic Native American folk tales for his poem.

Initially, the name of the poem’s hero was to be Manabozho, after an Anishinaabe demi-god. Many folk tales of Manabozho’s heroic and less heroic acts exist. The complexity of the demi-god’s dual role as a culture hero and trickster was lost on Schoolcraft, however, and he interpreted Manabozho as ‘‘rather a monstrosity than a deity, displaying in strong colors far more of the dark and incoherent acts of a spirit of carnality than the benevolent deeds of a god. . . . His bravery, strength, wisdom, ‘high exploits,’ clash with his ‘low tricks.’” Longfellow was intrigued by the stories of Manabozho but was looking for a less troublesome hero to appeal to his predominantly white audience’s sensibilities. Based on Schoolcraft’s mistaken claim that Hiawatha was an alternative name for Manabozho, Longfellow, according to his daughter, Alice, “blended the supernatural deeds of the crafty sprite with the wise, noble spirit of the Iroquois national hero, and formed the character of Hiawatha.’’
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A far cry from the poem’s depiction of a “white man’s Indian,” complacently accepting the arrival of white people and Christianity, in historical reality, Hiawatha was a sixteenth-century leader of the Mohawk tribe—from the region of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River—and co-founder of the League of Five Nations, a precolonial confederacy that ushered in a period of unprecedented peace for the Iroquois tribes.

Schoolcraft is not the source of all of the poem’s fabrications. Longfellow took several artistic liberties in character representation and also character creation. Minnehaha, Hiawatha’s fictional lover in the poem, from the competing Dakota tribe, was purely his invention. In his notes in the first edition of The Song of Hiawatha, the poet quoted Mary H. Eastman's description of Minnehaha Falls, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from her book Dahcotah; or, Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling (1849): “The scenery about Fort Snelling is rich in beauty. The Falls of St. Anthony are familiar to travellers, and to readers of Indian sketches. Between the fort and these falls are the ‘Little Falls,’ forty feet in height, on a stream that empties into the Mississippi. The Indians call them Mine-hah-hah, or ‘laughing waters.’” But in 1920, American geologist and archaeologist Dr. Warren Upham clarified in Minnesota Geographic Names that “The common Sioux word for waterfall is ‘haha,’ which they applied to the falls of St. Anthony, to Minnehaha, and in general to any waterfall or cascade. To join the words ‘minne,’ water, and ‘haha,’ a fall, seems to be the suggestion of white men, which thereafter came into use among the Indians.”

These discrepancies were not mentioned in Longfellow’s notes on the poem. But his invented intertribal courtship cemented itself in the public consciousness. The naming of the two adjacent main roads Hiawatha and Minnehaha Avenues within the Longfellow neighborhood of south Minneapolis, which contains the falls, is only one of numerous examples of Hiawatha-inspired place names throughout the Midwest.