Minnehaha Falls....A Pictorial Essay and tribute to HW Longfellow

[bvar22]

Text selected from Longfellow's
"A Song of Hiawatha" 1853

Photos are from Minnehaha Falls Park in Minneapolis
































"Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote The Song of Hiawatha in 1853 in an attempt to capture the Native American spirit in epic verse. In 1851 Longfellow was given a print of Brown's Falls near Fort Snelling. He never saw the Falls in person, but was inspired by the image.

Longfellow also gathered information about the Dakotas and Ojibwe from a book in 1849 by Mary Eastman. It is from her book that the name "Minnehaha" originated. She believed the Dakotas called the falls "Minne-hah-hah" or laughing waters. Although there is no factual basis to support her translation, both the Dakotas and the settlers began calling the falls Minnehaha. With the publication of the poem in 1853, the falls were forever renamed."---from the Memorial Fountain in Minnehaha Park




My apologies to Longfellow. I was unable to include the unabridged text from The Song of Hiawatha which is over 120 pages in length. It was an agonizing task to select the few particles represented here. The entire work is beautiful and to be fully appreciated should be read in its unabridged form.

You can find the unabridged version here:
http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/hiawatha.html



Pictures taken with an Olympus C-750 on auto, cropped and resized with Corel PhotoPaint 10, layout formatted with CorelDraw 10.

[alfredo]

1. Very good. Great presentation.

[bvar22]

2. Thanks!

Love the photo in your sig line!
Great minds think alike!

[alfredo]

3. You did a very good job

It's not overdone, not overly romantic, and the images compliment the text.

BTW, that image is a link to my anti bush site.

[kliljedahl]

4. Nicely done, Kudos to you

Keith’s Barbeque Central