by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
with illustrations from designs by
Frederic Remington

Copyright, 1855,

BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.

Copyright, 1883,

BY ERNEST W. LONGFELLOW.

Copyright, 1890,

BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.

Evangeline, published in 1847, was followed by The Golden Legend in 1851, and that by Hiawatha in 1855. The general purpose to make use of Indian material appears to have been in the poet's mind for some time, but the conception as finally wrought was formed in the summer of 1854. He writes in his diary under date of June 22, "I have at length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians, which seems to me the right one and the only. It is to weave together their beautiful traditions into a whole. I have hit upon a measure, too, which I think the

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right and only one for such a theme." A few days before, he had been reading with great delight the Finnish epic Kalevala, and this poem suggested the measure and may well have reminded him also of the Indian legends, which have that likeness to the Finnish that springs from a common intellectual stage of development and a general community of habits and occupation.

An interest in the Indians had long been

felt by Mr. Longfellow, and in his early plans
for sketches tales about the Indians had
prose
a place. He had seen a few of the straggling
remainder of the Algonquins in Maine; had
read Heckewelder while in college; had wit-
nessed the display of Black Hawk and his
Sacs and Foxes on Boston Common; and a
few
years before he had made the acquaintance
of the fine-tempered Kah-ge-ga-gah’bowh, the
Ojibway chief, and had entertained him at
his house, trusting not unlikely that he might
derive from the Indian helpful suggestion.

No sooner had his floating ideas of a work taken shape than he was eager to put his plans into execution. "I could not help this evening," he wrote June 25, " making a beginning of Manabozho, or whatever the poem is to be

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