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Through the far-resounding forest,
Through the forest vast and vacant
Rang that cry of desolation,
But there came no other answer
Than the echo of his crying,
Than the echo of the woodlands,
"Minnehaha! Minnehaha!"
All day long roved Hiawatha
In that melancholy forest,
Through the shadow of whose thickets,
In the pleasant days of Summer,
Of that ne'er forgotten Summer,
He had brought his young wife homeward
From the land of the Dacotahs;
When the birds sang in the thickets,
And the streamlets laughed and glistened,
And the air was full of fragrance,
And the lovely Laughing Water
Said with voice that did not tremble,
"I will follow you, my husband!"
In the wigwam with Nokomis,
With those gloomy guests that watched her,
With the Famine and the Fever,
She was lying, the Beloved,
She, the dying Minnehaha.
"Hark!" she said; "I hear a rushing,
Hear a roaring and a rushing,
Hear the Falls of Minnehaha
Calling to me from a distance!"
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
an excerpt from
"The Song of Hiawatha"
Minnetonka Review is headquartered on Lake Minnetonka, which is one of the largest lakes in Minnesota, located just west of the Twin Cities. The lake was first discovered by two children paddling up Minnehaha Creek from Fort Snelling. In 1852, Minnesota's territorial governor, Alexander Ramsey, named the lake after hearing the native Dakota people refer to it as minn-ni-tanka, which means "Great Waters." Soon thereafter, the first hotel was built on its shores and in 1855, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made the area famous with his epic poem, "The Song of Hiawatha. Minnehaha, the heroine of his poem, was named after the creek that flows from Lake Minnetonka to become a tributary of the Mississippi. Minnehaha is the word for waterfall, or "laughing waters."
