Where It All Goes Down
Lake Superior (Gitche Gumee)
Longfellow decided to set The Song of Hiawatha in an area on the banks of Lake Superior, or what he thought the Native Americans of the area called "Gitche Gumee." Longfellow uses just about every chance he can to work this name into his poetry, as you get with passages like this:
Forth upon the Gitche Gumee,
On the shining Big-Sea-Water
With his fishing line of cedar,
Forth to catch the sturgeon Nahma.(8.1-8.5)
It's clear that Longfellow was blown away by the beauty of North America's natural landscape, and he puts a lot of poetic description of this setting into his poem. It's actually fair to say that Longfellow saw the pitfalls of growing cities and modern technology and tried to escape them by retreating into nature with his poetry.