Poe in the Loess Hills

Here's a stumper: what has Monona County, Iowa, to do with Edgar Allen Poe, the nightmare poet lurking in dusty old lit books? 

"Poe--Onawa?" you ask. "Why, nothing," you say.

Go to the head of the class.

Poe the brooder never came any closer than West Point, NY, but his ideas--one shady one at least--made it all the way out here, even if he never darkened a Siouxland doorway. 

Answer me this: what has Winona to do with Monona, just a quick trip south? 

"Ah," you say, "Both have Indian names--indigenous females, in fact."

Well done. We're on a roll.

Now, what has the character "Minnehaha," in Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha," have to do with Winona and Monona?

"All three are sweet Indian maidens," you say?

Yes, and, well, they all die. 

Because no one knows ye' ancient legend that gave rise to a story about this 'Monona,' most history nerds guess--yes, guess--that the story behind Monona county's name was told around the campfires of pioneer white folks, not the Omaha. White folks made up the story, including Monona's death when, heartsick, she tosses herself from the towering banks of the Missouri. White folks made up the whole thing.

Twenty years ago Pipestone, Minnesota, stopped putting on "The Song of Hiawatha," a love story that ends when death strikes the sweet Minnehaha, another beautiful young Indian maiden. Ms. Minnehaha takes no leaps, however. Fever and hunger does her beleaguered heart in. 

Pipestone had been staging the Hiawatha pageant for sixty summers, when, in 2008, they hung up the headdress. Why? A bunch of reasons, but one of them was that the Hiawatha saga--so popular a century before--seemed corny and condescending when acted out by white-faces. In 1855 "The Song of Hiawatha" was not only a best seller, but a cultural sensation. Everyone knew the story, everyone. Wasn't that way 150 years later.

Three legends of the American West, three places and three names--all ending with death, sweet and beautiful women dying.

What has this to do with Mr. E. A. Poe? Poe preached this horrifying idea that if a poem wanted to be beautiful, then it had to have death, because death makes a poem or story beautiful, especially the death of a  young woman. Hence, his own poems, like that prophetic raven repeating "Nevermore" on and on and on.

In a neighborhood that would be called "Monona County," white folks were still arriving decades after The Trail of Tears, but those rough-and-tumble pioneers somehow preferred sad stories of lost love, of heartache and grief amid the huge stretch of their wilderness home. There was plenty of horrors in Minnesota and the Dakotas back then, but for their stories, it seems they preferred Hiawatha to Red Cloud's War, fantasy to real life. 

We still may.   

Quoth the Raven, "Evermore."