Beltrami and the Source of the Mississippi
Minnesota
Somewhere near here, in the late summer of eighteen twenty-three, an Italian exile decided he had found the source of the Mississippi River.
His name was Giacomo Costantino Beltrami, a jurist and adventurer who had fled political trouble in Italy and wandered halfway across America. He had attached himself to a government expedition, then struck off largely on his own, guided for part of the way by Ojibwe people.
In late August he reached a small heart-shaped lake and christened it Lake Julia, after a beloved friend who had died. He declared it the true headwaters of both the Mississippi and the Red River of the North.
He was wrong. Years later Henry Schoolcraft identified Lake Itasca as the real source. But Beltrami's name stuck to the county all around you, a monument to a confident, romantic, mistaken explorer.
