Improbable Explorer: Giacomo Beltrami's Summer of Discovery

On December 30, 1822, a forty-three-year-old Italian stepped ashore in Philadelphia after a stormy Atlantic crossing, beginning one of the most unlikely visits ever made to American soil. Not even Giacomo Constantino Beltrami himself, although events proved him impetuously imaginative, could have guessed that soon he would be alone in an uncharted wilderness on a seemingly hopeless, if not suicidal, quest.
. . . Louisville was a booming town of eight thousand that surprised Beltrami since a "great number of inhabitants yearly fall sacrifice to the pestilential exhalations of the surrounding marshes, as well as the contradictory systems of the swarms of medical men by whom it is infested."
. . . At St. Louis, a frontier metropolis of seven thousand people, he saw his first Indians. He was somewhat taken aback by their "grotesque appearance" (few of the Indians he met lived up to his idealized notions of them). On April 21, Beltrami and Taliaferro boarded the steamboat Virginia to begin the seven-hundred-mile voyage to Fort St. Anthony. It was to be a history-making venture, the first steam navigation of the upper Mississippi.
. . . Taliaferro's ancestors had come from Genoa and he found Beltrami's company highly stimulating. Years later, he would recall a quick-tempered, high-spirited man who seemed to have a near-obsession with Indian lore.
. . . Sometime during his stay in Fort St. Anthony, an idea began to take shape in Beltrami¹s mind. The source of the Mississippi was as yet unknown. It seemed a reasonable assumption that the man who found it would become famous.
. . . Completely alone in a vast wilderness, Beltrami's situation was complicated by his inability to balance himself in a birchbark canoe. After a series of disastrous attempts to paddle the craft, he gave up on the traditional method of propulsion and began towing the flimsy boat.
. . . Around noon Indians in two canoes warily approached. Never before had they beheld the bizarre prospect of a white man hauling a canoe upriver, rifle in one hand, tow rope in the other. What mystified them most of all was the umbrella -- they had never seen one before and could not imagine what might be under its red skin.
. . . With the supreme moment of discovery now seemingly at hand, the Italian could barely contain his excitement. There was a small, heart-shaped lake at the crest of the hill. Beltrami named it Lake Julia in honor of his departed countess friend and triumphantly concluded that, by seepage, it was the source of both the Mississippi and the Red rivers (hydrographers have since proven him wrong, but, given the circumstances, it was a reasonable guess).
. . . Giacomo Beltrami's adventures during that remarkable summer of 1823 have a certain comic-opera quality. Yet, in all fairness, there was also something undeniably admirable about the manner in which this enthusiastic visitor braved very real dangers with courage, resourcefulness, and unfailing good humor. "While traversing eternal deserts, among barbarous tribes and unknown regions," he explored a remote corner of the New World with ravenous curiosity and resolute optimism.