Major Long had been accompanied from Fort Snelling to Pembina by an Italian gentleman of a romantic and enterprising nature, Giacomo Constantino Beltrami by name. Little is known of his early life beyond the facts that he had held military and civil appointments, and had, for reasons not revealed, found it desirable to absent himself from Italy. He came to America full of zeal to be the discoverer of the true source of the Mississippi, and thus place himself in the company of great Italian explorers. Agent Taliaferro came upon him in Pittsburg and offered to further his ambition. They reached Fort Snelling on the 10th of May, 1823, by the steamboat Virginia, the first steam vessel to reach that post. The crowd of wondering Indians gathered on the levee were sufficiently impressed by the bulk of the white man’s fire canoe; but the scream of her steam whistle, opportunely let out, sent them scampering far off on the prairie. When Beltrami at Pembina found Major Long pointing his canoes down the Red River, he detached himself, and with a slender outfit and uncertain guides struck out to the southeast, where he expected to find the object of his journey. After a few days of hardship he reached the south shore of Red Lake, and there he found a “bois-brulé” who guided him up a tributary then called Bloody River. It is marked “Mud Creek” on modern maps. A short portage brought him to a small, heart-shaped lake, to which he gave the name “Lake Julia,” in memory of a deceased friend. Here on the 28th of August he reports himself as resting at the most southern source of the Red River and the most northern source of the Mississippi. He found no visible outlet to his lakelet and fancied that its seepage was indifferently the true source of the two rivers. His dream fulfilled and his ambition satisfied, he made all possible haste to Fort Snelling. He proceeded to New Orleans and in the next year (1824) published in French his “Discovery of the Sources of the Mississippi.” An English version appeared under the title “A Pilgrimage in Europe and America.” Lake Julia is still on the map, lying some two miles north of Turtle Lake, which David Thompson had charted twenty-five years before. The Minnesota geologists found no connection between it and Mississippi waters. It is noteworthy that Beltrami placed on his map a “Lac la Biche” as the “western source of the Mississippi,” which later explorers identified as approximately the true source. This knowledge he may have obtained from the intelligent guide, whom he praises highly, but whose name he neglected to report.