Having reached the ultimate geographical point visited by the expedition, I thought it due to the energy and enlightened zeal of the gentleman who had led us, to mark the event by naming this body of water in my journal Cassina, or Cass Lake. There was the more reason for this in the nomenclature of the geography of the upper Mississippi, by observing that it embraces another Red Cedar Lake. The latitude of upper Red Cedar, or Cass Lake, is placed by Pike at 47° 42´40´´.[74] Its distance above Sandy Lake, by the involutions of the river, is two hundred and seventy miles, and from Fond du Lac, at the head of Lake Superior, by the travelled route, four hundred and thirty miles. It is situated seventeen degrees north of the Gulf of Mexico, from which it is computed to be distant two thousand nine hundred and seventy-eight geographical miles. Estimating the distance to the actual origin of the river, as determined at a subsequent period, at one hundred and eighty-two miles above Cass Lake, the length of the Mississippi River is shown to be three thousand one hundred and sixty miles,[75] making a direct line over the earth's surface of more than half the distance from the arctic circle to the equator. It may also be observed of the Mississippi, that its sources lie in a region of snows and long-continued winter, while it enters the ocean under the latitude of perpetual verdure; and at last, as if disdaining to terminate its career at the ordinary point of embouchure of other large rivers, has protruded its banks into the Gulf of Mexico, more than a hundred miles beyond any other part of the main. To have visited both the source and the mouth of the stream has fallen to the lot of but few, and I believe there is no person living beside myself of whom the remark can be made. On the tenth of July, 1819, I passed out of the mouth of the Mississippi in a brig bound for New York, after descending it in a steamboat from St. Louis, but little thinking I should soon visit its waters, yet, on the twenty-first of July of the following year, I reached its sources in this lake. [74] Nicollet, in the report of his exploration of 1836, places it in 47° 25´ 23´´. [75] _Vide_ Expedition to Stasca Lake in 1832.