LONG AND KEATING.
The successful journey of Lewis and Clarke, as well as the somewhat useful expedition of Lieutenant Pike, led the United States Government to send in 1823 an expedition to the northern boundary line 49 deg. N., which had been settled a few years before. In charge of this was Major Stephen H. Long. He was accompanied by a scientific corps consisting of Thomas Say, zoologist and antiquary; Samuel Seymour, landscape painter and designer; and William H. Keating, mineralogist and geologist, who also acted as historian of the expedition.
Leaving Philadelphia in April, the company passed overland to Prairie du Chien on the Mississippi, ascended this river, and going up its branch, the Minnesota, reached the town of Mendota in the month of July. A well-known French half-breed, Joseph Renville, acted as guide, and several others joined the party at this point. After journeying up the Minnesota River, partly by canoe, and partly by the use of horses, they reached in thirteen days Big Stone Lake, which is considered to be the source of the river. Following up the bed of a dried-up stream for three miles, they found Lake Traverse, the source of the Red River, and reached Pembina Village, a collection of fifty or sixty log huts inhabited by half-breeds, numbering about three hundred and fifty. We have already seen how the North-West and Hudson's Bay Companies had posts at this place, and that it had been visited regularly by the Selkirk settlers as being in proximity to the open plains where buffalo could be obtained. On the day after Long's arrival he saw the return of the buffalo hunters from the chase. The procession consisted of one hundred and fifteen carts, each loaded with about eight hundred pounds of the pressed buffalo meat. There were three hundred persons, including the women. The number of horses was about two hundred. Twenty hunters, mounted on their best steeds, rode abreast, giving a salute as they passed the encampment of the expedition.
One of Major Long's objects in making his Journey was to ascertain the point where the parallel of 49 deg. N. crossed the Red River. For four days observations were taken and a flag-staff planted a short distance south of the 49th parallel. The space to the boundary line was measured off, and an oak post fixed on it, having on the north side the letters G. B., and on the south side U. S. This post was kept up and was seen by the writer in 1871. In 1872, a joint expedition of British and American engineers took observations and found Long's point virtually correct. They surveyed the line of 49 deg. eastward to Lake of the Woods and westward to the Rocky Mountains. Posts were erected at short distances along the boundary line, many of them of iron, with the words on them, "Convention of London, 1818."
His work at Pembina having been accomplished, Major Long gave up, on account of the low country to be passed, the thought of following the boundary line eastward to the Lake of the Woods. He sold his horses and took canoes down the river to the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Garry, where he was much interested in the northern civilization as well as in the settlers who had Fort Douglas as their centre.
It was August 17th when Long's expedition left Fort Douglas and went down the Red River. It took but two days to reach the mouth of the river and cross Lake Winnipeg to Fort Alexander at the mouth of the Winnipeg River. Six days more brought the swift canoe-men up the river to Lake of the Woods. At the falls of Rainy River was the Hudson's Bay Company establishment, then under the charge of fur trader McGillivray. On the opposite side of the river was the fort of the American Fur Company. Following the old route, they reached Grand Portage, September 12th, and thence the expedition returned to the East. Major Long's expedition was a well-conducted and successful enterprise. Its members were of the highest respectability, and the two volumes written by Secretary Keating have the charm of real adventure about them.
BELTRAMI'S DASH.
When Major Long was leaving Fort Snelling, on the Mississippi, to go upon the expedition we have just described, an erratic but energetic and clever Italian, named J. C. Beltrami, asked to be allowed to accompany him. This aspiring but wayward man has left us a book, consisting of letters addressed to Madame la Comtesse Compagoni, a lady of rank in Florence, which is very interesting. On starting he wrote, "My first intention, that of going in search of the real source of the Mississippi, was always before my eyes."
Beltrami, while clever, seems to have been a man of insufferable conceit. On the journey to Big Stone Lake and thence along the river, in the buffalo hunts, in conferences with the Sioux, the Italian adventurer awakened the resentment of the commander of the expedition, who refused to allow him to accompany his party further. This proved rather favourable to the purpose of Beltrami, who, with a half-breed guide and Chippewa Indians, started to go eastward, having a mule and a dog train as means of transport. After a few days' journey the guide left him, returning with the mule and dog train to Pembina. Next his Indian guide deserted him, fearing the Sioux, and Beltrami was left to make his way in a canoe up the river to Red Lake. Inexperienced in the management of a birch bark canoe, Beltrami was upset, but he at length proceeded along the bank and shallows of the river, dragging the canoe with a tow line after him, and arrived in miserable plight at Red Lake.
Here he engaged a guide and interpreter, and writes that he went "where no white man had previously travelled." He was now on the highway to renown. He was taken from point to point on the many lakes of Northern Minnesota, and affixed names to them. On August 20th, 1823, he went over several portages, led by his guide to Turtle Lake, which was to him a source of wonder, as he saw it from the flow of waters south to the Gulf of Mexico, north to the Frozen Sea, east to the Atlantic, and west toward the Pacific Ocean.