Giacomo Beltrami

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Giacomo Beltrami (painting by Enrico Scuri)

Giacomo Costantino Beltrami (* 1779 in Bergamo ; † January 6, 1855 in Filottrano ) was an Italian aristocrat , judge, freemason , writer and a supporter of Napoleon . He became known through his expedition of 1823 through the northern Indian areas of what is now Minnesota , during which he claimed to have discovered the source of the Mississippi River .

Early life

Princess Luise Maximiliane zu Stolberg-Gedern

Beltrami was born in Bergamo in 1779, the 16th of 17 children . His relatively wealthy family - his father was a customs officer in the service of the Republic of Venice - enabled him to get a good education and study law. At a young age he was enthusiastic about the ideals of the French Revolution and in 1797 placed himself in the service of the army of the Cisalpine Republic , which was under the rule of Napoleon, who had been Emperor of the French and King of Italy since 1805 . He soon found his way into the Napoleonic government, where he quickly rose in the political hierarchy. In 1805 he was appointed Minister of Justice of the Department del Taro in Parma , in 1806 as Deputy Inspector of the Napoleonic Army in Italy and in 1809 as Chief Justice of the Department of Musone in Macerata . In 1808 he joined a Masonic Lodge of the Grande Oriente d'Italia . Beltrami frequented the upscale districts of Florence , where he met and became friends with Princess Luise zu Stolberg-Gedern, who was of German descent. She was the widow of "Bonnie Prince Charlie" known as "Bonnie Prince Charlie" Jacobite pretender Charles Edward Stuart . In the same year Beltrami also made the acquaintance of the married Florentine Countess Giulia Spada dei Medici, who came from the famous Florentine noble family of the de Medici and with whom he presumably entered into a love affair, which, according to Beltramis, was purely platonic in nature.

After the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the old order in Italy, Beltrami was arrested as a supporter of the ideals of the French Revolution on charges of conspiracy and was under constant surveillance by the authorities after his release. When Giulia Spada dei Medici, whom he so admired, died in 1820 at the age of only 39, he decided to leave Italy . He then visited various European cities and came to Liverpool in England in 1822 . From there he boarded a ship to America and, after a two-month voyage, probably arrived in Philadelphia in December 1822 .

Travel through the United States of America

Major Lawrence Taliaferro
Stephen H. Long

In America he visited various cities on the American east coast and made the acquaintance of incumbent President James Monroe in Washington, DC , whom he met at the White House . Like Beltrami, Monroe was a Freemason and Beltrami was visibly impressed by his humble demeanor. Eventually he continued his journey on the Ohio River with the intention of traveling as far as the Mississippi and then on to New Orleans . On board the ship he made friends with the Indian agent Major Lawrence Taliaferro, who wanted to travel upriver along the Mississippi. Beltrami quickly became obsessed with the idea of ​​discovering the then-unknown source of the Mississippi. In the course of 1823 he therefore joined the geographer Stephen Harriman Long , who traveled to Fort St. Anthony . Long and Taliaferro were given the task of mapping the largely unknown country and making contact with the local Indian tribes. In July 1823, three months after the start of their journey, however, there was a dispute between Beltrami and Long and other participants in the expedition .

Beltrami left the expedition at Pembina Valley in August 1823 and traveled on with a group of Ojibwe Indians to discover the source of the Mississippi on their own. After a few days, the Indians separated from Beltrami, who was suddenly left on his own in the middle of the wilderness. Fortunately for him, he met a group of Sioux Indians who were enemies with the Ojibwe and joined them. He spent the next few months with the Sioux and studied their culture and language. After his return, Beltrami published the first dictionary that translated the Sioux language into English and that is still used today. Beltrami also collected over a hundred different artefacts from local Indian tribes during his stay with the Sioux, which are now in the Museo Civico di Scienze Naturali in Bergamo. Part of this Beltrami collection is also a flute that is believed to be the oldest Indian flute still in existence.

An Ojibwe Indian 1835
Sioux tipis, 1833

On August 28, 1823, Beltrami came across a lake which he believed to be the source of the Mississippi and which he named Lake Giulia after his late love . He also named a number of other lakes in the area after his friends. Eventually he returned to Fort St. Anthony and traveled from there to New Orleans, where he arrived in December 1823. There he wrote a book about his adventures in search of the source of the Mississippi, which he published a few months later in French under the title Le découverte des sources du Mississippi . However, the book sold poorly and its discovery was questioned or even ridiculed by many.

In fact, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft identified Lake Itasca as the true source of the Mississippi on his 1832 expedition . Beltrami, on the other hand, erroneously assumed that the northernmost point of a river, in the case of the Mississippi River, Lake Julia, was its source. Even if he was wrong when he discovered the source of the Mississippi, Beltrami has made an important contribution to the understanding of the culture of the indigenous people through his profound studies and writings on Indian culture and their language.

In 1824, Beltrami set out from New Orleans on a journey through Mexico , where he cataloged various unknown plants, studied the culture and language of the Aztecs and studied the political system of Mexico. He returned to New Orleans a year later, but soon left and went to Philadelphia , where his book also sold poorly. Disappointed, he traveled on to New York , where he attended the opening celebrations for the Erie Canal .

Return to Europe

After staying in Haiti , Santo Domingo and other islands, Beltrami returned to Europe and arrived in London in 1826 . Two years later he traveled on to Paris , where he joined various scientific societies in the course of 1830 and maintained friendly contact with Marie-Joseph Motier, Marquis de La Fayette and the writer François-René de Chateaubriand .

In 1834 Beltrami moved to Heidelberg , where he became friends with the famous lawyer Carl Joseph Anton Mittermaier . A few years later he returned to Italy, where he retired to his estate in Filottrano . He tried again to publish his book in Italy, which was prevented by the church-friendly government. The Roman Catholic Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith put Beltrami's work L'Italie et l'Europe , published in Paris in 1834, on the index by decree 1839 . For the next few years he lived the secluded life of a Franciscan and from then on only called himself "Brother Giacomo". He spent most of the last years of his life in the house of his country estate and its garden, where he died in 1855.

The last of the Mohicans

Two years after the publication of Giacomo Beltrami's book in New Orleans in 1824 , the American author James Fenimore Cooper published his famous novel The Last of the Mohicans in 1826 . Since in Cooper's novel the descriptions of the Indians, their characters, their appearance and their customs were practically identical to those in Beltrami's book Le découverte des sources du Mississippi , published two years earlier, Beltrami accused Cooper of plagiarism .

Others

In 1866, a county in the state of Minnesota was christened Beltrami County in honor of the Italian explorer . In addition, the National Archives of the United States in Washington have two letters written to Giacomo Beltrami by Thomas Jefferson , one of the United States ' Founding Fathers .

Titles and honors

  • Ispettore dei Magazzini della Commissione ( Turin , 1801)
  • Sotto-Ispettore degli Equipaggi ( Parma , 1805)
  • Cancelliere di Giustizia nel Dipartamento del Taro (Parma, 1805)
  • Vice-Ispettore delle Armate (1806)
  • Giudice della Corte del Dipartamento del Musone ( Macerata , 1809)
  • Medaglia d'Onore di Napoli (1815)

Memberships

  • Accademia dei Catenati di Macerata (1821, academy name: Alcandro Grineo )
  • Societas Medico-Botanica Londinensis (1828)
  • Société Géographie di Paris (1829)
  • Ateneo di Bergamo (1832)
  • Société geologique de France (1832)
  • Société Universelle de Civilization (1833)
  • Société dell'Institut Historique de France (1834)

Published works by Giacomo Beltrami

  • Deux Mots sur les promenades de Paris a Liverpool etc. (1823)
  • The Sioux vocabulary (1823)
  • Le découverte des sources du Mississippi (1824)
  • A Pilgrimage in Europe and America (1828) - English translation of the first two books, plus some extra material
  • Le Mexique (1830)
  • L'Italie et L'Europe (1834)
  • L'Italia ossia scoperte (1834)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Beltrami, Giacomo Constantino. In: Jesús Martínez de Bujanda , Marcella Richter: Index des livres interdits: Index librorum prohibitorum 1600–1966. Médiaspaul, Montréal 2002, ISBN 2-89420-522-8 , p. 118 (French, digitized ).