Around Burlington: Rough river trip north a journey of survival

It was a strange looking craft raising steam at the St. Louis levee on an April morning in 1823.

The wood vessel was an unwieldy 118 feet in length. It had a 19-foot beam and drew five feet, two inches.

Its only superstructure was a small cabin well forward with the remainder of its surface given over to a flat deck stacked with cargo crates.

It was only a faint precursor of the floating “wedding cake” steamboats that in a few years be plying the length of the Mississippi.

A crowd had gathered at the levee that morning, curious to see the boat cast off for the first upstream battle to reach Fort St. Anthony at the site of today’s St. Paul, Minnesota.

The strange-looking boat drawing crowds at St. Louis was the Virginia, launched in 1819, and originally brought west to link the middle river to downstream New Orleans.

The boat owners soon learned that there was also a profit opportunity upstream and when the U.S. Army offered a contract for supplying the soldiers at the Minnesota fort, they accepted the challenge.

The Virginia would also be carrying a strange mixture of passengers, who that morning, scurried aboard to seek shelter among the stacked crates of muskets and beans.

There were a motley collection of hard edged miners headed to the lead mines opening in the Dubuque area, an Indian agent headed to his Minnesota post and a Kentucky family of six and their livestock headed for a new life somewhere north.

There was a woman missionary following God’s will, a few non-commissioned military types, and a Sac Indian chief named Great Eagle, who would be escorted by a party of warriors who would keep pace with the Virginia by running along the shore.

But the most unusual passenger was Giacomo Costantino Beltrami, a comic-opera type figure who was on a “pilgrimage” after being exiled from his native Italy for being on the wrong side as his nation struggled for independence.

Beltrami kept a detailed and colorful account of his adventures that later became a popular book throughout Europe, and his journey on the Virginia played an important part in the later publication.

The Italian wanderer endured a disastrous Atlantic crossing and his discomforts only mounted when he at last reached the Mississippi and embarked on his trip to the northern reaches of civilization.

As St. Louis slowly disappeared behind them, it became obvious to the passengers that the Virginia was having a rough trip.

As she slowly worked her way through the Des Moines Rapids, she struck a rock but did not hole her hull.

There were delays as the crew struggled to extract the boat from numerous sand bars and the boat narrowly escaped a forest fire.

But among the passengers, Beltrami was the only one not to complain.

He turned each halt into an opportunity to go “exploring,” but this was to lead to even more problems.

On one excursion, he lost his bearings and was forced to use his compass to return to the landing place, only to find the boat had departed.

Imagining himself abandoned forever in the wilderness, Beltrami rushed frantically along the bank, firing his gun to attract attention.

To his immense relief, the Virginia was just around the next bend, firmly aground on yet another sand bar.

Further adventures awaited the Italian as he journey north. He took time to explore the ruins of Fort Madison, the government post fired the previous year when the troops there fled an Indian attack.

Nothing at what would become the site of Burlington was noted, but Beltrami was quite taken by the “Yellow Banks” that would one day become Oquawka.

The miners, missionary, the farm family, and finally, the Indian chief, departed the boat at its few scheduled stops along the river but Beltrami stayed on board all the way to Fort St. Anthony.

The arrival at the fort was not to be the end of the Italian‘s adventures, for he soon purchased a canoe and launched himself into the North Woods in a vain attempt to reach the source of the Mississippi.

In this, he failed, but he found a wealth of material for his book that established his reputation when he returned to Italy.

The voyage of the Virginia was to establish the practicality of navigating the Upper Mississippi, and soon a fleet of boats were to follow and open up the river to settlementswhich were to include Burlington

This article originally appeared on The Hawk Eye: Italian author, others, embark on rough river journey