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staying near home, joining his family’s glassmaking business and leading a conventional life. In 1818, twenty-five years old and still single, he bade his family and friends in Albany, New York, his hometown, goodbye and set off on a journey of exploration that would let him follow his interests in geography, geology and mineralogy. In 1821 he joined an expedition led by General Lewis Cass, probing the upper peninsula of Michigan and northern Minnesota and hoping to discover, among other things, the source of the Mississippi. In Minnesota Cass and his party of explorers found a lake they decided was the river’s headwaters and named it, as something of a memorial, Cass Lake.
Back from that adventure, Schoolcraft took a job as an Indian agent in 1822, stationed at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, at the northeastern tip of the upper peninsula. There he met and married Jane Johnson, daughter of an Irish fur trader and an Ojibway woman, and from her he learned a great deal about Indian culture and language. In 1832, on a mission to smooth over relations between the quarreling Chippewas and the Sioux, he determined that the Mississippi did not originate at Cass Lake and decided to try to find the big river’s true source.
After days of paddling upstream and across lakes and portaging through sandy, brushy, marshy and piney wilderness, Schoolcraft’s party of explorers discovered that the stream of the Mississippi separated into two branches above Cass Lake, something that the available maps failed to show.
The explorers pressed on, wearied by the demands of the portage and stopping often to rest and lay down their burdens for brief respites, and at last came the accomplishment of their arduous mission, recounted by Schoolcraft in his journal:
    Every step we made in treading these sandy elevations, seemed to increase the ardor with which we were carried forward. The desire of reaching the actual source of a stream so celebrated as the Mississippi — a stream which La Salle had reached the mouth of, a century and a half (lacking a year) before, was perhaps predominant; and we followed our guide down the sides of the last elevation, with the expectation of momentarily reaching the goal of our journey. What had been long sought, at last appeared suddenly. On turning out of a thicket, into a small weedy opening, the cheering sight of a transparent body of water burst upon our view. It was Itasca Lake — the source of the Mississippi. 2
    Known to the French as Lac la Biche, the lake, as described by Schoolcraft, was “a beautiful sheet of water, seven or eight miles in extent, lying among hills of diluvial formation, surmounted with pines, which fringe the distant horizon and form an agreeable contrast with the greener foliage of its
    immediate shores.” The outlet of the lake, through which it begets the Mississippi River, was ten to twelve feet wide, and the water there, as it poured into a stream, was twelve to eighteen inches deep. From such a beginning came the mighty Mississippi.
Schoolcraft gave the lake
    a new name, one that he contrived by splicing together parts of two Latin words, “ veritas caput ,” which translate into English as “true head”— meaning the river’s
actual source. Thus the lake became Lake Itasca.
    Schoolcraft’s discovery of the “true head” provided the Mississippi’s total measurement, from source to finish. From Lake Itasca in Minnesota the river stretches approximately 2,350 twisting, curving Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, discoverer of the miles to its debouchment into source of the Mississippi in 1832. He named the Gulf of Mexico, its course the Minnesota lake from which the river and length forever changing sprang Lake Itasca, a name he coined by splic with the vagaries of its flow. It ing together parts of the Latin phrase “ veri receives into its broad stream tas caput ,” meaning “true head” (Library of
    Congress). the waters of some 250 tributaries, and the area that it drains