Buenaventura River (legend)

The non-existent Buenaventura River, alternatively San Buenaventura River, Río Buenaventura, etc. was once believed to run from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean in what is now the western United States. The river was chronologically the last of several imagined incarnations of an imagined Great River of the West which would be for North America west of the Rockies what the Mississippi River was east of the Rockies. The hopes were to find a waterway from coast to coast, sparing the traveling around Cape Horn at the tip of South America.Harvey 2000, p.208–215.]

In 1776, two Franciscan missionaries Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante explored a connection between Santa Fe in Spanish New Mexico to Monterey in also Spanish California. They encountered the Green River, a southward-flowing tributary of the Colorado and named it "San Buenaventura" after the catholic saint Bonaventure. Shortly after they discovered the Sevier River and wrongly identified it with the Buenaventura, thus believing in a southwesterly course, instead of straight south. Consequently their cartographer Bernardo Miera y Pacheco showed the river as heading southwesterly and flowing into a lake, that can be identified as the now dry Sevier Lake. In an accompanying note to king Charles III of Spain Miera recommended to build several missions in the area and mentioned the possibility of a water way to the Pacific Ocean, via the Buenaventura or the completely speculative Timpanogos River.

When Francisco Garcés and Pedro Font drew their maps of Spanish "Alta California", they did not understand the nature of the Sierra Nevada, nor did they know about the Great Basin between the Sierra and the Rocky Mountains, so they identified rivers from the Sierra with Miera's Buenaventura. Then, when Manuel Augustin Mascaro and Miguel Constanso made the first map of the whole Viceroyalty of New Spain (1784), they built on their colleagues' work and connected the Buenaventura to the Pacific Ocean, in or near San Francisco Bay. Later cartographers of the young United States such as Alexander von Humboldt in 1804, William Clark in 1814 and Zebulon Pike in his book from 1810 believed in the findings of the Spanish cartographers and connected different Californian rivers, that they themselves had seen, with waters in the Rocky Mountains.

When Mexican explorers learned more about the Sierra Nevada, questions arose about the Buenaventura, but Albert Finley in 1826 still drew the river in his influential map. In 1827, Jedediah Smith crossed the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin, not finding the Buenaventura; the following year he tracked the western flank of the Sierra in its full length, again without registering a river of the size predicted. In 1841, John Bidwell and Thomas Fitzpatrick led the first group of settlers over the Rocky Mountains to California. They were advised to take carpenters tools with them, to build canoes and sail the Buenaventura from the Great Salt Lake. They found Humboldt River at the edge of the Great Basin and followed it for a while, but there was no trace of a navigable river that would cross the Sierra Nevada.

The Buenaventura River's existence or non-existence was a matter of controversy until 1843, when John Charles Frémont, with Thomas Fitzpatrick and Kit Carson as scouts, led a perilous expedition from the Columbia River to Sacramento, California via the Sierra Nevada. On January 27, 1844 at Walker River, he briefly believed himself to have found the mythical river, but it was the result of a faulty measurement. Two days later he discovered his mistake and definitively proved that the Buenaventura did not exist. [ [http://www.longcamp.com/buenaventura.html Excerpts] from Frémont's journals. Accessed online 7 November 2006.]

After the hopes of a waterway from east to west were lost, Frémont and his father-in-law and political sponsor, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, directed their ambitions to a transcontinental railway, which was completed in 1869, after the Mexican-American War of 1846–48 and the American Civil War.

Notes

References

* C. Gregory Crampton, "The San Buenaventura − Mythical River of the West", in: "Pacific Historical Review", Vol. 25, 2 (1956 May), p.163-171
*Miles Harvey, "The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime", p.208–215. New York : Random House, 2000. (ISBN 0-375-50151-7, ISBN 0-7679-0826-0)

External links

* [http://www.longcamp.com/buenaventura.html Frémont and the Buenaventura River] about the expedition by John Charles Frémont in 1844 and the Buenaventura River, with numerous quotes from Frémont's journal and period maps.