Buenaventura River (legend)
The Buenaventura River is a fictional river in western North America, which was written over fifty years in the hotel and its non-existence could be found until 1844 by a surveying expedition. It should extend from the Rocky Mountains west to the coast of California and open in the region around San Francisco in the Pacific Ocean.
Search for a transcontinental waterway
Until well into the 18th century, the interest addressed in particular the British in the exploration of the West of North America not to settlement areas, but on a trade route between the centers in the north- east of the continent and India. The only usable for connection led them around Cape Horn at the tip of South America and meant a period of almost a year. The exploration of the Northwest Passage in the north of the continent failed in the Arctic ice. A navigable waterway in the middle of North America would be ideal. Were it not for him, the land between usable rivers should be as short as possible. The Spaniards had already in 1531 by Hernán Cortés found a connection between Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico to Mexico City in the then Zacatula called Acapulco on the Pacific, and not least on the reasons for its supremacy in the Pacific Ocean.
End of the 17th century met French and British fur traders on the Great Lakes and the Ohio River before heading west into the continent. They found the major river system of the Mississippi and Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains, the rivers relative large amounts of water from its eastern flank. The structure of this mountain and the land west of the mountains was as a "white spot" only the subject of conjecture. Only the California coast was explored again. In most cases, it was assumed that in the West would be great river systems that would flow directly to the Pacific Ocean.
The first expeditions to the mountains failed. 1793 Alexander MacKenzie reached on behalf of the British Hudson 's Bay Company as the first white man the Pacific on a northern land by the later Canada.
Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the young United States, knew the reports of the British explorer and wanted to make their findings available for his country. When the United States the French colony of Louisiana west of the Mississippi Rivers bought in 1803 in the Louisiana Purchase, 1804-1806, he sent the Lewis and Clark expedition across the Rocky Mountains. They encountered before on the Missouri River, crossed the mountains on a northern route on Lolo Pass, reached the Columbia River and along it the Pacific Ocean. They reported on their return that the Rocky Mountains were almost impassable in this region: Just walking and without major expense they could be overcome. The interest lay now on the southern and central parts of the Rocky Mountains.
The Buenaventura River
There is a confusion came into play: The Dominguez -Escalante expedition of two Spanish Franciscan Padres, Francisco Antanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, had tried in 1776, a compound of Santa Fe in the Spanish Nuevo Mexico to Monterey in the also Spanish California to find. They met as first white before in the northwestern New Mexico and discovered the Green River, which they named San Buenaventura, according to St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio. Further west, they met the current flowing to the southwest Sevier River and were astonished that Ute Indians called him the same name as the Buenaventura. In the diary Dominguez and Escalante him Rio San Ysabel called and recorded their doubts about the identity of the rivers. Further west they came no more, they could not fulfill push forward its mission to California.
The retired officer Bernardo Miera y Pacheco accompanied them as a cartographer and left in 1778 when drawing the map for the expedition report to the information of the Indians. He wore erroneously Buenaventura not as tributary of the Colorado River in a southerly direction to its card, but it oriented to the southwest, leaving him in an immodest called after him even Laguna de Miera open lake, which was later called Lago Salago ( salt lake ) and with the now dry Sevier Lake is identified. This was at the very edge of his map. Also on the edge of the map he showed areas that had not even seen the expedition, but knew only from reports of Indians. Below is the first presentation of the Great Salt Lake, the Miera represented mistakenly connected to the Utah Lake and noted under the name Laguna de los Timpanogos. From this he drew a reported as a navigable river to the west, where he soon ended on the edge of the map.
In a letter accompanying the card to the Spanish king Charles III. Miera recommended the development of several Spanish missions in the area. As an important location he suggested the Great Salt Lake and mentioned in passing that from there a waterway to the coast would be possible either via the Rio Timpanogos or the Rio Buenaventura.
The Spanish cartographers California, Francisco Garcés and Pedro Font, had only from the Coast Mountains and the central valleys of sound evidence. The structure of the Sierra Nevada, the mountain range that limits California to the East, was explored in detail. So they identified rivers from the Sierra Nevada with Mieras representations and 1784 as Manuel and Miguel Augustin Mascaro Constanso a map of the entire Viceroyalty of New Spain anfertigten, they took over the descriptions of their colleagues. Spain and the 1821 independent Mexico did not carry out expeditions in the undeveloped north of its regions more - the errors have not been elucidated. There had previously been no reliable determination of longitude to the west of the continent, not even noticed that between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada about 500 km or more that were left out on the early maps or greatly reduced.
Also the first cartographers of North America from the new United States of America were based in their representations of the West of the continent to the Spanish pack of cards. Alexander von Humboldt in 1804, William Clark and Zebulon Pike in 1814 in his book from 1810 about the West joined each different, some of them even seen rivers such as the Sacramento River or the Salinas River with the Buenaventura, which they made to the Spanish cards familiar thought. Albert Finley and many cartographers attracted widespread this approach works as the basis of their cards. Henry S. Tanner was in 1822 in his Atlas of the United States even more flows directly from the Rocky Mountains to the coast one: the Timpanogos River should the Great Salt Lake, the Buenaventura River connect the Sevier Lake with the ocean. Others were skeptical, marking the Buenaventura as speculative as Sidney E. Morse in 1823. Was Albert Gallatin in 1836 in his map of the West is no flow in the area of Buenaventura more a.
John Charles Frémont
The trapper and explorer Jedediah Smith moved 1823/24 at South Pass over the crest of the Rocky Mountains and explored with his colleagues as the first Americans, the rivers of the western flank. In 1827 he crossed the first white man the Sierra Nevada and the desert of the Great Basin, the location made a flow of the Rockies to the west unlikely. In the years 1827/28 he moved along the entire California Longitudinal Valley to the north by the area in which the Buenaventura River was suspected, and found him not. When John Bidwell and Thomas Fitzpatrick in 1841 conducted a first small group of settlers over the South Pass to California, Bidwell was recommended to take material for boat building, so that he could go on the Buenaventura from the Great Salt Lake. Bidwell the first described by Peter Skene Ogden little Humboldt River was at the edge of the Great Basin and pulled him along a portion of the route, which established itself as the California Trail. A navigable river through the Sierra Nevada, he could not find.
It was not until 1844 confirmed the geographical surveying expedition John Charles Frémont the non-existence of the river. He presented from May to October 1842 in the company of Thomas Fitzpatrick and Kit Carson the exact location central points of the Rocky Mountains firm and went from there to the west. 1843/44 he measured the Columbia River and the Sierra Nevada and parts of California. He believed by a measurement error on the Walker River in California's Sierra Nevada for a short time to have the Buenaventura River found on 27 January 1844 but already recognized on 29 January his mistake. On the journey he presented for the first time establishes the geographical contexts and could exclude a flow between the Rocky Mountains and Central California.
As it was clear that there would be no continuous waterway, directed Frémont and his father and political sponsor, Senator Thomas Hart Benton interest now on a transcontinental rail service from the east to the west coast, which was finally completed in 1869.
Geography of the West
Only Frémont realized that the precipitation of the central Rocky Mountains drain predominantly east to the Missouri and Mississippi and to the west lies the endorheic desert of the Great Basin. Almost all the rivers of the western flank flow into the south via the Green River to Colorado or to the northwest across the Snake River to the Columbia River, and only small rivers flow directly to the west in the endorheic Great Salt Lake. West joins the Great Basin in the stretched north -south mountain range of the Sierra Nevada, where the water runs westward flow in the rivers of the great north-south valley of California, the San Joaquin River and the Sacramento River. Both flow into the Bay of San Francisco and the Golden Gate into the Pacific.