Buenaventura River
The Buenaventura River is a fictional river in western North America , which was entered on maps for over fifty years and whose non-existence could only be determined by a surveying expedition in 1844. It should run from the Rocky Mountains west to the coast of California and flow into the Pacific Ocean in the region around San Francisco .
Looking for a transcontinental waterway
Until well into the 18th century, the interest of the British in exploring western North America was not directed towards settlement areas, but towards a trade route between the centers in the northeast of the continent and India . The only connection they could use led around Cape Horn at the tip of South America and meant a journey 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 central North America would be ideal. If it didn't exist, the overland route between usable rivers should be as short as possible. As early as 1531, through Hernán Cortés, the Spaniards had found a connection between Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico via Mexico City and Acapulco, then known as Zacatula , on the Pacific, and not least on this basis they established their supremacy in the Pacific Ocean.
At the end of the 17th century, French and British fur traders advanced westward into the continent via the Great Lakes and the Ohio River . They found the great river system of Mississippi and Missouri Rivers as well as the Rocky Mountains, from whose eastern flank the rivers drew large amounts of water. The structure of these mountains and the land in the west of the mountains were only a matter of speculation as the “ white spot ”. Only the coast of California was explored again. Mostly it was assumed that there had to be large river systems in the west that would flow directly to the Pacific Ocean.
The first expeditions to the mountains failed. In 1793, Alexander MacKenzie, on behalf of the British Hudson's Bay Company, was the first white man to reach the Pacific on a northern land route through what would later become Canada .
Thomas Jefferson , the third President of the young United States, knew the reports of the British explorers and wanted to use their findings for his country. When the USA bought the French colony of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 , he dispatched the Lewis and Clark Expedition over the Rocky Mountains from 1804 to 1806. They advanced over the Missouri River, crossed the mountains on a northern route at Lolo Pass , reached the Columbia River and along it the Pacific Ocean. On their return they reported that the Rocky Mountains in this region were almost impassable: they could only be overcome on foot and without major loads. From now on, interest turned to the southern and central parts of the Rocky Mountains.
There was a mix-up there: The Dominguez Escalante expedition of two Spanish Franciscan priests, Francisco Antanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante , tried in 1776 to establish a connection from Santa Fe in Nuevo México, Spain to Monterey in California, also in Spain to find. They were the first whites to venture into northwestern New Mexico and discovered the Green River , which they named San Buenaventura , after St. Bonaventura of Bagnoregio . Further west they met the Sevier River flowing to the southwest and were astonished that Ute Indians called it the same name as the Buenaventura. In the diary, Dominguez and Escalante named him Rio San Ysabel and noted their doubts about the identity of the rivers. They could not get any further west, they could not fulfill their mission to advance to California.
The retired officer Bernardo Miera y Pacheco accompanied them as a cartographer and in 1778 relied on the information provided by the Indians when drawing the map for the expedition report. He erroneously did not enter the Buenaventura as a tributary of the Colorado River in a southerly direction on his map, but oriented it to the southwest and let it flow into a lake immodestly named Laguna de Miera after himself , which was later referred to as Lago Salago (salt lake) and identified with Sevier Lake , which has now dried up . This was right at the edge of his card. Also at the edge of the map he marked areas that the expedition had not seen itself, but only knew from reports from Indians. Among them is the first depiction of the Great Salt Lake , which Miera erroneously represented as being connected to Utah Lake and noted under the name Laguna de los Timpanogos . From this he drew a river to the west, designated as navigable, where it soon ended at the edge of the map.
In a letter accompanying the card to the Spanish King Charles III. Miera recommended the establishment of several Spanish missions in the area. He suggested the Great Salt Lake as the most important location and also mentioned that a waterway to the coast would be possible from there, either via the Rio Timpanogos or the Rio Buenaventura.
The Spanish cartographers of California, Francisco Garcés and Pedro Font, only had well-founded knowledge of the coastal mountains and the central valleys. The structure of the Sierra Nevada , the mountain range that borders California to the east, was not further explored. They identified rivers from the Sierra Nevada with Miera's representations and when Manuel Augustin Mascaro and Miguel Constanso made a map of the entire viceroyalty of New Spain in 1784 , they adopted the descriptions of their colleagues. Spain and Mexico , which became independent from 1821 , no longer carried out expeditions to the undeveloped north of their areas - the errors were not cleared up. Since no reliable determination of longitudes in the west of the continent had taken place so far, it was not noticed that there are around 500 km between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, which were omitted or greatly shortened on the early maps.
The first mapmakers of North America from the new United States of America also relied on Spanish maps for their depictions of the west of the continent. Alexander von Humboldt in 1804, William Clark in 1814 and Zebulon Pike in his book from 1810 on the West each connected different rivers, some of which they had seen themselves, such as the Sacramento River or the Salinas River with the Buenaventura, which they refer to from the Spanish maps believed to know. Albert Finley and many cartographers used these widely used works as the basis for their maps. Henry S. Tanner even entered several rivers directly from the Rocky Mountains to the coast in his Atlas of the United States in 1822: the Timpanogos River was to connect the Great Salt Lake, the Buenaventura River the Sevier Lake with the ocean. Others were skeptical and marked the Buenaventura as speculative, like Sidney E. Morse in 1823. Albert Gallatin did not enter a river in the Buenaventura area in his map of the west in 1836.
John Charles Frémont
The trapper and explorer Jedediah Smith moved over the ridge of the Rocky Mountains at the South Pass in 1823/24 and was the first American to explore the rivers on the western flank with his colleagues. In 1827 he was the first white man to cross the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin desert , the location of which made a river from the Rockies to the west unlikely. In the years 1827/28 he moved along the entire length of the California valley north through the area in which the Buenaventura River was suspected, and did not find it. When John Bidwell and Thomas Fitzpatrick led a first small group of settlers over the South Pass to California in 1841 , Bidwell was recommended to bring material for building a boat so that he could sail from the Great Salt Lake on the Buenaventura. Bidwell found the small Humboldt River at the edge of the Great Basin, first described by Peter Skene Ogden, and pulled along part of the route that established itself as the California Trail . He could not find a navigable river through the Sierra Nevada.
It was not until 1844 that John Charles Frémont's geographic surveying expedition confirmed the river's non-existence. From May to October 1842, accompanied by Thomas Fitzpatrick and Kit Carson, he determined the exact location of central points in the Rocky Mountains and went west from there. In 1843/44 he measured the Columbia River as well as the Sierra Nevada and parts of California. Due to a measurement error on the Walker River in California's Sierra Nevada, he believed he had briefly found the Buenaventura River on January 27, 1844, but recognized his error on January 29. On the trip he established the geographical connections for the first time and was able to rule out a river between the Rocky Mountains and central California.
When it was clear that there would be no continuous waterway, Frémont and his father-in-law and political supporter, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, turned their interest to a transcontinental rail link from the east to the west coast, which was finally completed in 1869.
Geography of the west
It was only Frémont who realized that the precipitation in the central Rocky Mountains mainly flows east to the Missouri and Mississippi and that the desert of the Great Basin with no drainage lies in the west . Almost all rivers on the western flank flow south over the Green River to the Colorado or to the northwest over the Snake River to the Columbia River , and only small rivers flow directly west into the drainless Great Salt Lake. To the west, the Great Basin is followed by the north-south stretched mountain range of the Sierra Nevada, whose watercourses flow west into the two rivers of the great north-south valley of California , the San Joaquin River and the Sacramento River . Both flow into the Pacific in the Bay of San Francisco and the Golden Gate .
literature
- C. Gregory Crampton: The San Buenaventura - Mythical River of the West . In: Pacific Historical Review . Berkeley Cal 25.1956, 2 (May), pp. 163-171. ISSN 0030-8684
- John Charles Frémont: The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California in the years 1843-44 - To which is Added a Description of the Physical Geography of California, with Recent Notices of the Gold Region from the Latest and Most Authentic Sources . Blair and Rives Publishers, Washington DC 1845 (full text can also be downloaded from Project Gutenberg: Exploring Expedition ).
Web links
- Frémont and the Buenaventura River - about John Charles Frémont's expedition in 1844 and the Buenaventura River, with many quotes from Frémont's Journal and contemporary map excerpts.
- Diario y Derrotero of the expedition of Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Francisco Silvestre Vélez de Escalante (digitized, Spanish transcription, English translation)
