Buenaventura River (legend)
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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.
In 1776, Silvestre Vélez de Escalante encountered the Green River, a southward-flowing tributary of the Colorado. He gave it the name San Buenaventura. His cartographer Barnardo de Miera showed the river as heading southwesterly rather than southward. Later and even more speculative cartographers connected it to the Pacific Ocean, in or near San Francisco Bay. Its existence or non-existence was a matter of controversy until in 1843, John Charles Frémont led a perilous expedition from the Columbia River to Sacramento, California via the Sierra Nevada, definitively proving its non-existence.
References
- Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime, p.208–215. New York : Random House, 2000. (ISBN 0375501517, ISBN 0767908260)
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