The internet is filled with things. Here is one of them.
This river doesn't exist2024 Jul 26
Early in the days of European exploration of America the surveyors hoped for and desired for and even drew onto maps a great river running from the Rocky Mountains and out west into the Pacific Ocean. A river such as that would've been very useful to their goals of providing easy transport to settlers fulfilling Manifest Destiny. They even named this river: the Buenaventura.
But the map, clearly, is not the territory, and the Buenaventura as we now know does not exist. As the many, many expeditions sent to find it proved, The Great Basin exists, the Great Salt Lake, while big, is not actually the Pacific Ocean, and the Sacramento, while mighty, flows only from the Sierra Nevada.
It took intrepid explorer and asshole John C Fremont himself to talk President Polk out of this riparian denial, that drawing lines on a map cannot simply conjure up a river. Although all this desire to get people going west did inspire Fremont to invest heavily into railroads... which would have made him rich, had he speculated on the correct railroads.
Early in the days of European exploration of America the surveyors hoped for and desired for and even drew onto maps a great river running from the Rocky Mountains and out west into the Pacific Ocean. A river such as that would've been very useful to their goals of providing easy transport to settlers fulfilling Manifest Destiny. They even named this river: the Buenaventura.
But the map, clearly, is not the territory, and the Buenaventura as we now know does not exist. As the many, many expeditions sent to find it proved, The Great Basin exists, the Great Salt Lake, while big, is not actually the Pacific Ocean, and the Sacramento, while mighty, flows only from the Sierra Nevada.
It took intrepid explorer and asshole John C Fremont himself to talk President Polk out of this riparian denial, that drawing lines on a map cannot simply conjure up a river. Although all this desire to get people going west did inspire Fremont to invest heavily into railroads... which would have made him rich, had he speculated on the correct railroads.