The non-existent Buenaventura River, alternatively San Buenaventura River or Río Buenaventura, was once believed to run from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean through the Great Basin region of 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. Dominguez, Vélez de Escalante and Miera In 1776, two Franciscan missionaries Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante sought to find a land route between Santa Fe in Nuevo México to Monterey in Alta California. They were part of what has become known as the Dominguez–Escalante Expedition, a ten-man expedition including Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco (Miera) acting as the cartographer. On September 13, they encountered what is now called the Green River in modern day Utah, a southward-flowing tributary of the Colorado and named it San Buenaventura after the catholic saint Bonaventure. At that point in time, there was nothing mythical about the Buenaventura River. Dominguez and Vélez de Escalante's journal correctly notes that above their crossing, the river flowed toward the west. It flowed generally southwest where they crossed it and continued southwest as they traveled in its vicinity. Escalante also correctly recorded that after its junction with the Rio San Clemente (today's White River? – which he also named) the Buenaventura River turned to the south. So, the original Buenaventura River is real and exists today under a different name. After establishing contact with a branch of the Ute (Yutahs) Tribe on the south shore of what they called Lake Timpanogos (various spellings), now called "Utah Lake," the expedition turned south-southwest. On September 29, they were surprised to come upon a river (the Sevier River) flowing from the south-southeast, and turned toward the west at the point where they encountered it. Dominguez and Vélez de Escalante noted in their journal that the Native American name for this river suggested it was the same river they had named Buenaventura. They expressed doubts it was the same river because had it been so, it was substantially smaller downstream than it had been upstream--the opposite of the normal pattern. They named this river