From the mountain men to modern Utahns, the Great Salt Lake has been a source of myth and misunderstanding. 

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During their 1824-25 winter encampment in Cache Valley, a bet was made among the mountain men: What lay at the end of the Bear River? One young man named Jim Bridger was selected to follow the river to its end. In a bull boat, made of willow branches and buffalo hide, he rode through the mountains and into the Great Salt Lake.

Upon drinking the brine, Bridger—the first American recorded as seeing the lake—is recounted as exclaiming, "Hell, we are on the shores of the Pacific!"

The lake's salinity convinced the mountain men that the lake must be an arm of the Pacific Ocean. Bridger's "discovery" recalled to their minds the Buenaventura River, an old myth of the American West, that had the potential to transform the fur trade and open up the West to incoming settlers.

The only problem was the Buenaventura River—and the dream of using waterways to facilitate travel coast to coast—doesn't exist. Yet, for these explorers, the myth began a decades-long journey to understand the Great Salt Lake and its role in the West.

Today, 200 years later, Utahns are still on that journey.

In 2023, researchers at Brigham Young University released a report explaining that if 2020 water loss rates remained unchanged, the lake would cease to exist by 2028, stating "Most Utahns do not realize the urgency of this crisis."

It is a crisis that has been worsening for quite some time. Water levels in the lake hit new record lows in 2021 and again in 2022. The lake did not fall to these records overnight. Rather, the lake has been in a downturn for nearly 40 years.

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"The solutions we are looking at will probably take a decade or more to see results from," said Carie Frantz, a geoscientist at Weber State University, "and it will only take a few bad snow years to send the lake back into a state of emergency."

For a while yet, we will be facing these stories of a looming catastrophe. There is good reason for this urgency—the Great Salt Lake is at the heart of Utah's future, and that isn't much different to the way it has always been.

'Somewhere, Somehow, Sometime'
In 1776, Franciscan friars Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante set out to find a route from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Monterey, California. Along the way, they crossed the modern-day Green River, calling it the Rio de Buenaventura. In his journal, Escalante made a note of the river's flow "west-southwest" and continued on.

The note was accurate, but the map made from the journey featured crucial errors. In his 1947 book The Great Salt Lake, historian Dale Morgan detailed how Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, the expedition's cartographer, "with vigorous strokes of his pen ... joined the [Green and Sevier] rivers as one, and made this river to flow into a brackish lake of indefinite extent."

Just north of that lake, on Pacheco's maps, was "Lake Timpanogos." This amalgamation of the Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake featured a single outlet flowing west. Miera's mistakes, a complication in translating Ute descriptions of the region into a physical map, were soon compounded.

Through the early 1800s, other cartographers used Miera's map as their foundation. Although these cartographers generally agreed on the placement of the Laguna de Miera (now called Sevier Lake) and Lake Timpanogos (now Salt Lake), they could not agree on which of these lakes fulfilled the promise of the Buenaventura in reaching the Pacific.

Morgan explained it as such: "the mappers of the mythological drafted their maps for the next 20 years, each according to his fancy [...] The lake itself was called Salt Lake, Lake Salado, Lake Teguayo or, once in a while, Lake Buenaventura. Concerning the outlet of this lake, the cartographers could not make up their minds."

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No matter the cartographer, they all furthered the fictitious waterway flowing from Utah's lakes to the Pacific. John Barton, a historian at Utah State University, explained, "Their understanding of geography at that time was if you've got a river, it's going to somewhere, somehow, sometime get to the ocean."

'Sought Not Furs Alone'
When businessman William Henry Ashley envisioned the Rocky Mountain fur trade, he saw it taking place on the rivers of the West, echoing the French fur trade system. Only after a disastrous encounter with the Arikara on the banks of the Missouri River did he look to overland trails to move goods to and from St. Louis. Still, Ashley's men relied on waterways for their livelihoods.

Mountain men's work—laying traps in the rivers of the Rocky Mountains and collecting beaver pelts for the yearly rendezvous—was difficult, deadly and far from profitable. For these men, maps of the region mattered little.

However, to the captains of the company who, as Morgan saw it, "hungered after fame and sought not furs alone," the maps were a guide to discovery.

By 1824, European and American explorers had yet to venture through the Salt Lake Valley. The mountain men were among the first outsiders to come into this region and document it. When Jim Bridger arrived at the Great Salt Lake, it seemed to confirm the maps. A route to the Pacific surely laid just out of view. All they had to do was find it.

Ashley's curiosity had been piqued by the lake, but his travels down the Buenaventura (Green) River did not go past Desolation Canyon. After determining the Green River would not take him to the lake, he opted to travel overland to set eyes on its waters.

In detailing Ashley's report of the "new route to the Pacific Ocean," the Missouri Advocate wrote in 1825, "Gen. A [...] fell upon what he supposed to be, the sources of the Buenaventura." They continued, "at the extreme west end of this Lake, a large river flows out, and then runs in a westwardly direction ... the headwaters of the river represented as the Buenaventura."

Mountain man Robert Campbell reported in 1826 that four men in Ashley's company had been dispatched to circumnavigate the lake. Campbell met the men following their voyage, noting they had "returned with indifferent success."

In reporting on this venture, the Missouri Advocate wrote that the men "did not exactly ascertain its outlet, but passed a place where they supposed it must have been."

Morgan posited that while the "ambiguity of that supposition has often been found amusing [...] the opening along the western lake shore north of Strongs Knob [...] may have seemed a likely outlet." The area was one which would have been difficult for the men, who at that point had nearly perished from dehydration, to further explore.

Later in their lives, James Clyman, Henry Fraeb, Moses "Black" Harris and Louis Vasquez each claimed, independently, to have taken part in the 24-day journey. Vasquez wrote in 1858 that he had "circumnavigated this sheet of brine, for the purpose of finding out definitely whether it was an arm of the sea or not, and thus discovered that it was in reality merely a large inland lake, without an outlet."

The statement echoed those of his fellow voyagers in their own accounts of the journey. Despite all four men agreeing that there was no outlet, as Morgan said best, "the idea of the Buenaventura was not easy to dismiss."

'Purposeful Discovery'
The Buenaventura was the ticket to changing the fur trade. At the turn of the 19th century, the Great Salt Lake, like the river, was little more than myth. Confirming the existence of one surely confirmed the other.

Historian John Barton offered this justification, "All these mountain men, they're not from the West. They're from the east where rivers are big and navigable ... [The Buenaventura] would change the entire focus of the fur trade."

At the time, waterways were the safest and most efficient way to travel. Overland journeys were dependent on the resilience of people, their guides, pack animals and wagons. Travelers had to be ready for the risks that came with the wilderness—inclement weather and Indigenous peoples protecting their homelands. To the trailblazing mountain men, the Buenaventura River could bring the United States west.

William Ashley would leave the Rocky Mountains in the summer of 1826. He had sold his company to his lieutenants—David Jackson, William Sublette and Jedediah Smith. Jackson and Sublette took on many of the business duties but, according to Morgan, "to Jedediah Smith [...] fell the task of purposeful discovery."

Through 1826, stories from local Indigenous peoples swirled among mountain men of the mythical river. These rumors raised more questions on the area south and west of the lake—new paths of exploration for Smith to pursue.

Following a failed expedition by Peter Skene Ogden to the north side of the lake, Smith led a group of men south. His goal was not just about the Buenaventura, but rather charting out an area that had confounded fur traders for the past two years.

He traveled down the Jordan River and then up the Sevier River to Utah Valley. There he turned south, later traveling along the Colorado and Mojave rivers to California. Though an arduous journey, Smith never forgot his aim.

Now starting at the Pacific, Smith looked to identify the Buenaventura from the ocean back to Utah. He went north to the Sonora Pass and back east to the Great Salt Lake.

Smith remarked in his journal, "the sight of this lake surrounded by a wilderness of more than 2,000 miles diameter excited in me those feelings known to the traveler, who, after long and perilous journeying, comes again in view of his home. But so it was with me for I had traveled so much in the vicinity of the Salt Lake that it had become my home of the wilderness."

The expedition led Smith to determine that the Buenaventura had to lie further south. He embarked on a second expedition in 1827 that stretched into 1830 as venturing took him beyond California into Oregon and back east to St. Louis.

Smith would never set eyes upon the Great Salt Lake again. He set out west once more in 1831, traveling along the Santa Fe trail and aiming to establish trade in the southwest. Smith was killed along the way.

With Smith dead, recorded tradesmen's expeditions to find the Buenaventura came to an end. In truth, by 1831, the Wasatch Front beavers were scarce. As Morgan detailed it, "fur was stripped from the Utah country in the four years after the Great Salt Lake was discovered; and after 1828, the annual rendezvous, that center of gravity for mountain life, moved northerly."

'Final Nail in the Coffin'
Although the mountain men had left the lake behind, other explorers continued to search for that old, fabled river.

Benjamin Bonneville, while traveling near the Snake River in 1832, sent a group of men led by Joseph Walker to explore the lake and its hoped-for river to California. Walker was, of course, unsuccessful; making for California overland through the Sierra Nevada mountains. Biographer Washington Irving offered insight into Bonneville's thinking, "The failure of this expedition was a blow to his pride, and a still greater blow to his purse. The Great Salt Lake still remained unexplored."

Walker had once again found no outlet from the Great Salt Lake. Bonneville took full credit, "It was from my explorations and those of my party alone that it was ascertained that this lake had no outlet."

Bonneville used this claim to bolster his effort to name the lake after himself, despite having never set foot near its shores. Despite Bonneville's pretensions, consensus was growing—the Buenaventura did not exist, certainly not as an arm of the Great Salt Lake. But consensus was not absolute.

John Bidwell, a pioneer, later wrote about the pervasive misinformation, "An intelligent man with whom I boarded possessed a map that showed these rivers to be large, and he advised me to take tools along to make canoes, so that ... we could descend ... to the Pacific."

In 1842, John Charles Frémont, still in the early days of his career, was well positioned to be an agent of U.S. expansion as Manifest Destiny captured the minds of leaders in Washington D.C. With former tradesmen Thomas Fitzpatrick and Kit Carson as guides, Frémont was tasked with charting the interior of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast.

The expedition party went west along the Oregon Trail in May 1843. When they came upon the Bear River, Frémont, understanding it the main tributary of the lake, diverted from his course.

Frémont arrived at the Great Salt Lake on Sept. 6, recording in his logs, "We were upon the waters of the famous lake which forms a salient point among the remarkable geographic features of the country, and around which the vague and superstitious obscurity which we anticipated pleasure in dispelling, but which, in the meantime, left a crowded field for the exercise of our imagination."

When they finished on the shoreline, they rode out to "Disappointment Island"—now Frémont Island—to finish their work. They departed the lake on Sept. 10, charting it in just four days.

Even with a complete map of the Great Salt Lake, Frémont was not yet finished. This whole misunderstanding had been based on the geographical assumption that rivers will always meet the ocean. Early in his expedition, Frémont had concluded, but not yet proved, that this region was a basin.

As he traveled and saw the region, he put together the pieces—with the Sierra Nevada range to the west and the Wasatch range to the east, no rivers could flow beyond them. John Barton explained that by understanding the nature of the rivers here, Frémont put "the final nail in the coffin of hope for a river Buenaventura."

Frémont's final report named this region as the "Great Basin" and laid to rest the myth of the Rio de Buenaventura for good. President James Polk was reticent to accept this at first. After 68 years of echoing maps, the absence of the Buenaventura was difficult to accept.

With the dream of a natural path to the Pacific dead and finally buried, the United States would have to forge a path themselves. The first proposals for a transcontinental railway were put before Congress three years later in 1847.

Myth Busters
Sometimes, the simplest answers can be difficult to come by. Today we understand the complexities of the Great Basin and that saline lakes have no natural outlets. Yet, it took nearly 70 years for the men of the era to understand that.

Even as explorers disproved the old myth, time and time again, others persisted in believing the fairy tale.

Fur trappers saw on maps something that would revolutionize their livelihoods. They spent time searching for it, time trying to understand the region as they had been told it was. All the while they neglected what was right in front of them.

It was not just the mountain men, either, Carie Frantz says, "Western settlers tended to view the lake as a garbage dump and held the opinion that water that made it to the lake was water wasted. Culturally, we only started to shake that toxic way of thinking quite recently."

According to Frantz, the downward trajectory of the lake has been known since the 1990s, with scientists then predicting and speaking up about many of the consequences that Utahns have witnessed in the past several years.

"The collective political will to act to fix the underlying issues, however, wasn't really there," Frantz said.

The search for the Buenaventura saw plenty of men speak up. There was no river, and yet the search continued. And the delay acknowledging modern realities has caused long-term damage to the lake.

Frantz went on to say, "we had to seal off the North Arm of the lake to prevent a salinity-based collapse of the ecosystem."

Just as Frémont's breaking of the myth forced a reexamination of routes west, so, too, did a drying lake break the myth it would permanently remain without action. In the end, there is no river of good fortune to make dreams a reality. In its absence, the future is in our hands.