Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands

by Albert L. Hurtado

  Garrison's report heralded his own ambitions for the University of Texas while paving the way for Bolton. At that time there were no other significant university libraries with historical research collections west of Missouri, so the University of Texas was well positioned to become a center of graduate training.38 This situation would change in a few years, but for the moment there was no better place in the West for an aspiring historian. Bolton scrambled to get on board Garrison's southwestern express. “Garrison was the man in this year's national association,” Herbert told his brother. “Texas has the key to Spanish American history.” Bolton was “grubbing Spanish” so that he could “help turn the lock.”39 Garrison enhanced his scholarly reputation in 1903 with the publication of Texas, A Contest of Civilizations in the respected American Commonwealths series.40

  Early in 1902 Garrison revealed to Bolton his long-range thinking about the younger scholar's future. In the fall of 1902 Bolton would begin teaching a course on “European Expansion, commercial and colonial activities” in colonial America. “I think I shall in time be able to block out a field of my own here,” he wrote Fred.41 This new course would at least have Herbert teaching American history, even though it was not in the area of his special training. Perhaps it was just as well that Garrison redirected Bolton's intellectual interests. By December Bolton had taken to describing his work on freedmen simply as “Niggers,” which suggests neither sympathy with nor a deep interest in the subject.42

  The rest of the Bolton family arrived in Austin as expected. Once settled, the Boltons fit into the social round of the young faculty and their families. “This is a great place for callers,” Herbert told his brother. People visited in the “forenoon, afternoon, and evening.” One couple in particular visited frequently. “They come in with a pack of cards to spend the evening,” or might invite the Boltons for singing. He liked his colleague, but he wasn't “a very hard worker, I think. Likes too well to go to church and calling.” Organized religion was not going to get in the way of Bolton's ambition. “Do you people attend church?” he asked Fred. “We do not,” though most of the Texas people did. “I haven't the time.”43

  Moving expenses had staggered the Boltons’ finances, a situation that usually caused Herbert to think about greener pastures. Garrison had virtually promised Bolton a raise, but the regents did not promote him. In the past, personal pride and pecuniary needs had made Bolton rail against politics and outrageous fortune, but not this time. “I shall not worry for another year,” he wrote. “Promotions are slow here, in spite of what they told me before I came.”44 Rather than excoriating Garrison for misleading him about early promotion, Bolton worked hard to please him. Bolton was more philosophical at Texas because for the first time he was reasonably certain things were going his way. With his $1,500 salary he no doubt knew that he was getting top pay in his grade.45 And now he saw the beginnings of something that would prove more important to him than money: the possibility of developing a field of historical investigation entirely his own.

  Bolton rapidly developed his knowledge of Spanish and southwestern history so that he could begin archival research. “I have a new bee in my bonnet,” he told Fred in July. He had decided to go to Mexico City. “I want to lay my lines here deep enough, and my plans broad enough, so that if, in the future, chance should leave an open field, I will be master of the situation.” Bolton was tired of being at the mercy of others. To control his destiny, he planned to dominate the field of southwestern history that Garrison had pioneered. “To do it one must know the Spanish archives and the Spanish language.”46 The department head must have been pleased that his hardworking instructor was willing to go to Mexico at his own expense. He did not yet understand the extent of Bolton's aggressive plans.

  Once summer school was out, Bolton boarded a train for the four-day ride to Mexico City. After quickly orienting himself in the Mexican capital—“beats Milwaukee in many respects,” he observed—Bolton turned to the Archivo Nacional. “It's a bold venture, but I have the nerve.”47 He burrowed into the Archivo with characteristic energy but struggled with the strange orthography and lack of finding aids. On Sundays he found time to sightsee. As might be expected, Bolton was a historically minded tourist. What he saw appealed to his romantic imagination. He traced the route of Cortes's entry into the city and saw the tree under which Cortes wept on la noche triste because he had lost so many of his men during his retreat from the Aztec capital in 1520. Bolton visited the Zocolo, the main plaza, and ventured out to Coyoacan, where Cortes had lived. Sites of American feats of arms during the Mexican War also seized his attention. He ambled along the remains of old causeways that harked back to the Aztec empire. There were sixteenth-century churches cheek by jowl with modern structures. “Everything here is a mixture of the very ancient and the very new.” Mexico City's modernity was perhaps most surprising to Herbert. “They tell me there are 400 miles of street railway in this city of the Aztecs—mostly electric.” Not everything in Mexico was commendable: once he left the modern city center, there were “myriads of peons—Indians of the laboring class—barefooted, blanketed &c. Someone said a yard of cotton will cover 4 Mexicans.”48

  After spending about one month in Mexico, Bolton returned to Austin with “enough powder for shooting off historical fireworks most of the year.” Within weeks, Bolton's first article about his findings appeared in the Quarterly: “Some Materials for Southwestern History in the Archivo General de Mexico.” This piece described in a general way about three dozen bound volumes of original and copied documents comprising many hundreds of pages. He pointed out some of the most important and interesting things he had discovered—eighteenth-century Texas settlements, missions, explorations, and personalities. This, Bolton revealed, was just a small portion of the archival riches in Mexico. What the remaining 273 volumes of bound documents contained could “be learned only by patient investigation.” Some arrangement should be made, he argued, to “systematically seek out, sift, copy, edit, and publish the more important sources.”49 And Texas was only a portion of Spain's northern frontier. There was much else on New Mexico, Sonora, and the Californias. By way of example, he published in the January 1903 issue of the Quarterly his translation of an inspection of eighteenthcentury Laredo.50 Beginning in 1903, Bolton contributed translated documents to a fifty-five-volume collection concerning the history of the Philippine Islands.51 It was a fair start for the founder of Spanish Borderlands history.

  Bolton's first publications from the Mexican archives show him to be a meticulous researcher with a comprehensive, though as yet undeveloped, view of the subject as he understood it—the history of those parts of the U.S. Southwest (especially Texas) that had been a part of the Spanish Empire. This definition, furnished by Garrison, was created as much by the need to appeal to Texans as it was by strictly scholarly considerations. In Mexico he again exhibited his capacity for hard work. Reading in a language still new to him, Bolton was able to review intensively about one volume of one hundred or more pages of handwritten documents per day. He also took time to copy out some of the most important items. He recognized that the Archivo General was only the tip of the iceberg. Local and provincial Mexican archives held much more, including the originals of many of the copies he encountered in 1902. He believed that it was necessary to track down those originals and to plumb the more remote repositories where even more documentary riches remained to be discovered. This was the true beginning of Bolton's lifetime of scholarly labor and achievement.

  His hard work paid off. The regents gave him a modest raise of $100 and a twoyear appointment. In the summer of 1903 Garrison arranged university funding for Bolton to return to Mexico to copy documents for the university. While there Bolton copied additional Philippines documents, which added a few dollars to his state-supported budget. Things were looking up. He and Barker were now close friends and cowriting With the Makers of Texas, which he thought would “have a good market” because the state's history was requir
ed to be taught in every school. The University of Washington asked him to apply for an assistant professorship there, but he decided to stay in Texas, probably with Garrison's encouragement. The university was growing. The student body had increased from 353 to 1,348 in the past ten years.52 In the long run Texas was the best place for Bolton, or so it seemed in 1903.

  From Garrison's point of view Bolton's work in Mexico advanced his plan for Texas and Southwest history. He thought of Bolton as his assistant in a program of research that Garrison managed. In 1903 he sought funding from the Carnegie Institution for Bolton's work in the Mexican archives. Garrison would send a party from Texas “composed of an instructor…and two assistants, all of them well trained and competent.”53 The proposal was not approved on account of uncertainty about whether the Mexican documents were merely copies of original records in Spanish archives. Until that question was answered, the Carnegie Institution was unwilling to fund translation work in Mexico.54

  Nevertheless, Bolton and three University of Texas student assistants (all young women) went to Mexico City that summer. The Texas women had “worked in Spanish four or five years each,” he explained to Fred. Herbert could speak more fluently, but the women read more accurately because they worked full-time with the Spanish manuscripts in the Bexar Archives. With the help of these assistants Bolton greatly improved his ability to decipher colonial writing.55 The researchers set a grueling pace. They entered the Archivo General at eight in the morning and worked until it closed at two. Then they ate before going to the library of the National Museum, working there from about three until it closed. After supper they translated Philippines documents.56 Adhering to this taxing schedule, Bolton and his assistants collected more than a thousand folios of material on Texas history. He thought that in two or three years he would be an authority on the manuscript sources of southwestern history—“a thing worth accomplishing.”57

  The Texas women helped him immensely in Mexico. He especially appreciated their work on the Philippine translations. Bolton told his brother, “They have helped me to the last and it will be published as a joint product.”58 Bolton was as good as his word. When the document was published, he shared credit with the two young women.59 This small act of scholarly generosity told much about Bolton as a man and about his conception of the scholarly enterprise. While he demanded all the credit he thought he deserved, Bolton also believed that scholarship was essentially a cooperative enterprise. A hard worker himself, he recognized and rewarded hardworking men and women. Though not a feminist, throughout his career Bolton helped women scholars, took women graduate students, and worked to get them fellowships and jobs.

  Bolton actively sought competent Spanish-language students to help him with his work. One semester he prefaced a medieval history lecture with a question: was there anyone who knew “Spanish and would like to work in the history of the old Spanish Southwest? If so, please see me after class.” Freshman William E. Dunn came forward. Bolton put him to work in the state capitol, indexing and copying Spanish and Mexican government manuscripts at twenty cents per hour. The work fascinated Dunn, who thereafter accompanied Bolton on his summer excursions to Mexico and became his graduate student.60

  In the spring of 1904 two prominent Americans visited Austin—President Theodore Roosevelt and David Starr Jordan, then president of Stanford University. They arrived on the same train. Teddy gave his stump speech and moved on. Jordan remained to deliver a formal lecture. Bolton took the opportunity to drive Jordan through the Texas hill country in a buggy.61 Jordan remembered that the Texas faculty had a spirited debate about whether to serve wine for dinner at their club, where Jordan would be guest of honor after his lecture. The Stanford president was, after all, a man of the world. What would he think of a place that did not serve wine with dinner? The epicures lost by one vote. Worried that the lack of spirits would give Jordan a negative impression of Texas, several heroic professors missed Jordan's lecture and repaired instead to the club, where they furiously smoked in order to fill the rooms with a convivial blue haze that would make Jordan feel at home. But instead of appreciating the club's cosmopolitan atmosphere, Jordan requested that the windows be opened to evacuate the smoke.62 Whether Bolton—a chain smoker—had a hand (or lung) in the smoke-out is unknown, but he had made an important acquaintance in Jordan. They would become better acquainted in the future.

  Bolton did not go to Mexico in the summer of 1904, perhaps because Gertrude was in the final stage of pregnancy with their fourth daughter, Eugenie, who was born in September. He was also working on an article on the Spanish abandonment and reoccupation of Texas and finishing his textbook with Barker.63 Garrison, who no doubt regarded the book as the latest good advertisement for the University of Texas school of history, wrote a graceful introduction.64

  Book royalties may have improved Bolton's financial situation somewhat, but he was betting on future prospects associated with his Mexican research. Money problems pestered him, yet in the same letter in which he complained of grim prospects for promotion at Texas—“They are terribly stingy”—he reported that he had rejected the presidency of Vincennes University.65 There is little doubt that, had Bolton remained in Milwaukee, he would have jumped at a university presidency. But Texas had changed the trajectory of his ambitions. Now he was a dedicated scholar who was convinced of the importance of his work and the eventual rewards that it would bring. Bolton's reputation was spreading. Texas would have to recognize his achievements or he would go. In June 1905 the regents promoted Bolton and raised his salary to $1,800.66 He was finally a regular member of the faculty with an improved salary (plus a stipend for managing the Quarterly and other university publications). There would be bigger payoffs in the future.

  As Bolton continued to develop his expertise in the Mexican material, his relationship with Garrison became fraught with jealousy and mistrust. In early 1905 both men were evidently involved in Garrison's new application for Carnegie money to support Bolton's work in the Mexican archives.67 Andrew McLaughlin, the Carnegie Institution's director of research, had apparently given Garrison strong assurances that the project would be funded, because the Quarterly carried an announcement about it. But McLaughlin's successor, J. Franklin Jameson, was mainly interested in underwriting the publication of guides to U.S. materials in foreign archives.68 In February Jameson informed Bolton (and probably Garrison) that the Carnegie Institution's executive committee had turned down the Mexican project.69 Jameson reasoned that without sound guides to foreign archives, historians could not make reliable decisions about what should be copied. Jameson's desire for a guide to the Mexican archives eventually would raise Bolton's professional stature and wound Garrison's pride.

  Before leaving for Mexico in the summer of 1905, Bolton scattered a little professional seed corn. He wrote Turner about documents in the Archivo General that might be of interest to him. Heading the list was correspondence concerning the 1819 Transcontinental Treaty. There were also eighteenth-century documents about England and Texas. “Do you suppose that the American Historical Review would care to publish good material of this sort?” he asked.70 Turner immediately (and without telling Bolton) forwarded Bolton's letter to Jameson, who was editor of the Review. “Bolton is a good man—trained here and at University of Penna,” he explained. “The stuff sounds interesting and…copies ought to be gotten, I imagine.”71

  Turner's note prompted Jameson to contact Bolton, who sent a detailed report to Jameson. He revealed that he had found new Spanish material on the Lewis and Clark expedition and mentioned the possibility of renewing Garrison's application for funds to pursue work in Mexico. “If there are any questions that you would like to ask me personally,” Bolton offered, “I shall do my best [to] answer them.” He had done a great deal of research at his own expense, he explained, but he needed more funds to work more extensively. “The field is rich here, and it ought to be harvested.”72

  Garrison knew that Bolton and Jameson were in contact, but
he may not have known the details of Bolton's correspondence or the sort of papers that Bolton had used to bait the hook for Jameson.73 The documents bearing on Lewis and Clark and the Transcontinental Treaty were in the class of material that Garrison expected to monopolize himself, documents reflecting the Anglo advance in the West. Bolton was now on Garrison's turf. Furthermore, Bolton invited a direct correspondence with Jameson that undercut Garrison's role as the nominal director of research in Mexico while simultaneously establishing Bolton's reputation with Jameson as the true expert in the field.

  Professional courtesy dictated that Jameson ask Garrison about Bolton's fitness to compile a guide to the Mexican archives.74 Garrison's response was lukewarm. “I will only answer yes in a general way to the questions you ask me about him. You would, I believe, find his work reliable and satisfactory.” He added that he hoped to see Jameson personally at the AHA meeting and thought it best to put off further consideration of the work in Mexico until then. Garrison explained that he had intended to do the Mexican archival work himself, and he diplomatically suggested that he would go if Jameson could provide funding. In his honeyed but pointed conclusion Garrison remarked that he was pleased to learn of Jameson's interest in Mexico. “I shall take pleasure in doing anything I can to further your plans relative thereto, whether Mr. Bolton or I should have a personal share in them or not.”75