SOURCE: Data from Ogden, Sluiter, and Crampton, Greater America, 549–672; and Bannon, Bolton, 283–90.
*Arrived at by counting only once people who took two degrees with Bolton.
Professional limitations for women were more than an academic concern for Bolton. His sixth daughter Gertrude was a history teacher with a master's degree in modern European history. She enrolled in the doctoral program at Cal, but dropped out to teach at the Kamehameha School for Girls in Honolulu.32 After two years she wanted a college teaching job in California. Her supportive father wrote twenty-six letters to the presidents of every junior college and state college in the state. Bolton assured them that she was capable of teaching courses in modern Europe as well as U.S. history, civics, and of course, Bolton's history of the Americas.33 After Bolton recommended his daughter for a position at San Francisco Junior College, he wrote a second letter insisting that it was imperative to hire someone who could teach his Americas course at the new junior college. Gertrude got the job.34
The placement of so many students at all levels of the educational system enabled Bolton to spread his core idea for revamping the way history was taught—the Americas. Bolton's two-semester course was well established at Berkeley, but the lack of a text held back the adoption of the course at other institutions. In 1928 he published an elaborate syllabus for the course.35 Bolton assigned it to his students and hoped that the book would provide the needed pedagogical tool for professors who taught the course elsewhere.
Of course, Bolton sent the syllabus to Turner, who had retired from Harvard and was living in Pasadena. Turner's acknowledgment of the Americas syllabus was positive but perfunctory. A quick perusal convinced him that it would have “a real and important influence upon the study of American history.”36 “You of course recognize it only as a pioneer effort,” Bolton responded. He planned to write a twovolume work on the Western Hemisphere, but in the meantime his syllabus would have to do. “I may never get it done,” he accurately predicted. “I would not do you the injustice to claim that I have in any satisfactory way expounded or applied your views of the frontier[;] nevertheless they are, in my mind at least, one of the underpinnings of the framework which I have constructed in my crude way,” he acknowledged. “I am not sure that you would be able to recognize them.”37 Once again, the student asked the master to engage his ideas. Once again, Bolton was disappointed. Turner's failure to intellectually debate or critique Bolton's work was perhaps understandable. The elder scholar was getting on in years and his health was fragile. Did Turner believe that Bolton had carried on and perhaps expanded Turner's ideas about frontiers and sections, or that he had merely added peripheral material to the main story of U.S. history? Turner never said.
Turner had retired from Harvard, but he continued his research in the newly opened Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which his old friend Max Farrand directed. Farrand, who had tried to hire Turner at Stanford and Yale, believed that Turner could offer sound advice and speed development of the new research library. Thus the preeminent historian of the American frontier (and a pretty good fly fisherman) finally moved to California. “It was with great delight that I learned…that you were coming to California,” Bolton told Turner. Bolton's enthusiasm was sincere. “Everybody here on the coast realizes what a great thing it is for us to count you as one of the Far Western group of scholars.”38 Bolton was still top gun in California, but Turner's presence on the coast might have reminded him of the joke he had made about Turner at the American Historical Association meeting a few years previously—like a sore thumb, always on hand.
In 1928 Bolton once again seemed to have a serious chance at the AHA presidency. The Nominating Committee chair was Bolton's student and friend Charles Hackett. Hackett greatly admired Bolton, but conditions kept him from pushing Bolton for the second vice presidency, despite the fact that he had twelve nominations, which placed him in the top rank of potential candidates. Ephraim D. Adams, Bolton's friend and coauthor, was one of the other leading candidates. Adams suffered from an apparently terminal case of tuberculosis, so there was strong sentiment for his nomination. In addition to these sad circumstances, the punctilious Hackett did not want it to appear that he was unduly pushing his mentor at the expense of other deserving candidates. Bolton supported Adams's nomination and actually wrote on his behalf. The ailing Adams got the nod.39 It was beginning to look as if Bolton would never reach the AHA presidency.
In 1928 two University of Colorado professors who had studied with Turner planned a conference on the history of the trans-Mississippi West to meet in Boulder the following year. Bolton and Turner agreed to attend.40 There would be roundtable discussions and individual papers meant to provide a broad perspective on western history. Turner did not want to speak formally but wished to provide advice and a friendly presence.41 Bolton agreed to speak after dinner. His address had the promising title “Defensive Spanish Expansion and the Significance of the Borderlands,” which echoed Turner's “Significance of the Frontier in American History.”42 Even though Turner would have only an informal role perhaps the conference at last would provide a forum to contrast and compare the ideas of Turner and Bolton.
If Bolton had hoped that his address would engage Turner, he was disappointed. Turner's health prevented him from going to Boulder. Even though he was not in the banquet hall, Turner was still an important presence. Before Bolton gave his address, someone suggested that the conference send salutations. The entire assembly rose to salute Turner.43 Then Bolton stood to address his audience. His speech was one of his most important statements about the meaning of borderlands history. “The old Spanish Borderlands were the meeting place and fusing place of two streams of European civilization,” he averred, “one coming from the south, the other coming from the north.”44 The borderlands were “a zone of contact, the scene of a long series of conflicts, ending in territorial transfers.” In spite of these changes in national sovereignty Spanish culture was a continuing presence in the southern tier of states. “It is we of the borderlands,” Bolton said, “who have the strongest historical bonds with our Latin neighbors.” Bolton's contemporary borderlanders appreciated Latin Americans’ “brilliant minds, their generous hearts, and their delicate culture.” He concluded with this ringing call: “It would be only fitting if we of the borderlands should be foremost in a fair-minded study of our common historical heritage, foremost in a study of our common problems, and foremost in making closer and stronger bonds of true international understanding.” Bolton found in his study of the borderlands not only a unique and romantic heritage (which his address also illustrated) but a meaningful history that informed the present and lit the path to a cooperative future with Latin America.
Bolton thought he had found a useable past strikingly different from Turner's jeremiad about American history. Turner wondered in his frontier essay what the future might hold for the United States now that the frontier was closed. If the particular conditions that promoted national development and fostered the emergence of American character no longer existed, what now? In Bolton's mind, history pointed to a hopeful future because Spain had left its imprint on the borderlands, thus making the region's residents more sensitive and open to Latin American culture. He thought modern borderlanders and Latin Americans could work together to solve common problems. Turner saw barriers to civilization and dead ends in non-Anglo cultures; Bolton saw cultures that mixed and fused. Turner worried about a frontier that had forever closed once free land was gone; Bolton saw the borderland frontier as an opening for a cooperative future.
What did Turner think of all this? “The Conference was a very real success,” Turner's student James F. Willard wrote him. “The papers were excellent, especially one by Herbert E. Bolton,” he added, and promised to send Turner a copy of the proceedings.45 If Turner read Bolton's address, he did not mention it to Bolton.
Turner was silent, but Bolton was not. In the 1920s Bolton continued to publish documenta
ry volumes much like his translation of Kino. His edition of Francisco Palóu's Historical Memoirs of New California was meant to be a foundation document for California history. It was also marked by the romantic gloss that appealed to Californians “who have lived to enjoy the fruits of the civilization whose seeds” Palóu planted. The padre was “one of the great figures” of “the heroic days” of California's mission era.46 Bolton had no reservations about the goals of Palóu and his missionary companions, who brought “Faith and civilization to the wilds of America, both North and South.” While Bolton emphasized the historical value of Palóu's writing, he also made clear that the friar had recorded “heroic deeds.”47
By now, Indians, who had taken a leading role in Bolton's early work, had become mere objects of missionary attention. In his edition of Fray Juan Crespi's account of Spanish exploration and settlement in California, Bolton described the Indians as “heathen” and “rude neophytes,” while Crespi was a “splendid wayfarer.”48 Like Kino and Palóu, Crespi was no mere recorder of facts, but a hero whose “Christian teachings” to the native people would “never die.” Crespi's diaries contained “the adventures, the thrills, the hopes, the fears” of Franciscan missionaries, but little of the Indians’ motivations. Bolton sometimes included notes to anthropological literature, but allowed statements such as Crespi's “thievishness is a quality common to all Indians” to stand without comment.49
There was no venom in Bolton's decision to allow missionaries to speak for themselves, ethnocentric stereotypes and all. His intention was not to vilify Indians, but to glorify his heroic friars. He was writing for an appreciative audience—local patriots and Catholics who loved the positive history that Bolton published.50 Had the Native Sons included a substantial number of California Indians, Bolton might have given more thought to the friars’ language and biases. But in the 1920s and ‘30s Bolton did not have to worry about a constituency that was critical of damage caused by missionary zeal and colonial conquest. These voices would rise later. For the time being Bolton preached to the converted. Neither Bolton nor his admirers realized that in later times Bolton's editions of missionary writings would be one of the important sources of evidence for ethnohistory that was critical of the men and events that he sought to valorize.
Scholars should be grateful for the great care that Bolton took in translating and editing these important documents. His meticulousness in the archives and on the trail gave his publications lasting utility. However, in retailing the accounts of missionaries and soldiers while characterizing them as heroes, Bolton gave his stamp of approval to a conquest that was sometimes brutal and frequently disastrous to Indian society. In due time this criticism would be laid at Bolton's door, an unexpected patrimony.
E L E V E N · The Grand Patriarch
The 1930s were challenging years for the University of California. In July 1930 Robert Gordon Sproul became president of the university. No one was surprised. As university vice president and secretary of the regents, Sproul was in effect the “operational president” from 1920 on, according to Clark Kerr, Sproul's successor.1 Bolton, of course, knew Sproul well and worked closely with him. Sproul assumed the presidency during the Great Depression, a time when his legendary attention to budgetary detail was most needed.
Hard times for the country meant hard times for the university. Yet there was a glimmer of hope. In the midst of the depression Bolton would have plenty of money to fill two new and much needed senior positions. In 1930 university benefactors provided endowments for two new history professorships, the Margaret Byrne in American history and the Sidney H. Ehrman in European history. The Ehrman endowment grew out of a family tragedy, the untimely death of Sidney Hellman Ehrman, son of Bolton's benefactor. Like his father, young Ehrman had an interest in history. After taking the baccalaureate at Berkeley, he studied European history at Cambridge University, where he contracted a horrible infection in 1929. His parents rushed to Sidney's side, but to no avail. The Ehrmans endowed a chair for European history at Cambridge and another at Berkeley in their son's memory.2 Shortly after his son's death Sidney Ehrman was named a regent of the University of California.3
In 1930 death came to one of Bolton's important friends, Judge John F. Davis.4 The judge, domineering though he was, had been one of Bolton's most important allies among the Native Sons, his colleague on the State Historical Commission, and a savvy navigator on the choppy political waters of state politics. No one could entirely replace him as an effective advocate for the Native Sons’ fellowship program.
Hoping that Davis was a good Catholic, Father Zephyrin Engelhardt said an RIP for him. Alas, he would have done the same for Charles F. Lummis, who had died in 1928, but he was not a Catholic. “He jumped into eternity with both feet without examining whether there is a bottom to it,” so the Franciscan priest would not sing the mass for him. Engelhardt, motivated no doubt by the most kindly intentions for Bolton, went on to explain that it was “stupidity” not to act to save one's soul. “The Lord save us, but we must want to be saved and must save ourselves, too,” he explained.5 Engelhardt's not-so-subtle message was clear: Bolton knew “the Truth” and should act accordingly. The message could not have been lost on Bolton, but he remained silent on his religious beliefs, even to well-meaning priests who were his friends. He continued to believe whatever he believed as quietly as possible.
In 1930 Bolton published one of his major works, Anna's California Expeditions, consisting of four volumes of translated diaries and correspondence, plus a fifth (separately published as Outpost of Empire) containing Bolton's history of events based on the documents. Bolton's narrative covered Juan Bautista de Anza's leadership of two expeditions to California and the founding of San Francisco between 1774 and 1776. Outpost was Bolton's first full volume of history since publishing The Spanish Borderlands in 1921. Since then, his many other publications had been edited documents with long introductions that were sometimes reissued separately.6 Bolton's introductions had given him practice in presenting his Spaniards in a grand heroic light. Under Bolton's pen Anza's deeds were comparable—indeed superior—to those of Lewis and Clark. Anza he characterized as “a man of heroic qualities, tough as oak, and silent as the desert from which he sprang.”7 One sees the archetypal western hero—quietly strong and determined to do the right thing. But there was something more here than mere hero-mongering (though there was plenty of that). Bolton had learned how to construct a lively historical narrative that captured the reader's imagination. He had assimilated the writing lessons that Johnson, Skinner, Turner, and Parkman had offered him. Bolton's prose was now sprinkled with memorable imagery, as when he briefly described Anza or the conquest of New Mexico: “Now, like an athlete, gathering force for a mighty spring, the frontier of settlement leaped eight hundred miles into the wilderness.” He was not Parkman, but he had become an engaging narrative writer.
In this book Bolton saw the Indians as his Spanish friars and soldiers saw them—as fitting subjects for improvement by religious instruction, or perhaps as sly and dangerous opponents. But in one case Bolton found an Indian personality worthy of extended treatment: Palma, a Yuma chief. The helpful Palma wanted baptism and longed for a mission in his Colorado River homeland. His story thus became a minor theme that reinforced Bolton's positive larger story of Spaniards bringing civilization to America. He titled the concluding chapter “Palma Before the Cathedral Altar.” Bolton's use of Palma as a foil for his European protagonists was a literary trick that he could have learned from Parkman.8
Not everyone appreciated Bolton's prose or his Spanish hero-mongering. Constance Lindsay Skinner reviewed Anna's California Expeditions for a New York paper. She thought Anza a “typical product of the Spanish-American frontier,” but rejected Bolton's claim that Anza's exploits were greater than those of Lewis and Clark. “One blinks, hardly believing such arrant nonsense can really be on the page,” she wrote. Anza's travels were not heroic, but the common stuff of “frontier folk.” Skin
ner thought that the value of the book lay not in Bolton's “deductions and interpretations,” but in the documents that he presented.9 The critique was rooted as much in her Anglophilia as it was in Bolton's literary excesses. Yet she grudgingly admitted that students of the frontier owed Bolton a debt of gratitude for publishing the documents.
There is much truth in Skinner's review, but she missed some things. Of course there was the large, folded map, “Anza's Routes through Pimería Alta,” which showed his trails crossing the international border, Bolton's usual symbol for inferential transnational meanings.10 But this time Bolton's final words on the founding of San Francisco went beyond cartographic inference. San Francisco developed “on the borderland of competing powers and varied civilizations.” Spain, Mexico, Russia, England, and the United States competed for California and the town that Anza founded. “One flag followed another” until the United States won the prize. But even then, “an astounding medley of races” converged on California during the gold rush. In the twentieth century San Francisco was still “a borderland community, an interpreter of diverse faiths, a nexus between Nordic and Hispanic cultures, a Western Hemisphere outpost toward the vast world that lies beyond the Pacific, a link between the restless Occident and the patient, mighty Orient.”11 Here Bolton explicitly used the borderland motif to tell a national story with transnational dimensions. And because San Francisco was still a borderland community, its future was open to new transnational possibilities. Whereas Turner's frontier ended, Bolton's borderland frontier lived on with the continuing invigoration of new national and cultural contacts.
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