Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands Read online

  Still, brief family outings aside, Bolton spent most of his time at the university or on the trail of some Spanish explorer. Bolton’s regimen was obsessive, almost compulsive, a work routine that might have shortchanged his family. They did not see it that way. Yet it is fair to say that Bolton’s work meant more to him than anything but his family. His devotion to research and writing was extraordinary by any reasonable standard. The Bolton clan was proud of the family patriarch. His admiring family’s complete support of his prodigious labor is one of the chief reasons Bolton was able to do so much. However, Bolton’s great reputation may have taken a toll on young Herbert. A successful, commanding, and famous father can be a fearful legacy. “To live up to his example,” the son observed at the age of fifty-seven, “would have been a task for a giant or a saint.”7

  When Herbert Jr. recalled his father, he looked back over a lifetime of accomplishment, recognition, and public acclaim. But during those first years in Berkeley Bolton was not yet the imminent figure he would become. Nor was he an entirely free agent. While he worked diligently on his own research and teaching, Bolton cooperated with Stephens and friends of the university and its history department. The Native Sons of the Golden West were at the center of this group. In addition to providing research funds for Cal’s graduate students, the Native Sons were interested in preserving the documentary basis for California’s history. Under the guidance of Judge Davis the organization lobbied the state legislature for the establishment of a California Historical Survey Commission that would identify and preserve historical sources throughout the state, especially official records in the county offices.8 Bolton complied with Davis’s many requests for letters to the legislature and governor, and the bill authorizing the commission was duly signed into law.9

  The legislation provided for three commissioners appointed by the governor. One was to represent the Native Sons; the second would be nominated by the University of California Board of Regents; naming of the third commissioner was entirely up to the governor. Not surprisingly, the Native Sons named Judge Davis chairman. The regents recommended Bolton. The governor appointed James M. Guinn, secretary of the Southern California Historical Society, thus providing balance in a state often split along regional lines. The commission named Bolton’s doctoral student Owen C. Coy as secretary and archivist.10 Under Bolton’s guidance Coy produced guides to county records that are still of value today.11 Davis constantly goaded them to work harder and faster.12

  In 1915 Henry Morse Stephens became the first AHA president from west of the Mississippi River. This was not only a great personal achievement but a signal that the University of California’s history program should be taken seriously. His presidency coincided with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, so Stephens organized a concurrent meeting of the specially created Panama-Pacific Historical Congress, which was also declared to be a special meeting of the AHA. The congress showcased the Bancroft Library, the University of California, and Pacific Coast historical scholarship. Stephens and Bolton edited a volume of essays from the Congress, The Pacific Ocean in History.13 The lion’s share of the editorial duties for the conference volume fell to Bolton.14 As might be expected, the writings of Cal faculty and students dominated the book. Stephens’s essay on European conflicts in the Pacific was the lead article, while Bolton contributed two articles on California and New Mexico. The volume included papers from six of Bolton’s students, whose topics ranged from New Mexico to San Francisco Bay. California faculty and other participants examined the Philippines and other Pacific Ocean subjects.

  The book well expressed the historical outlook of Stephens and Bolton. As Bolton explained to the dean of the graduate college, the University of California history department should emphasize the writing of the state’s history. But this work “should not be interpreted too narrowly, for problems and interests are generally regional rather than intra-state.” Just as Turner, who had “made one of the great advances of all time in the understanding of democratic institutions,” had studied the Old Northwest at the University of Wisconsin, California should adopt a similarly broad sectional outlook. The Bancroft made it possible to study not only “California history in a limited sense, but…the whole American West with its Spanish and English backgrounds, and with its Pacific Ocean influences.”15 Bolton had learned well his lessons from Turner, Garrison, and Stephens. Beginning with local history and resources, historians at Wisconsin, Texas, and California widened their perspective to include ever broader historical vistas: Wisconsin and the Old Northwest; Texas and the Southwest; California and the Far West, Latin America, and the Pacific.

  Turner was never far from Bolton’s thoughts in his first years at Berkeley. Explaining his course on western history to his brother, Bolton wrote that he had “established a point of view which will cause a rewriting of textbooks, much as Turner’s work did.” Bolton thought his perspective was more expansive than Turner’s. “I approach American history from a continental and European standpoint, instead of from the standpoint of England alone.” Thus in Bolton’s course the West got its “due prominence in the colonial period as well as in the national period.”16 He would eventually express this outlook as hemispheric history, also known as the history of the Americas.

  Everything was in place for Bolton to advance in the historical profession. He had many publications, graduate students, a great library, an important position, and growing recognition, but he still stood in the shadow of Turner and the other “big men” of the profession. Bolton wanted to be on the same elevated plane with them, especially Turner. To break through, he needed two things: a signature piece of scholarship that would impress professional historians, and a popular book that would influence the general reading public. He realized both of these goals at about the same time.

  His chance for a popular book came when Yale University Press announced the Chronicles of America, a series comprised of short interpretive books by leading historians. Bolton offered to write a volume on Spain, “like what Parkman did for the French.”17 The new series must have seemed the perfect opportunity for Bolton to do what Turner had suggested a few months previously, but he soon learned that it was no easy matter to write with Parkman-like grace.

  Like most well-educated Americans Bolton had read Parkman, even selected his Pontiac for the tiny Fairchild school library when he was principal. Parkman was perhaps the greatest American narrative historian of his time or any other.18 His ability to describe historical scenes and personalities has never been surpassed. Parkman was an obvious model for Bolton. The New England historian had written about the titanic struggle of France and England for possession of North America. Bolton’s work suggested a parallel story on the English colonies’ southern flank. The editors of the Chronicles series no doubt saw it that way.

  Bolton wanted to write with Parkman’s verve, but he did not wish to adopt the same interpretive stance. Parkman called Spain “the incubus of Europe,” where a “tyranny of monks” employed “their racks, their dungeons, their fagots” to guide “the mind from infancy into those narrow depths of bigotry from which it was never to escape.” Parkman’s own bigotry stemmed from his origins. He was a Boston Brahmin, an upper-class New England Protestant through and through. It was only right, as far as he was concerned, to excoriate the Roman Catholic Church and the absolutist Spanish monarchy that “chilled the world with her baneful shadow.”19 Parkman’s prejudices were the very ones that Bolton was determined to extirpate from American historical writing. It would not be easy. Parkman’s prejudices were distributed well beyond the boundaries of New England.

  The job of dealing with Bolton’s Chronicles of America volume fell to series editor Allen Johnson. Johnson was the sort of “eastern and northern” scholar that Turner had in mind when he urged Bolton to write a popular account of his subject. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1870, Johnson had been educated at Amherst College, the University of Leipzig in Germany, and École Libre
des Sciences Politiques in Paris before earning a PhD at Columbia University in 1899. Johnson was a professor of history at Yale University when he teamed up with publisher Robert Glasgow for the new series, which was modeled after Glasgow’s successful Chronicles of Canada.20 After the series was completed, he became the first editor of the Dictionary of American Biography, giving it the careful editorial attention that made it a classic reference work.21 In sum, he was a fine writer and an able editor who would hold the Chronicles authors to the highest literary standards.22

  When Bolton offered to write a book like Parkman’s, the New Englander Johnson knew exactly what the Berkeley professor meant, and he expected Bolton to produce what he had promised. But Bolton was not an easy man to direct. He had a substantial ego and a keen sense of professional turf. Johnson, on the other hand, was even more arrogant than Bolton and not always diplomatic in his dealings with authors. Bolton would experience Johnson’s withering sarcasm more than once before the book was done.

  While Bolton was negotiating his contract with Johnson, he wrote an essay intended for a select scholarly audience, “The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish American Colonies.”23 This article became Bolton’s signature piece, the essential distillation of fifteen years’ research in the Mexican archives and the Bancroft Library. He read this essay as a faculty lecture in March 1917 and the next month sent it to Jameson for the American Historical Review. “It is entirely interpretative and contains no footnotes,” Bolton explained. “I have the feeling, however, that it reveals the significance of the mission as no other treatment has done, and is worth publishing somewhere.”24 Jameson’s 1907 AHA presidential address should have inspired confidence that the editor would want to publish Bolton’s essay. Jameson had encouraged American historians to investigate the history of religion in their own country. “In every other period of recorded time, we know that the study of religion casts valuable light on many other aspects of history,” Jameson wrote. “Why should it be otherwise with the religious history of America?”25 Perhaps he thought that Bolton was just the man do it. Jameson had been prompting Bolton to send something to the Review for more than a year.26

  Five weeks after Bolton submitted his essay Jameson accepted it, “with one proviso”: Bolton had included “rather extravagant language regarding Professor Turner” that Jameson wished to tone down.27 The editor suggested that the following words be substituted for Bolton’s original prose:

  Professor Turner’s study of the Anglo-American frontier has been richly rewarded. Scarcely less conspicuous in the history of the Western World than the advance of the Anglo-American frontier has been the spread of Spanish culture, and for him who should interpret, with Turner’s insight, the methods and the significance of the Spanish-American frontier, there awaits a recognition not less marked or less deserved.28

  Bolton had been thinking of “just such a modification.”29 The change was published with only slight alteration.

  It is remarkable that Jameson and Bolton would have published this special plea for the recognition of Bolton’s contributions as being equal to Turner’s. Bolton’s name was not mentioned, but if the statement was not meant to apply to Bolton, then to whom? Why mention Turner’s “rewards” at all? What could that word mean if not the professional status, popular acclaim, top salary, and Harvard professorship that Turner enjoyed? The meaning of the words is plain. At forty- seven years of age, Bolton still labored in the shadow of Turner and thought he deserved to be seen on the same level. Jameson, a close friend and deep admirer of Turner, thought so too, or at least he was willing to publish the words (his words) in the Review. There was nothing wrong in asserting the importance of Bolton’s work, but the words are oddly importunate and personally comparative, more like something one would see in an extravagantly positive book review written about someone else’s work. Yet there they stand, like a flag atop some newly discovered mountain emblazoned with “I did this!” Bolton’s claim to the mountaintop was not empty rhetoric, as his essay made plain. All those years in the libraries and archives of the United States and Mexico had given him secure command of his subject. Bolton, with Jameson’s imprimatur, was the authority on this subject.

  Bolton’s mission essay outlined the significance of one of Spain’s frontier institutions and the pioneers who built them, but these American frontiersmen were not quite like mountain men and yeoman farmers, for their intentions were dramatically different. Missionaries intended to Christianize and acculturate, or “civilize” in Bolton’s language, the American Indian population. Missionaries trained Indians in European occupations, the Spanish language, and Spanish mores as well as the Catholic religion. While admitting that the missionaries were not always successful, Bolton valorized and validated their methods and purposes. He gave no attention to what Indians may have wanted or to any negative effects that missions may have had on them. In the main, Bolton judged the missionaries to have been humane and effective exponents of European civilization and Christianity. The missionaries’ goals invited comparison to Turner’s frontier. “The missions were a force which made for the preservation of the Indians,” Bolton argued, “as opposed to their destruction, so characteristic of the Anglo-American frontier.”30

  Not only did Bolton plead for professional recognition in Turner-like proportions, but he did it by praising a frontier institution that challenged Turner’s Anglo frontier on moral grounds. At its heart, Bolton argued, the Spanish colonial experience was a religious enterprise that emphasized humanitarian values. In some ways, Bolton’s frontier was the diametric opposite of Turner’s. Unlike Turner’s Anglo-American frontiersmen who destroyed or removed Indians, the Spanish authorities sought to incorporate native peoples in frontier communities. Bolton’s frontier was racially inclusive and driven by the Spanish government as well as the Church; Turner’s frontier was racially exclusive and driven by individuals. Turner saw Americans confronting challenges and abandoning or modifying European culture for a new, democratic, uniquely American way of life. Bolton found missionaries Europeanizing American Indians and America itself.

  It was as if Jameson had set the stage for a discussion between Turner and Bolton about the nature and meaning of the frontier in North America. Such a debate could have been intellectually productive, but it never happened. Neither Bolton nor Turner attempted to rationalize or combine their ideas into a single coherent frontier theory. Rather, Bolton’s work was regarded as a new field of study without direct connection to Turner’s frontier, despite obvious temporal and geographic overlap in the region that ultimately became known as the Spanish Borderlands.31

  The mission essay established Bolton as the unchallenged master of his field, but it did not demonstrate the relevance of his subject to U.S. history in general. His emphasis on the southern tier of states from California to Florida marginalized rather then centralized the mission story. He said that millions of Latin Americans counted former mission Indians among their ancestors, but could only identify Indians in New Mexico and California as evidence for the continuing significance of missions in the United States. Turner could easily ignore Bolton’s Spanish missionaries and Indians because to him they were peripheral, but it was precisely the periphery that interested Bolton. The zone of Spanish occupation and exploration that he described required his reconnaissance on both sides of the border. He had become a border crosser, a transnational figure in a liminal space of his own design.

  Jameson admired Bolton’s essay, but he was astonished when Bolton requested six hundred reprints of the article. As a rule the journal provided the author with twenty-five reprints gratis but charged for additional copies. Six hundred copies was unheard of.32 Bolton explained that Edward J. Hanna, the archbishop of San Francisco wanted five hundred, presumably for distribution among interested Catholics.33

  Archbishop Hanna’s interest in Bolton’s article is not surprising. In an age when Catholics were only beginning to gain acceptance as Americans, Bolton’s asses
sment of missionaries as “American frontiersmen, and magnificent examples of the breed,” was welcome indeed.34 Thus began Hanna’s friendship and support for Bolton’s work. Hanna sometimes invited Bolton to dinner in San Francisco. “While you smoke we may catch a gleam of wisdom through the haze,” Hanna wrote in one invitation. The archbishop also provided some financial aid for Bolton’s work, though the extent is unclear. “This little mite,” Hanna vaguely explained in a note that must have accompanied a check, “to help your great work in behalf of our South West.” As far as the prelate was concerned, Bolton’s history, “in a way so perfect,” gave “true views of the past.”35

  Bolton’s reputation had become big. His success attracted the attention of leading historians, who wondered if Bolton could be attracted to their institutions. Not long after Bolton’s mission essay appeared, William E. Dodd sent out a feeler asking if Bolton might move to the University of Chicago. Bolton was interested and suggested an entirely new course, the history of the Western Hemisphere. Andrew McLaughlin of Chicago followed up. He thought that Bolton’s proposed course—“in the large—would be very interesting.” But the United States had entered World War I, and that stalled hiring at Chicago. Could Bolton come to Chicago for part of the year in 1919? If so, perhaps a permanent arrangement could be made once the war was over. Bolton replied that his situation was “so pleasant” at Berkeley that he could “with a fair degree of contentment await developments” in Chicago.36 After Bolton consulted with Stephens and President Wheeler about a temporary assignment and the possibility of a permanent opening in Chicago, he decided against going on a temporary basis. He blamed the decision on wartime dislocations and left the door open for future negotiations.37 The courtship between Bolton and Chicago went on for two years. It was reminiscent of Turner’s dance with Cal and Stanford. McLaughlin was not able to come up with the money for Bolton, but eventually was able to hire one of Bolton’s new doctors, J. Fred Rippy.38