Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands Read online

  The literary criticism from Marshall and substantive criticism from Paxson were not markedly different from that of Chronicles of America series editor Allen Johnson, who had rejected Bolton’s early drafts for the series. Bolton disappointed Johnson not only on matters of style but on punctuality. Even though Bolton had promised to give priority to the Chronicles series, he was working on several other projects, including Kino’s Historical Memoir of Pimería Alta, the Colonization book with Marshall, plus nine articles.27 All of these publications came out during the years when Bolton was working on his still-unnamed contribution to the Chronicles.

  The Kino volume was the most troublesome of Bolton’s other publishing ventures. He quarreled with Arthur H. Clark, the publisher, who eventually sued Bolton for costs incurred due to delays and Bolton’s ceaseless revisions. Eventually the case was dropped.28 All of this took time away from the Chronicles.

  In the meantime Bolton seemed to lavish time and attention on Kino, which involved archival and trail research. For the rest of his life Bolton would combine exhaustive documentary work with personal inspections of historic sites and explorers’ routes. As Bolton stated in his biography of Kino, he “retraced nearly all his endless trails and identified most of his campsites and water holes—all this in an effort to see Kino’s world as Kino saw it.”29 In following the trails of Kino and others, sleeping on the ground at their campsites, eating trail rations, and smoking by the campfire, Bolton came to fully identify with his subjects. His perspective won many admirers, but it would also mark his work as a kind of hero worship that would not ring true in the post–World War II era.

  As with Athanase de Mézières Bolton drew an oversized map with remarkable ethnogeographical details. Like the Texas chart, his “Map of Pimería Alta” implied a transnational and multicultural history. It identified general tribal areas and dozens of specific Indian communities as well as the locations of Spanish missions and visitas, places where Kino occasionally preached. Bolton traced the routes for thirty-six of Kino’s journeys out of Mexico north to the Gila River in Arizona and west to the Colorado River. The trails make a pattern like a gnarled ironwood tree spreading across the Sonoran Desert. Bolton did not bother to include the international boundary between the United States and Mexico, a lapse that reinforced the impermanence of national borders even though Kino’s travels spanned modern national boundaries and, in Bolton’s point of view, perhaps transcended them. By following and interpreting Kino’s trails, Bolton himself became a transnational figure—a historian of Native America, Spain, and Mexico as well as the United States.

  But Bolton had not forgotten the interpretive devices of the United States. He marked an east-to-west line of “Frontier Settlement When Kino Arrived in 1687,” which illustrated Kino’s contribution to the spread of European civilization, as Bolton described it—or Spanish colonial conquest, as it is understood by others. The line of settlement declared Bolton’s loyalty to Turner’s concept of a moving frontier. Turner’s line moved west; Bolton’s line moved north. Eventually the lines would converge.

  Bolton’s boots-on-the-ground history set him apart from Turner. Turner loved the outdoors and could write about the environment in beautifully descriptive, emotive language, as when he described the Grand Canyon for a friend. “We saw the world made at sunrise yesterday,” he wrote. It was nothing less “than the unfolding of the dark chaos into the form and color of the Grand Canyon’s gigantic occupants.”30 But Turner reserved these word pictures for his personal letters. For him outdoor life was about recreation, not academic work. It is doubtful that Turner influenced Bolton’s trailside history; perhaps McMaster was a source of inspiration. McMaster’s early career as a surveyor of Civil War battlefields and a Princeton bone hunter in the West may have crept into his teaching and casual conversation at Penn in the 1890s. If so, Bolton never mentioned it in his letters.

  The most likely model for Bolton’s fieldwork was a man he never met, Francis Parkman. Parkman was not only a great narrative stylist but a devoted field researcher who examined every scene of historical action in his books. “In short,” Parkman explained, he studied his subject “as much from life and in the open air as at the library table.”31 Parkman’s field research enabled him to reconstruct stirring scenes of the struggle between France, England, and Indians in North America with almost “novelistic perfection,” as historian Wilbur Jacobs put it.32

  Parkman sometimes used his personal adventures as a basis for describing the acts of historical figures. Once he made a dangerous climb up a rocky canyon and then used that experience to describe the British assent to the Plains of Abraham in Montcalm and Wolfe. Parkman performed other feats of derring-do that found their way into his writings. Jacobs perceptively characterized Parkman’s extension of his own experiences into his descriptive prose as a form of narcissism. Thus Parkman became the historian as hero.33

  Bolton aspired to Parkman’s artistic prowess and to the supposed authenticity that the Brahmin’s field research gave his work. He did not go to Parkman’s extreme of self-modeling, but Bolton did put himself in the picture by emphasizing that he had replicated the exploits of his heroes, an achievement diminished only slightly by the fact that Bolton was often in the seat of a Hupmobile rather than a saddle. Like Parkman, Bolton portrayed himself as a man of action who was a match for the physical environment. In Bolton’s retracing of Kino’s trails, Bolton also became the historian as hero.

  As important as Kino and his other projects were to Bolton, they were entirely extraneous as far as Johnson was concerned. After several times putting off sending a manuscript to Johnson, Bolton had the bad judgment to send his editor two offprints of freshly published articles. Johnson coolly acknowledged them and added that he would rather see Bolton’s manuscript. “Pray when may I expect that long-delayed document?”34 Bolton at last sent Johnson two manuscripts, a long and a short version. Neither pleased the editor. Although he appreciated Bolton’s expertise in his subject, he wanted “an impressionistic picture of these Spanish adventurers and borderers.” As it stood, Bolton’s book was too detailed and boring. “To inflict dry tomes on the public after promising interesting literary volumes,” he added, “would make us a laughing stock.”35 “The average reader wishes graphic pictures and human interest, not an account of a shadowy individual traveling so many miles on one day and so many the next, with so many horses and so many goats, reaching a place with an unpronounceable name, after so many days of travel.” And then he gave Bolton an elegant piece of advice. “I wish that I could shut you up in a room without your books and your notes, with only a pen and paper, and bid you write a book for us out of your memory.” Then perhaps Bolton could “set down large impressions and paint pictures on a big canvass, against that wonderful atmospheric background of the Great Southwest—and the result would probably be the book we want.”36

  Bolton worked on revisions for more than a year—when his other projects did not interfere. In April 1919 he sent a revised manuscript to Johnson.37 Neither Johnson nor the publisher, Robert Glasgow, liked Bolton’s revised manuscript. As Glasgow loftily put it, “Professor Bolton has not the artistic faculty sufficiently developed to write one of our books.” The publisher believed that the only salvation for Bolton’s work was to hire someone to rewrite it.38 Johnson assured Bolton that the practice was common. The editor himself had taken a large role in rewriting one of the Chronicles volumes. He praised Bolton’s skill as an investigator, but insisted that he had not yet developed “the artistic gift.”39

  Bolton read Johnson’s letter when he was just beginning his term as head of the history department, so the idea of a ghostwriter had some practical appeal. While accepting Johnson’s proposal, he demanded the right to approve the manuscript for historical accuracy.40 Once Bolton had agreed to accept a reviser, Johnson and Glasgow decided to edit the manuscript in house. Then Bolton would not have to acknowledge another writer at all. Most important, Johnson assured him that Bolton’
s judgment of facts would be final.41

  Johnson assigned Bolton’s manuscript to Constance Lindsay Skinner, a gifted writer with an unusual background. She was born in the trading village of Quesnel, British Columbia, the daughter of a Hudson’s Bay Company trader. Formal education in Quesnel was limited, but Skinner read widely in her parents’ large library. At age fourteen she went to a private school in Vancouver where she became a newspaper journalist. After gaining experience, Skinner moved to Los Angeles and went to work as one of William Randolph Hearst’s “sob sisters.” Skinner ran with California’s Bohemian crowd. She counted writer Jack London among her friends and lived for a summer on stage actress Helena Modjeska’s Southern California ranch. Determined to become an independent writer, Skinner published verse, magazine articles, and two plays, one of which was produced in New York in 1917.42 She was a vivid personality on the New York publishing scene. One of her friends described her as a “mountain of a woman, dressed in fantastic red plush, with dyed hair and mascaraed eyes, with gaudy costume jewelry jangling on her arms.” She possessed “an incisive wit” that put “the fear of God into the various writers who worked with her.” Skinner had no respect for academic credentials and was thankful she had never attended a college.43

  Skinner wrote one of the first Chronicles volumes, Pioneers of the Old Southwest: A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground, under her own name. Turner liked the book and asked Johnson about her. “I hope you will appreciate the subtle compliment,” Johnson wrote to Skinner, “from one of the foremost historians of the United States.”44 Johnson, of course, could also feel flattered at Turner’s indirect compliment to his judgment in choosing Skinner—who had published no history previously—to write the volume. Johnson was so taken with Skinner’s first effort that he asked her to write a volume on the fur trade for the series, but that project had to wait until Skinner was finished with Bolton’s manuscript. “It is an awful mess,” Johnson warned.45

  Part of the problem, Johnson acknowledged, was that the story of Spain in America was apportioned among Bolton and three other writers. There was some overlap, but Johnson understood one thing with regard to Bolton’s contribution: “Clearly, it is highly desirable to link the Borderlands with Spain and with the rest of New Spain,” he explained to Skinner.46 Johnson’s line of thought may have led to the eventual title for Bolton’s book, The Spanish Borderlands. It would become more than a title. Along with his conception of hemispheric history as embodied in the Americas, the borderlands idea would be forever associated with Bolton. Just as important, Bolton’s confrontation with Johnson and Skinner convinced him that it was necessary to emphasize the significance of Spanish-American history. This led him to sometimes make extravagant claims about Spain and its heroes.

  In January 1920 Bolton received the revised manuscript from Johnson. Johnson did not want Bolton to edit the manuscript, but to give a “verdict on the work of the reviser in general.”47 The editor reminded him that he had promised “to do for Spain in America what Parkman did for New France; that is, to write a book totally unlike your other books and designed to interest the ordinary reader.” Then he urged Bolton to “make the book your own.” Johnson refused to reveal the name of the ghostwriter but assured Bolton that he could “trust his [sic] literary sense as well as his sense of historical values.”48

  But Skinner’s work did not reassure Bolton. First, there was the matter of perspective. Skinner (and presumably Johnson) wanted Bolton to tell the story of Spaniards in the territory that became the United States, and “why Spain isn’t here now.” Everything that was not “at least relatively important today” ought to be excised. Skinner’s sense of contemporary importance was far different from Bolton’s. The latter, for example, wished to emphasize in the story of Florida the “constructive” efforts of the Spanish commander Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in founding St. Augustine. Skinner, on the other hand, thought that telling about the short-lived French Huguenot settlement at Fort Caroline was the main thing, even though Menéndez slaughtered the Protestants like sheep and forced France to abandon designs on Florida. What did St. Augustine matter, Skinner argued? Spain did not expand its settlements from there, and a few years later England founded Jamestown and its people spread “to the mountains and beyond and down into Georgia.” Moreover, “the Huguenot-Spanish fight…ought not to be ignored in any American history,” because it “was prophetic of the power which would break Spain.” “Spreading Protestantism…foiled Philip II’s ambition” and “raised against him his antagonist Elizabeth and Drake’s guns.” “This book should not be written from the Spanish standpoint but from the American,” Skinner concluded. “The ‘conservative movements’ of Spanish exploration may be interesting to antiquarians, but they are not vital to the ordinary reader.”49

  Skinner had presented in a few words the Anglophilic prejudices that, in Bolton’s mind, constituted what was wrong with standard interpretations of American history. Protestant England prevailed; Catholic Spain failed. The prospect of such ethnocentric bigotry appearing under his name was intolerable to Bolton. “I am not of that school of writers who speak traditionally of ‘the dark shadow of Spain,’ or supposes the ‘Spanish institutions in the New World crumpled like a house of cards at the touch of the Anglo-Saxon,’ ” he explained to Johnson. “There is no excuse for another book written in the old spirit of ignorance and prejudice,” he wrote without referencing Parkman as the author of such books.50 Bolton was willing to accept Skinner’s stylistic changes, but “after your complete annihilation of any slight literary pride which I may have had[,] the only refuge for my self respect [sic] lay in still daring to hope that I might venture to have some historical opinion with regard to your revision.”51

  Bolton was also concerned about Skinner’s reorganization of his book. “X,” as Bolton called the still anonymous Skinner, had folded the chapter on Texas into the one on New Mexico and, in similar fashion, had combined material on Kino and other Jesuit missionaries into a chapter titled “The Missions” that covered only the Californias and Arizona.52 Bolton insisted on restoring separate chapters on Florida, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and Alta California and on the Jesuits in Arizona and Baja California.

  While Bolton revised the Skinner manuscript, Johnson made clear that Bolton’s concerns about interpretation were not uppermost in his mind. “What a job you had!” he wrote to Skinner. “My fear is that he wont [sic] know the difference between your work and his own,” he added, although Bolton’s letters made plain that he had a perfect understanding of the dissimilarity of Skinner’s interpretation of the borderlands. Johnson condescendingly explained that Bolton was one of those professors who had an excessive reverence for facts. “The more of these sacred things you can amass the bigger man you are.” Johnson supposed that “Bolton would turn a handspring which would land him across the continent, if he had any inkling that a mere woman had revised his manuscript.”53

  In the end, Glasgow and Johnson had the good sense to give Bolton his way on large matters of organization and interpretation, but they kept much of Skinner’s language, which gave The Spanish Borderlands its distinctive literary quality. Bolton retained full authorial credit and acknowledged Skinner’s “able assistance” only in a single prefatory line. Most important, Bolton won the bigger battle by insisting on his interpretation of the continuing significance of Spanish colonial history. Despite Skinner’s and Johnson’s insistence that Bolton’s story should make Spain fade away so that Protestant England and the United States could take over, he emphasized the permanent stamp of Spain and Mexico on the region. His preface sketched the influences of Hispanic culture, language, religion, law, institutions, and people, which were “growing stronger,” especially in the Southwest. “In short,” he concluded, “the Southwest is as Spanish in color and historical background as New England is Puritan, as New York is Dutch, or as New Orleans is French.”54

  The origin of the title is uncertain, but it most likely came from Jo
hnson, whose letters mention the words “borderers” and “borderlands.” In Johnson’s mind the terms may have emphasized the marginal nature of Spanish history in the Chronicles series. And Bolton may have suggested the term as a convenient and obvious way to refer to those places “belonging to the United States, over which Spain held sway for centuries.”55 Whatever the case, The Spanish Borderlands presented Bolton’s point of view with his name indelibly imprinted on it.

  The success of Bolton’s little book helped him to teach and promote History 8. Yale University Press brought out an inexpensive textbook edition that Bolton and other professors—especially those who trained under Bolton—assigned to students.56 In 1928 the director of Yale University Press concluded that the Chronicles volumes sold especially well in California and Texas because of the presence of The Spanish Borderlands in the series. Bolton attributed this success to the spread of his course, History of the Americas, throughout California and the Southwest. Not surprisingly, The Spanish Borderlands was one of the “interesting little books” he recommended for the course.57 Thus, the Chronicles series gave Bolton a large audience and a core text for his broad course on the Western Hemisphere.

  Bolton received something from The Spanish Borderlands in addition to recognition and his royalty: a writing lesson. His acknowledgment of Skinner was perfunctory, but her influence on his style was lasting. All of his subsequent books displayed a muscular and romantic style that owed much to her and to Johnson.