Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands Read online

  There was no mistaking Garrison's preference as to whom the Carnegie Institution should fund to work in Mexico. Garrison had welcomed and applauded Bolton's work in Mexico as long as it had been seen as part of his larger operation, but he well understood that if Bolton authored a guide to historical materials in Mexican archives, he would become the leading authority, not Garrison. And Bolton understood this too. The opportunity to work in the Mexican archives under Jameson's direction was “just the kind of work I have been preparing to do and am intending to do independently and unaided if I cannot have the advantages of cooperation and financial help,” Bolton explained. He had a bibliographical essay “relative to the Mexican archives about ready” for the Quarterly, “but I shall withhold it at present.”76 This was bait that Jameson was interested in. He rejected the publication of the Transcontinental Treaty documents, but placed Bolton's essay on the Mexican archives in the Review.77 This publication alone made Bolton the leading candidate for the Mexican guide project.

  In early January 1906, presumably after seeing Garrison at the AHA meeting in Baltimore, Jameson invited Bolton to compile “a comprehensive guide to the materials for the history of the United States in the Mexican archives.”78 He offered to pay Bolton's salary and expenses for one year. Jameson advised Bolton to consult with Garrison to determine when he might begin the work. Garrison put a smiling face on these developments in a newspaper article announcing the project. He claimed that Bolton had taken up the work because Garrison's other duties prevented him from doing so.79 Bolton noted that Garrison figured “with characteristic prominence” in the article. “He claims everything in sight,” he added, “but this does not greatly trouble me.”80 Bolton was coming into his own, and he felt secure enough to risk alienating Garrison. With Jameson on his side (not to mention Turner, Haskins, and McMaster), he could afford to be bold.

  Bolton's serenity was well founded. He had shrewdly played an inside game that enabled him to get around Garrison. He outmaneuvered his department head in Austin by winning the support of the new university president, David F. Houston, who had replaced Prather. Bolton asked Houston if he had made a mistake in studying southwestern history, because Professor Garrison was “(let me whisper it) very sensitive to competition.” Houston told Bolton to “create the field and the chair will be made in due time. This is what he [Houston] wants me to do.” Bolton did not intend to be Garrison's errand boy at Texas.81

  But Garrison was not yet finished with Bolton and Jameson. The question of the timing of Bolton's leave of absence depended on arrangements for someone to take Bolton's duties at the University of Texas and the Quarterly. Barker was in Pennsylvania finishing his doctoral work with McMaster, and Bolton could not leave until Barker returned. Bolton proposed to do part of the work in the summer of 1906 and return to Texas for the academic year 1906—1907. He would complete the Mexican work in the succeeding academic year.82 Just when everything seemed set, Jameson reported that the Carnegie Institution executive board had deferred funding for the guide projects.83 He hoped that funding would be forthcoming, but in the summer of 1906 Bolton proceeded to Mexico without Carnegie assistance.

  Bolton had found new work that subsidized his Mexican research trip. William A. Holmes of the Bureau of American Ethnology had asked Bolton to revise some articles and to write additional ones for a handbook on American Indians.84 More than one hundred articles in the published book came from Bolton's pen, and much of it was written from documents he found while he was in Mexico in 1906. He was paid $1,000 for the first half of this work, a considerable infusion of outside income.85

  Bolton reported his new findings to Jameson, who finally secured the appropriation for the Mexican guide at $150 per month plus expenses. The two planned to meet in Washington to firm up plans before proceeding to the AHA meeting in late December.86 “Please express my thanks to Professor Garrison for his kindness in making the arrangement possible,” Jameson concluded, but he expressed his gratitude too soon.87 The very next day Garrison asked Jameson for financial assistance to examine in the Mexican archives “materials belonging to the period of the Anglo-American movement southwestward.” Bolton, he clarified, was working in the “earlier period of Spanish-American history,” and his archival research had dealt exclusively with that area. “My own judgment is that his work for the Carnegie Institution had best be prosecuted under the same restrictions.” Garrison believed that he had earned the right to exploit the Mexican archives in his own field, because he had pioneered research in Mexico. “I do not like to press my claims,” Garrison wrote, but “I trust that you yourself see the situation clearly, and that argument is unnecessary.”88

  Jameson's response was unequivocal. He had engaged Bolton for the preparation of “one comprehensive guide to the materials for United State history” in the Mexican archives. Turning to Garrison's long-standing hope that the Carnegie Institution would help him get documents from the Mexican archives, Jameson planned to aid in “the more elaborate exploitation” of foreign archives “that would do the greatest good for the greatest number,” but these projects lay “so much in the future that I have not considered them carefully.”89 Jameson hoped that Texas and other state governments would be moved to fund projects of the sort that Garrison proposed. Garrison was out in the cold.

  Everything seemed to be set. Barker would finish his degree, return to Texas in June, and Bolton would leave for Mexico. Then came Garrison's letter to Jameson. “I regret greatly the little hitch that seems likely in the matter of Dr. Bolton's leave of absence.” Barker was going to Harvard on a one-year fellowship. Garrison proposed to put off Bolton's leave for a year. Garrison insisted that he had no desire to interfere with Jameson's plans. “This is said in the frankest and most cordial spirit.”90 There was a limit to Jameson's patience and it had been reached. Delaying Bolton's leave would cause much “difficulty and regret,” he informed Garrison.91 Just when was Barker expected to finish his degree, and when would Bolton's leave finally be decided? the irritated Jameson asked. Bolton solved the problem by going directly to the university president, who approved the leave.92 Houston also promised Bolton a promotion to associate professor with a good salary raise when he returned.93

  President Houston realized that Bolton's work had practical applications as well as scholarly merit. In May Houston referred several “Dallas capitalists” to Bolton for information about the long-lost Los Almagres silver mine.94 Discovered in the eighteenth century, the mine was located somewhere north of San Antonio, Texas. Comanches had driven out the miners, and the mine's exact location had been forgotten. Anglo Texans learned of the place, assumed that the mine was fabulously rich, and fruitlessly searched for it. In 1904 Bolton had found an official account of the mine together with precise information about its location. After hearing from Houston's acquaintances, he sent to Mexico for the records and met with the Dallas men, who made him one of nine partners in the venture. Then he and one of his partners found the mine “exactly where the papers directed us…with startling precision.” Iron deposits as well as silver might make money for the partnership. “But, thunder,” he exclaimed, “I never expect anything except in return for a day's work, and in the form of wages.”95 The mine proved not to be a moneymaker but was still useful to Bolton because it connected him with Texans who appreciated his knowledge of Spanish land records.96 And from Houston's perspective Bolton's work demonstrated the utilitarian value of historical research in the university.

  Six years in Texas had made a big change in Bolton's professional fortunes. He had carved out a field of his own and established the beginning of a national reputation. Hungry for professional recognition and advancement, Bolton now felt sure enough of his future to turn down tempting offers when they came. He was also secure enough to risk the wrath of Garrison by taking over the Mexican project that his department chair had pioneered and wished to dominate. Bolton established a legitimate claim to the field by virtue of hard work and significant publi
cations. But he made his claim stick by adroitly outmaneuvering Garrison at every turn. President Houston supported Bolton because he recognized the value of his work to the university. Garrison wanted to do the work, but Bolton was actually doing it.

  Bolton had established a substantial scholarly reputation in Texas, but he had had a lot of help. Jameson, Turner, Haskins, and perhaps others behind the scenes promoted his career. Nor should Garrison be forgotten. Without a Garrison, there could not have been a Bolton. By founding the state historical association and its journal, he created an organizational structure that promoted and published southwestern research. He was the first historian to foresee that the systematic exploitation of the Mexican archives by Texas faculty and students could elevate the scholarly reputation of the University of Texas. And he knew that the historian who opened those archives would become a very big man in the historical profession. By the time Bolton left for his year in Mexico, Garrison no doubt understood that he would not realize his dream of being that big man. But in a very real sense Garrison had founded his Texas school of southwestern history through Bolton, and there was no other way he could have done it. Garrison would die of a heart attack in 1910, just about the time he promised Jameson that he would be free to get back to Mexico.

  When Bolton stepped onto the train to Mexico in the summer of 1907, he knew that his career had entered a new phase. He was looking at a big future. Texas would not be able to hold Bolton.

  F O U R · Many Roads to California

  While Bolton negotiated the terms of his work in Mexico, Frederick Jackson Turner was engaged in high-level professional discussions of his own. From 1904 until 1909 Stanford University and the University of California avidly competed for Turner's services. Bolton would be the ultimate beneficiary of Turner's long courtships on the Pacific Coast.

  In 1902 Turner had called Max Farrand to Madison to teach a summer seminar in American constitutional history, “to the delight” of the students, Turner noted. “I am finding him a most companionable friend,” he explained to Professor Henry Morse Stephens. Farrand was head of the history department at Stanford, and Stephens had just moved from Cornell to the University of California. “I am very confident that your removal to the coast is full of significance to the development of historical study in the country,” he added.1 This was the beginning of a delicate, three-sided courtship between Turner, Stanford, and Berkeley.

  Turner's friendship with Farrand lasted all of their lives. A few years younger than Turner, Farrand had earned his PhD at Princeton University, where he had studied with Woodrow Wilson, Turner's friend and teacher from his Hopkins days.2 Turner and Farrand had much in common intellectually, and they were both avid anglers who spent summer weeks fly-fishing.3 Farrand, of course, saw much more than a fishing buddy in Turner. Adding Turner to the Stanford faculty would immeasurably enhance that young institution's intellectual reputation. He discussed the matter with university president David Starr Jordan, who enthusiastically agreed to recruit Turner.4

  Selling Stanford to Turner would be tough. The institution had opened in 1891 as a memorial to Leland Stanford Jr., the son of railroad baron and California U.S. senator Leland Stanford. After their son died at age fifteen, Stanford and his wife, Jane, invested millions in the creation of the university, which they conceived as a gift to the people of California as well as a lasting memorial to their son. When her husband suddenly died in 1893, Jane Stanford carried on the work of building the university, but it still lacked a significant library, a shortcoming that hindered faculty research as well as graduate training.5

  Farrand and Jordan recognized that Stanford needed a better library in order to attract Turner. It so happened that two major private libraries were available in California, the Bancroft and the Sutro. The former was named for Hubert Howe Bancroft, a wealthy San Francisco stationer and bookseller who wrote a multivolume history of California and the West.6 He scoured the world for manuscripts and books pertaining to his subject, acquiring copies when the originals could not be had. The Bancroft Library's special strengths were in the Spanish and Mexican periods of California and the Southwest. Bancroft erected a special building for his library in San Francisco and hired a staff of librarians and writers. In 1883 the first of thirty-nine volumes of The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft issued from the press. Once The Works were completed, Bancroft was faced with the question of what to do with his vast private library and archive. The city of Sacramento, the University of Chicago, and the Library of Congress all were rumored to have been offered the library for prices ranging from $50,000 to ten times than figure.7

  Adolph Sutro was a Prussian-born mining engineer who became wealthy through his mining investments and the development of the famous Sutro Tunnel, which drained the silver mines near Virginia City, Nevada. Sutro had refined tastes that he satisfied by amassing a huge private library. He and his agents searched Europe, Mexico, and the United States to add to his collection. Sutro would buy the entire stock of a bookstore, or an entire library, to obtain one treasured item. He prevailed on poor monks to sell centuries-old monastery libraries with their rare incunabula (books printed before 1501). Sutro's library may have amounted to 200,000 books, pamphlets, and newspapers. It was one of the largest privately held libraries in the world, and in some ways one of the richest. Sutro owned more than 4,000 incunabula, perhaps more than any other library anywhere. His interests were different from Bancroft's, as reflected in Sutro's holdings in science, natural history, and European subjects. But there was some overlap, as in the cases of Mexican history and American newspapers. Cornell University historian and librarian George Lincoln burr judged Sutro's holdings in some categories as being unrivaled in America and perhaps even in Europe.8

  Unlike Bancroft, who wished to sell his collection, Sutro offered his library to the public. In 1895 he promised to give the library, a building to house it, and twenty-six acres in San Francisco to the University of California, which turned him down because accepting would have required the abandonment of the new Berkeley campus. Sutro's heirs continued the search for a suitable public recipient, but no one would have it. So it was that two of the worlds’ great private libraries were spurned by the people of California, who would neither purchase nor receive a great library as a precious gift.

  Like a good fisherman, Farrand lured Turner with libraries. He asked Turner for his estimation of the value of the Bancroft and Sutro collections. Like a wary trout, Turner circled the bait. Turner was not familiar with the Sutro holdings but supposed it was a good modern European library. As for the Bancroft, “if the $200,000 or so” that was supposed to be its price was “to be expended chiefly on early Indian and Spanish records,” Turner felt “less confident…if the documentary material for the American period of the history of the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Coast” could be obtained elsewhere. Remarkably, Turner believed that too large a proportion of Spanish records actually devalued the Bancroft collections as a resource for a university library—or at least for his university library. He thought the record of the American period of about a half century outweighed three and one-half centuries of Spanish and Mexican history. The very sort of materials that Bolton was laboriously collecting in Mexico were of no concern to Turner.9 Nevertheless, if Bancroft's library had the Anglo-American materials that Turner valued so highly, or if they could be obtained and added to the collection, Turner supported the purchase.

  Turner made it clear that if the Bancroft (or the Sutro) did not have the materials that he needed, Stanford should find or build a library that did. Jordan and Farrand agreed. On Christmas Eve 1904 Farrand wrote Turner that “one by one the obstacles are being removed in the most satisfactory way,” though there were still details to be worked out that Farrand would not reveal.10

  What was Farrand unwilling to tell Turner? The new library building at Stanford was about to open, and Jordan was undoubtedly pressing Jane Stanford on the need for books to fill it, a need that coincided with Turner's
recruitment. Stanford decided to fund the proposed acquisitions, but before she could act, she had a frightening experience. In January 1905 she sipped some water at her bedside table, but the foul taste made her spit it out. There were no lasting ill effects, but analysis revealed that the water had been tainted with strychnine. Investigators thought the poisoning had been an accident, but Stanford believed that someone had tried to murder her. She decided to go to Honolulu, where she hoped she might be safe. Before sailing on February 15, she took care of the library business.11 “We need books at present more than anything else,” she wrote. The new library had room for one million volumes and she intended to acquire them. Therefore, she requested that the trustees establish an endowment from the sale of her “diamonds, rubies, and other precious stones,” to be known appropriately “as the Jewel Fund.”12

  The story of the Jewel Fund does not have a happy ending. A few weeks after announcing her plans for the library, Stanford died in Honolulu, the victim of a second strychnine poisoning. Her murderer was never found. Indeed, the police did not investigate the crime. President Jordan, who evidently hoped to spare the Stanford family as well as the university from a scandal, insisted that she had died of heart failure even though an inquest in Hawaii indicated otherwise. Jordan's unfounded version of events was widely believed until recently when researchers examined the autopsy report and other testimony from Hawaii.13 Nevertheless, as Jane Stanford had wished, the Jewel Fund was established and became the essential endowment for Stanford's library.14

  In January 1905 Jordan made an offer to Turner of $5,000 per year, a $1,000 raise over his Wisconsin salary. Turner did not jump at the offer, but he did not turn it down. He decided to wait for a year to see what Stanford would do about a library.15 The California rumor mill turned. A San Jose newspaper erroneously reported that Turner was going to Stanford.16 In Berkeley Professor Stephens, who was by then the history department head, heard the false report and implored Turner not to go to Stanford until he visited Berkeley. He promised to match any offer that Stanford made. Turner assured Stephens that Jordan had made no offer, but of course the Stanford offer was on the way.17