Herbert became increasingly unhappy at Milwaukee and was anxious to get out. In a surprising move in the spring of 1900 he applied for the presidency of Oahu College, a small preparatory school in Honolulu originally founded to educate the children of Congregationalist missionaries. A more remote, insignificant posting for the ambitious Herbert can scarcely be imagined. The title of president may have appealed to him as much as anything else. At least he would have been in charge of a school. Perhaps the idea of being in a balmy land far away from the ordinary pressures of academic advancement and petty politics charmed him, but it was only a dream. He did not get the job.4
Herbert was not the only Bolton who was dissatisfied in Milwaukee. In September 1900 Fred left for the University of Iowa, where he would head an education program. This turn of events, while unwelcome from a personal standpoint, lit the forward path for Herbert: be patient, get more experience, publish, establish yourself in your field, then move to a better place where you will be in charge. Fred's move to Iowa was an important step upward, but Herbert's happiness for him was tinged with sadness. The brothers would never again live in the same town or even in the same state.
Herbert toiled on alone. He condensed his dissertation for a magazine.5 That essay was not accepted, but he published his first short article for a teachers’ magazine, “Our Nation's First Boundaries,” which in a general way foreshadowed his interest in the borderlands. He was also working on a textbook manuscript on U.S. territorial development. A sketch of his ideas about the U.S. acquisition of Florida included a section called “Race Antipathy and Spanish Weakness,” which declared that “Race dislike between Spaniards and Americans was…a constant spur inciting the stronger to encroach upon the other.” Spaniards, Bolton thought, “lived in constant dread of the irresistible westerner.”6 At the turn of the century, Bolton's thinking about Spain in America had not penetrated beyond the common prejudices of the day.
Herbert applied for jobs in late 1900, but to no avail.7 He had to get out of Milwaukee, but “I do not know where I'll land, I'm sure,” he wrote. “I hope I'll be a teacher of something, somewhere, sometime. Now I'm a teacher of every thing.”8 He fit in as best he could while waiting for something to break.
While Herbert chafed at Normal, events one thousand miles away conspired to take him away from Wisconsin. George Pierce Garrison, chair of the history department in the University of Texas, needed a replacement for his assistant professor, Lester Gladstone Bugbee, who was mortally ill with tuberculosis. Bugbee taught medieval history, but he and Garrison had been developing the archival basis for the history of Texas and the Southwest. Bugbee had been instrumental in the university's acquisition of the important Bexar Archives, which documented the history of Coahuila y Texas from 1717 to 1836.9 Garrison, who dreamed of making the University of Texas a great center for historical research and graduate training, needed someone to replace Bugbee in the archives as well as the classroom.
Garrison would have an important influence on Bolton's career. He was “an impressive man with a commanding presence and a cultivated, urbane manner,” according to historian Llerena Friend. He was born in Georgia in 1853, and after attending college and teaching school, he moved to Texas in 1874.10 Five years later he studied at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where he received certificates in mathematics, natural philosophy, logic, metaphysics, rhetoric, and English. The suave southerner even won the David Masson prize for poetry while he was there. Returning to Texas in 1881, Garrison was immediately stricken with tuberculosis, but by 1884 he was well enough to join the faculty of the one-yearold University of Texas as part of a two-man department of English language, history, and literature. Four years later Garrison was teaching all of the history courses at Texas, a fact that determined him to enroll for the doctorate in history at the University of Chicago, which he completed in 1896. He put his personal stamp on all things historical at the University of Texas and insisted on teaching all of the courses in U.S. history.
Garrison and Texas were attracting favorable attention in the historical profession. In 1898 J. Franklin Jameson, editor of the American Historical Review, invited Garrison to submit an article. There was a wealth of hitherto unknown and unworked material on Texas and the Southwest, Garrison explained. He, Bugbee, and his students were all at work on it and would have something ready for publication soon. “At least some of it shall be offered to the Review,” as indeed it was.11 He sent Jameson some articles by his students about Spanish missions in Texas and the wanderings of Cabeza de Vaca.
National notice of Texas made the replacement of Bugbee all the more pressing. Garrison had obtained some help from Eugene C. Barker, who held a fresh new Texas MA, but with Bugbee gone Garrison needed a new wheelhorse. Barker was not yet the proper animal; he needed to complete doctoral work before he would be credible in the estimation of the historical profession. In search of the right man Garrison initiated a “furious correspondence,” as Barker put it.12
One of Garrison's letters fell on the desk of Jameson, who knew almost everyone in the history profession. “It is important that the man selected should not only be of high scholarship,” Garrison explained. “I am anxious especially that the man chosen should be of high character and an inspiring and effective teacher, ready to devote himself…to the general interests of the School of History and the University at large.”13 Where could Garrison find such a man? In all likelihood, though letters have not surfaced, Garrison (and perhaps Jameson) sent queries to Turner and Haskins, perhaps only the latter since Garrison wanted someone to teach European courses. In any case, Haskins recommended Bolton for the Texas job.14
Meanwhile Bolton had almost given up looking for jobs when a graduate school friend recommended him for a place at Dartmouth College. He got the offer, but it was not a permanent position as had been promised. There was a chance the position could be made permanent, but he could not justify moving his family on that uncertain basis.15 Bolton turned it down. Neither Turner nor Haskins encouraged him to go. Turner said that he would “be more ready to help me into a university if I stay than if I go out of his territory.” Turner admitted that he was selfish in recommending that Herbert stay so that he could “help build up in Wis a history centre.”16 Turner's advice was no doubt sound, but there was an edge to it. Do my bidding here for a while, Turner seemed to say, and I will help you. If you leave, I may not. In 1901 the world of American history was Turner's world. Turner knew it and so did Herbert.
Within a month Herbert regretted his decision to stay in Wisconsin. His raise at Normal was fifty dollars less than he had expected, and he was unlikely to be promoted over other faculty with more seniority. Nevertheless, as the fall semester approached, he seemed determined to make the best of his situation. Perhaps in an effort to make his teaching more congruent with the objects of the normal school mission, Herbert developed a proposal to team-teach an innovative history course on “the child in history—an historical child study course,” with Vande Walker, one of the women on the faculty. Herbert thought it should be “evolutionary in character,” examining the childhood experience over time and across cultures.17 He would use anthropology and psychology as well as historical sources. This unrealized idea—it never got off the drawing board—surely was a pathbreaking approach to historical study. In an age when the lives of great men and important political movements were considered to be the proper stuff of history, Herbert was thinking about the history of children, a topic that would not come into its own until the rise of social history in the 1970s. In some ways it was not surprising that Herbert would consider such a subject, for it combined his own interests with those of his brother in child psychology. Turner's interest in social scientific approaches to history also may have influenced Bolton. The history of childhood proved to be a road not taken, but it revealed an innovative streak in a developing young historian who was struggling to find himself.
Herbert's ruminations about new courses were interrupted when baby Helen suddenly fell ill with intestinal complaints all too similar to those that had almost killed her older sister in Philadelphia. Herbert hired