After spending about one month in Mexico, Bolton returned to Austin with “enough powder for shooting off historical fireworks most of the year.” Within weeks, Bolton's first article about his findings appeared in the Quarterly: “Some Materials for Southwestern History in the Archivo General de Mexico.” This piece described in a general way about three dozen bound volumes of original and copied documents comprising many hundreds of pages. He pointed out some of the most important and interesting things he had discovered—eighteenth-century Texas settlements, missions, explorations, and personalities. This, Bolton revealed, was just a small portion of the archival riches in Mexico. What the remaining 273 volumes of bound documents contained could “be learned only by patient investigation.” Some arrangement should be made, he argued, to “systematically seek out, sift, copy, edit, and publish the more important sources.”49 And Texas was only a portion of Spain's northern frontier. There was much else on New Mexico, Sonora, and the Californias. By way of example, he published in the January 1903 issue of the Quarterly his translation of an inspection of eighteenthcentury Laredo.50 Beginning in 1903, Bolton contributed translated documents to a fifty-five-volume collection concerning the history of the Philippine Islands.51 It was a fair start for the founder of Spanish Borderlands history.
Bolton's first publications from the Mexican archives show him to be a meticulous researcher with a comprehensive, though as yet undeveloped, view of the subject as he understood it—the history of those parts of the U.S. Southwest (especially Texas) that had been a part of the Spanish Empire. This definition, furnished by Garrison, was created as much by the need to appeal to Texans as it was by strictly scholarly considerations. In Mexico he again exhibited his capacity for hard work. Reading in a language still new to him, Bolton was able to review intensively about one volume of one hundred or more pages of handwritten documents per day. He also took time to copy out some of the most important items. He recognized that the Archivo General was only the tip of the iceberg. Local and provincial Mexican archives held much more, including the originals of many of the copies he encountered in 1902. He believed that it was necessary to track down those originals and to plumb the more remote repositories where even more documentary riches remained to be discovered. This was the true beginning of Bolton's lifetime of scholarly labor and achievement.
His hard work paid off. The regents gave him a modest raise of $100 and a twoyear appointment. In the summer of 1903 Garrison arranged university funding for Bolton to return to Mexico to copy documents for the university. While there Bolton copied additional Philippines documents, which added a few dollars to his state-supported budget. Things were looking up. He and Barker were now close friends and cowriting With the Makers of Texas, which he thought would “have a good market” because the state's history was required to be taught in every school. The University of Washington asked him to apply for an assistant professorship there, but he decided to stay in Texas, probably with Garrison's encouragement. The university was growing. The student body had increased from 353 to 1,348 in the past ten years.52 In the long run Texas was the best place for Bolton, or so it seemed in 1903.
From Garrison's point of view Bolton's work in Mexico advanced his plan for Texas and Southwest history. He thought of Bolton as his assistant in a program of research that Garrison managed. In 1903 he sought funding from the Carnegie Institution for Bolton's work in the Mexican archives. Garrison would send a party from Texas “composed of an instructor…and two assistants, all of them well trained and competent.”53 The proposal was not approved on account of uncertainty about whether the Mexican documents were merely copies of original records in Spanish archives. Until that question was answered, the Carnegie Institution was unwilling to fund translation work in Mexico.54
Nevertheless, Bolton and three University of Texas student assistants (all young women) went to Mexico City that summer. The Texas women had “worked in Spanish four or five years each,” he explained to Fred. Herbert could speak more fluently, but the women read more accurately because they worked full-time with the Spanish manuscripts in the Bexar Archives. With the help of these assistants Bolton greatly improved his ability to decipher colonial writing.55 The researchers set a grueling pace. They entered the Archivo General at eight in the morning and worked until it closed at two. Then they ate before going to the library of the National Museum, working there from about three until it closed. After supper they translated Philippines documents.56 Adhering to this taxing schedule, Bolton and his assistants collected more than a thousand folios of material on Texas history. He thought that in two or three years he would be an authority on the manuscript sources of southwestern history—“a thing worth accomplishing.”57
The Texas women helped him immensely in Mexico. He especially appreciated their work on the Philippine translations. Bolton told his brother, “They have helped me to the last and it will be published as a joint product.”58 Bolton was as good as his word. When the document was published, he shared credit with the two young women.59 This small act of scholarly generosity told much about Bolton as a man and about his conception of the scholarly enterprise. While he demanded all the credit he thought he deserved, Bolton also believed that scholarship was essentially a cooperative enterprise. A hard worker himself, he recognized and rewarded hardworking men and women. Though not a feminist, throughout his career Bolton helped women scholars, took women graduate students, and worked to get them fellowships and jobs.
Bolton actively sought competent Spanish-language students to help him with his work. One semester he prefaced a medieval history lecture with a question: was there anyone who knew “Spanish and would like to work in the history of the old Spanish Southwest? If so, please see me after class.” Freshman William E. Dunn came forward. Bolton put him to work in the state capitol, indexing and copying Spanish and Mexican government manuscripts at twenty cents per hour. The work fascinated Dunn, who thereafter accompanied Bolton on his summer excursions to Mexico and became his graduate student.60
In the spring of 1904 two prominent Americans visited Austin—President Theodore Roosevelt and David Starr Jordan, then president of Stanford University. They arrived on the same train. Teddy gave his stump speech and moved on. Jordan remained to deliver a formal lecture. Bolton took the opportunity to drive Jordan through the Texas hill country in a buggy.61 Jordan remembered that the Texas faculty had a spirited debate about whether to serve wine for dinner at their club, where Jordan would be guest of honor after his lecture. The Stanford president was, after all, a man of the world. What would he think of a place that did not serve wine with dinner? The epicures lost by one vote. Worried that the lack of spirits would give Jordan a negative impression of Texas, several heroic professors missed Jordan's lecture and repaired instead to the club, where they furiously smoked in order to fill the rooms with a convivial blue haze that would make Jordan feel at home. But instead of appreciating the club's cosmopolitan atmosphere, Jordan requested that the windows be opened to evacuate the smoke.62 Whether Bolton—a chain smoker—had a hand (or lung) in the smoke-out is unknown, but he had made an important acquaintance in Jordan. They would become better acquainted in the future.
Bolton did not go to Mexico in the summer of 1904, perhaps because Gertrude was in the final stage of pregnancy with their fourth daughter, Eugenie, who was born in September. He was also working on an article on the Spanish abandonment and reoccupation of Texas and finishing his textbook with Barker.63 Garrison, who no doubt regarded the book as the latest good advertisement for the University of Texas school of history, wrote a graceful introduction.64
Book royalties may have improved Bolton's financial situation somewhat, but he was betting on future prospects associated with his Mexican research. Money problems pestered him, yet in the same letter in which he complained of grim prospects for promotion at Texas—“They are terribly stingy”—he reported that he had rejected the presidency of Vincennes University.65 There is little doubt that, had Bolton remained in