Introduction
The Border Lord
On one of his southwestern expeditions Herbert Bolton clambered atop an Anasazi ruin tucked into a canyon wall. From there he surveyed his domain like a conquistador viewing his latest conquest. The pose suited him. Bolton was the undisputed master of a scholarly domain that he had pioneered and conquered. It is a memorable image of Bolton at the height of his powers. Of course, the snapshot did not capture a true conqueror, but a historian doing field research for one of his books. Yet the pose reveals the aspect of Bolton's work that today's historians find most objectionable—his complete identification with Spaniards who were conquerors. This is the Bolton that is easy to dismiss as an artifact of colonialism's bygone days.
But there is another Bolton whose work suggested a tolerant and capacious view of American history, an outlook more congruent with today's values: the transnational Bolton of the borderlands who was equally at home in Mexico and the United States. This Bolton conceived of the borderlands—the southern tier of states that extended from Georgia to California—as a liminal space that transcended national boundaries. Within this space he found a Spanish past that illuminated and expanded United States history. According to Bolton, Spanish explorers, missionaries, and soldiers were heroes who paved the way for Anglo pioneers who came later. The story of the Spanish Borderlands was the indispensable preface to the national history of the United States. Thus Bolton's borderlands comprised a transnational region that told a national tale. His essential concept, that the borderlands were the meeting place of diverse cultures, is an important foundation for today's multicultural borderlands studies.1
Bolton conceptualized a second broad idea that has continuing significance: hemispheric history or the history of the Americas. His sojourns in Mexico and his study of the history of colonial New Spain and the Spanish borderlands of the United States convinced him that national histories could be better understood in a hemispheric setting. When seen in hemispheric context, the history of one nation sheds light on the history of the others, he argued. He also claimed, too grandly for many specialists, that there was an essential unity in the history of the Western Hemisphere. His Americas course aimed to provide a broad comparative foundation for Berkeley's undergraduate students. He hoped that his course would be generally accepted in American universities, and he met with some success. Although critics charged that Bolton too easily glossed national and cultural differences, Bolton's hemispheric perspective was influential for decades. In recent years some of Bolton's ideas have been resurrected in the guise of transnational history.2 These coexistent, sometimes incompatible Boltons—the colonial apologist and the progressive transnational scholar—make his legacy a debatable matter that demands scrutiny before it can be fully appreciated.
Bolton was one of the most respected historians of his generation. His professional accomplishments were prodigious. He was a prolific publisher. Hundreds of graduate students studied with him. He helped to establish the academic reputation of the University of California in the eyes of the world. The presidency of the American Historical Association and many other professional honors marked him as one of the elite academics of his time. Yet his once towering reputation gradually faded and became the subject of scholarly debate.3 There were several reasons for Bolton's decline. The rise of Native American history made Bolton's appreciative treatment of Spanish missionaries and explorers seem an apology for colonialism. Latin American historians regarded his studies of the far northern reaches of the Spanish American empire as marginal episodes of limited significance and explanatory power. The romantic tone of Bolton's triumphalist narrative no longer matched the critical sensibility of American historians.
Yet, when all is said and done, there he stands, like a colossal ruin on the intellectual landscape of the borderlands. Right or wrong, au courant or passé, Bolton is impossible to ignore. Historians and anthropologists continue to rely on his many volumes of carefully translated and edited documents and detailed maps. His ideas about the borderlands and the Americas are once again relevant to historical studies. Bolton's graduate students added hundreds of scholarly articles and books to the corpus of essential borderlands and Latin American studies. He personally contributed thousands of pages of original and transcribed Spanish documents to the Bancroft Library and, as its director, acquired tens of thousands more—an essential cache of primary documents for scholars to use now and in the foreseeable future.
Now, more than a century after Bolton began to investigate the Mexican archives, with a steady stream of revisionist borderlands and transnational studies issuing from academic presses, the time has come for a new assessment of Bolton and his work.4 The appreciative biographical treatments of Bolton by his students emphasize his scholarly contributions but do not adequately contextualize his work.5 I believe that Bolton's work is best understood when it is seen in a world that was not always prepared to accept his ideas. Today Bolton's critics emphasize his ethnocentrist, pro-missionary perspective, but in valorizing Catholic missionaries, Bolton (a Methodist) challenged the commonly held anti-Catholic prejudice of his day. Some Californians (Bolton called them “local patriots”) objected to Bolton's Hispanophilia and wanted the University of California to emphasize the history of their Anglo ancestors (see the “Note on Language” herein). In the university of California Bolton also met resistance that was sometimes intellectual and sometimes personal. Long-forgotten political controversies sometimes influenced Bolton, and vice versa. Thus I have explored Bolton's larger world in order to fully comprehend his work.
I have paid particular attention to Bolton's relationship with his mentor, Frederick Jackson Turner. Bolton's ideas about the Spanish frontier offered a counterpoint to Turner's writings on American frontiers and sections, so it is natural to look into the influence that Bolton may have had on his mentor over their more-than-thirty-year association. Alas, there seemed to be none, but in comparing Bolton and Turner, the present study offers a new way to understand and interpret the work of both historians.
This volume gives some attention to Bolton's graduate students because they helped to disseminate his work. They formed an unusually large and diverse group. More women than men studied with Bolton. Most of the women were master's students who became public school teachers. The majority of his doctoral students found academic employment at the college level all over the United States. Still other graduate students worked as what we now call public historians for the State Department, National Park Service, National Archives, and other federal and state agencies. Through them Bolton created a professional empire that spread his ideas about borderlands and the Americas in schools at every level and in historic parks and monuments. Artifacts of the once extensive domain of Bolton and his students may still be seen at the national monuments today.
Bolton established a professional empire perhaps without parallel, but he was not primarily an academic politician. He was a scholar. The central purpose of this book is to explore the development of his historical ideas, their impact on scholarship and society in his day, and their relevance to historical studies today. It is my hope that this study of Bolton will deepen our understanding of the American historians’ ongoing challenge: writing the history of a people who are racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse.
O N E · The Scholars’ Hard Road
In late December 1922 Herbert Eugene Bolton boarded an eastbound train at the Berkeley station and settled into his seat. Even in repose Bolton was a striking figure. At fifty-two years old, he was six feet tall with neatly trimmed sandy hair that was still full. Smiles broke easily upon his open face. He wore glasses over large blue, attentive eyes, and chain-smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes, but still looked fit in middle age. Bolton was chairman of the history department at the University of California, director of the Bancroft Library, and one of the most important historians of his day. Everyone in the history profession knew it. He was on his way to New Haven for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA).
The wintry landscape that slid past the Pullman car window triggered memories about his own past, as well