The same letter contained another foreshadowing. Herbert asked Fred about bringing Wisconsin history professor Frederick Jackson Turner to Fairchild for a lecture. There is no reason to suppose that Herbert wanted to study with Turner, but the brothers probably knew enough about him to regard the young history professor as a role model. Turner was also a small-town Wisconsin boy, who was only five years older than Fred and nine years senior to Herbert. If Turner could do it, there was hope for the brothers.
Herbert was beginning to take more than a perfunctory interest in history. With a friend he read Prescott's Conquest of Mexico.60 He selected an assortment of histories for his school and hoped to read them, but feared he had “more good works” than he could “get time to read.”61 The little library included books about Hannibal, Alfred the Great, Peter the Great, William the Conqueror, Rome, and Greece. He also had Parkman's Pontiac, Fiske's history of the American Revolution, and miscellaneous books about U.S. history. This was not a bad little library, considering the state of historical scholarship in 1892. Dipping into it would have given him a broad education in history.
While at Fairchild Herbert found time for romance with a local woman, but she threw him over for someone else. The experience left him wounded and a little discouraged about women. “I would not trust any of them with my heart if I wanted it to remain whole. They would bust it, sure!”62 Fred was probably in no mood for Herbert's dreary philosophy about women and love, for he planned to marry his fiancee after he graduated from Wisconsin in June 1893.63 But Herbert continued with his casually misogynistic ramblings. “It is well for me that there is no danger of female eyes gazing on some of my charges made against their sex,” he wrote; “otherwise I should be doomed to lifelong celibacy.”64
Permanent celibacy was not the sort of life sentence that Gertrude Janes had in mind for Herbert. He had come to respect her educational and professional goals, although in the fall of 1892 he regarded her merely as an old friend. Nevertheless, his respect for Gertrude was growing. When he told someone that Gertrude “ought to be at the U.W.,” his friend replied, “Yes, nice thing—lots of money,” referring to the Janes family's comfortable circumstances. “I suppose that's as far as he sees,” Herbert thought.65 But Herbert now saw Gertrude as someone with serious mental ability, a likely prospect for the state university, where he was headed himself. In the spring of 1893 his feelings for her would deepen.
During the Christmas holiday Herbert went home to his family and likely saw Gertrude. Whatever transpired then, their relationship took a turn in the new year. In early February Gertrude visited Fairchild, and it was not because she was looking for a job. Herbert, who usually wrote long, detailed letters to his brother, resorted to breathless stabs of information. “Janes is here to spend Sat & Sun[.] Dance last night.” It must have been a big night. “Still in the ring, though slightly disfigured,” he told Fred.66 Gertrude had him now and Herbert was a willing captive.
In the fall Herbert went to Madison, while Fred and his new wife, Olive, moved to Kaukauna, Wisconsin, for a principalship at the high school. Once again the brothers traded places, now with Fred gaining practical experience and subsidizing Herbert's education. At last Herbert stood at the door of the institution that he had dreamed about since high school, an institution that he hoped would grant him the keys to the kingdom of professional recognition and social advancement. The professors he met there would change his life.
T W O · A Gathering at Lake Mendota
The University of Wisconsin was less than fifty years old when Herbert Bolton arrived in 1893. The student body of nearly three thousand was small by today's standards, but it had grown rapidly from only five hundred in 1887. Located on College Hill along the shores of Lake Mendota, the university's environs were nothing if not scenic, but its political geography was as important as its physical location. Madison is the state capital, and the state house is within walking distance. Politicos had only to cast their eyes westward to see the fruits of the state's investment in higher education. Most Wisconsinites judged the university approvingly; some thought otherwise.1
The University of Wisconsin was poised to become a great institution of higher learning. Funding from the sale of public lands under the federal Morrill Act had enabled the expansion of faculty, student body, and curriculum. By the 1890s Wisconsin was recognized as one of the emerging progressive centers of higher education.2 Thousands of working-class urbanites, villagers, and farm boys like the Boltons were among the beneficiaries of this magnificent public donation.
Two young professors in the history department when Bolton arrived in 1893 would influence his development as a historian: Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles Homer Haskins. Turner, at age thirty-one, was a rising star. The Wisconsin native had received his undergraduate and early graduate training at the state university, where he was influenced by William F. Allen. Turner had studied for the doctorate under Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins University before returning to the University of Wisconsin faculty. In July 1893 he read his influential essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” at the AHA meeting in Chicago. Frontier conditions and the settlement of the West, he argued, had made the United States what it was. This was a distinctive departure from the prevailing historical idea which held that the beginnings of American institutions and character were to be found in European antecedents. “It seems exceedingly valuable and important,” Haskins wrote of Turner's essay, “but I feel so ‘westernized’ that I cannot appreciate how it would appeal to an eastern man.”3 Turner's essay eventually established him as one of the leading American historians of his day, even among easterners. Needless to say, westerners (including Wisconsinites) were glad to learn that they were on the cutting edge of history rather than mere primitives who lived on the margins of American civilization.4
Haskins had also earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins, where he became Turner's friend. He wrote his dissertation on the Yazoo land frauds but eventually became America's leading medieval historian, with interests in Norman institutions and the development of medieval science. Something of a child prodigy, he completed his undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins at the age of sixteen, then studied in Paris and Berlin before returning to Hopkins for his doctorate. Professor Haskins was only twenty-three, the same age as the undergraduate Bolton. By the time Bolton met him, Haskins was known as a meticulous researcher who had mastered several languages. Haskins impressed Bolton because of his thoroughness and because he worked his students very hard, which appealed to Bolton's dogged work habits. One of Haskins's friends, F. M. Powicke, likened his approach to teaching and writing to that of a builder. First, he amassed sufficient research material with which to build his edifice; then, he deliberately laid its foundation, “each sentence…like a block of hewn stone, laid in its place by a skilful mason.” Haskins's construction “was directed by a clear and powerful mind, but every stone…was left to make its own impression, without the aid of external graces.” Anything “wild and extravagant” from Haskins “was unthinkable,” Powicke recalled. Yet, when listening to Haskins lecture, Powicke found himself “hoping, and I knew I hoped in vain, for a touch of mischief or something just a trifle hazardous.” The resulting intellectual structure, however, spoke “of purpose and achievement; its austere lines reveal unexpected lights and shadows.”5
Turner's teaching methods also impressed Bolton. His undergraduate lecturing style must have seemed offhand, perhaps even ill-prepared to the casual undergraduate, but Herbert was anything but a casual student. In a time when most professors delivered carefully prepared lectures from detailed notes, or perhaps written essays that were read word for word, Turner would walk into the hall with a stack of note cards often based on primary source material. Turner spoke to the students from the cards, which he would sometimes fumble while he looked for some particular datum; so the effect was informal, almost casual, except for his voice, which had a melodic, almost hypnotic quality. Bolton's friend, historian Carl Becker, wrote that Turner's “voice was everything: a voice not deep but full, rich, vibrant, and musically cadenced; such a voice as you would never grow weary of, so warm and intimate and human it was.”6 Turner's lectures were analytical and full of ideas, rather than strictly narrative. He amply illustrated