In that tense moment in the mountain crater, as “the desert … and the solitude of nature filled the spot,” Bullard wrote later, the rookie army officer had expected death. “My life stopped; I stood nailed to the spot. I did not move or cry or think but waited in dumbness and numbness for the end.”
Aside from the personal drama of his situation, Bullard’s tableau captures the uneasy alliance between U.S. and Mexican forces in Sonora and Chihuahua less than forty years after the United States had forcibly wrested the northern frontier territories from Mexico, thereby acquiring the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, most of Colorado, and parts of Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma.4 The scene also illustrates the prominence of indigenous techniques of warfare, including knowledge of the country, tracking, and ambush. All parties to the Apache conflict relied on such methods, but Mexico was suspicious of the U.S. Army’s employment of Apache and other native scouts in Mexican territory. Dependence on Apache scouts was also a source of deep racial anxieties within the leadership of the U.S. military as it struggled to reconcile axiomatic Anglo-Saxon superiority with the manifest failure of well-equipped white troops to subdue, contain, or even keep up with an opponent described by one contemporary historian as “the most savage and intractable Indians in the country.”5
Finally, our attention, like that of the Mexican Rural Guards, is drawn to the incongruity between Bullard’s handkerchief, that vestige of civilized attire, and the rest of his self-described “Indian togs.” As the Yaqui scouts of Troop H ranged over the desert below, matching their skills as trackers against the U.S. Army’s most elusive quarry, the young lieutenant assigned to the expedition as quartermaster and commissary had been caught playing Indian.6 Bullard’s inept efforts to embody cultural knowledge by dressing up and chasing antelope after a romantic ideal of Indian hunting had attracted the attention of other actors in the contested landscape of the Sierra Madre. However, as the Mexicans pointed out to him in insulting terms, there was something in Bullard’s obvious inability to embody Indianness convincingly that stayed their hands from killing him, until they could get close enough for the telltale handkerchief to confirm their sense that they had the wrong target.7
By his own account, Robert Lee Bullard made a bad Indian. What is more, he was proud of how poorly he played the role. Bullard was not interested in truly transforming himself, either physically or culturally. He was not one to “go native,” to take on the identity, even provisionally, of an Apache or any one of the other so-called primitive peoples he encountered during the successive wars of colonial pacification in which he took part. He was, however, deeply interested in the tactical knowledge he believed could be acquired through inhabiting such roles. In this, his outlook and actions were in keeping with a long line of frontier soldiers.
Like other military men and civilian elites of his generation who found virtue in “the strenuous life” and saw in it an industrializing nation’s salvation from effete overcivilization, Bullard advocated activities that brought white men into contact with the elemental forces of nature. The relationship between civilization and primitiveness, for Bullard, like others of his generation who grappled with the question, was complex and contradictory. Wildness promised renewal and empowerment for the civilized man who embraced it; it also threatened to corrupt him.8
Bullard’s explanation of the behavior that led to the standoff in the Sierra Madre is telling: “I was new,” he wrote of the incident, “and in those days these Indian togs caught all new men’s fancy. On the least lead the most civilized of us quickly reverts to the primitive.” Bullard’s account speaks to his embrace of different mores and the general freedom for new men such as himself to shed some of the constraints of civilized comportment in the frontier posts to which they were assigned. It also underscores Bullard’s belief in the tenuousness of the white man’s claim to be civilized and the inevitable tendency to “revert to the primitive.” For Bullard, the tension between the civilized and the primitive was one he felt he had contended with all his life. For him, the distinction was racial.
Born in 1861 on a cotton plantation in eastern Alabama, Bullard was socialized early into the power and immutability of racial hierarchy. He remained acutely aware of racial difference throughout his life. His diaries and autobiographical writings constitute a ledger in which he weighed the costs and advantages of his association with those he regarded as his racial inferiors. His writings also include frequent observations and hypotheses about the relationship between race and the capacity to attain civilization among the peoples he encountered and read about during a military career that encompassed the Indian Wars in the Southwest, spy missions in Cuba and Mexico, and a stint as military governor in the Philippines.
Bullard’s childhood was shaped by intimate but racially circumscribed relations with his family’s former slaves and other freedmen and women on and around the family’s farm in Lee County, Alabama. Bullard blamed his early childhood “association with Negroes big and little” for having “marked” him in negative and enduring ways. “I grew up with them, both short on morals, purpose, manners and education. It told on me. Skipping the morals, I was fifteen before I felt the moving of any ambition; twenty before I began to correct my plantation manners to which reversions are still not uncommon; thirty before my African methods of speech began to yield to grammar; forty before ‘aint’ gave way to ‘is not’ and ‘are not’, and to this day ‘r’s’ and ‘ings’ are a difficulty.”9 Bullard feared that racial inferiority was inscribed in his speech as well as in his character. Its effects were expressed through his behavior; it was part of his very way of being. His embodiment of such defects was something he struggled against for much of his life, always fearing a “reversion” to “plantation manners.” Bullard’s association of inferiority with ways of speaking also reflects his awareness of the stigma attached to southern culture—white as well as black—in the aftermath of the Confederacy’s defeat, which was construed by the victorious North as proof of the inherent backwardness and decadence of southern society. As the first cadet to “carry the name of Robert E. Lee back to West Point,” Bullard was sensitive to the claim of the regnant Yankee culture to define the norms of civilized behavior to the detriment of an Alabama-bred boy like him, whose childhood heroes had been two sisters’ husbands who served on the staffs of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis.10 At the same time, Bullard believed that the humiliation his family had felt after the war provided him with insights into the psychology of resistance to the American occupation of the Philippines and Cuba.
Later in life, when he had achieved success in his army career, and the bitter memories he associated with growing up under Reconstruction had faded, Bullard was able to reflect with amusement on the ironies of his elevation through the ranks of the “Grand Army of the Republic,” or GAR, as the Union army became known. Bullard’s humor on the subject, like the reabsorption of the white southerners into the federal army and the attenuation of Reconstruction, was accomplished at the expense of African Americans.
Three decades after he became the first southerner with the name Robert Lee to matriculate at West Point since the Civil War, Bullard paid a visit to Lee County (which, like Bullard, had changed its name following the war). There, a chance encounter with one of his father’s former slaves provided the material for a story that served as a commentary on the ironies of history and on the complexities of Bullard’s loyalties as both soldier and southerner.
As Bullard later recounted the tale, he was visiting his family in Opelika when he met a former slave of his family named Frank Bullard. The two Bullards—one white and one black—encountered one another “within two miles of where both he and I were born.” When Robert Bullard told Frank who he was, the older man looked puzzled, as “he evidently struggled with old memory to locate himself and me together,” Bullard remembered. At a GAR meeting years later, Bullard slipped into dialect to tell the rest of the joke:
Then, after a moment or two, [Frank] said, “Oh, yes, yes, I remember. You’s ‘Babe’. Dey tol’ me you went away long time ago into the yankee army what come down thr’ough heah when