Читать книгу Herbert Eugene Bolton - Albert L. Hurtado - Страница 12

T H R E E · Gone to Texas

Life in Milwaukee was good, but despite Herbert's happiness in being with Fred, the reality of normal school teaching soon set in. Herbert's teaching load was heavy: four classes in three subjects, while more favored faculty taught only three classes in two subjects.¹ This was a matter of preferential treatment rather than merit, Herbert believed. He had little control over what he taught. “He had to teach what was handed to him at the opening of each term,” Fred explained; “mathematics, economics, ancient history, etc.” Herbert was rarely permitted to teach U.S. history in Milwaukee. He taught in a college, but his colleagues and administrators did not value his hard-earned PhD. What had the sacrifice been for? Institutional life at Normal was riven with pettiness, politics, and the narrowest sort of pedagogical cant, at least as far as Bolton's letters told the story.² Then there was the matter of salary. The Boltons had a second child, Helen. Despite Gertrude's careful management, $1,000 did not go far with Herbert's growing family. He even considered taking a sales job with a publishing house.³ Surely he had not invested so heavily in the doctorate merely to become a traveling salesman.

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 a nurse and gave Helen all of his attention. (Gertrude was eight months pregnant at the time.) “She is a very dear child—Beautiful in temperament and feature. We can't spare her.”¹⁸

Herbert was so consumed with the welfare of his child that Garrison's letter scarcely registered. The Texas professor offered Bolton a position, which would become permanent “providing Prof Bugbee does not recover from consumption—an improbability.” The starting salary would be $1,500 with the rank of instructor the first year and the possibility of promotion through the ranks to “head of the school.” “The work will be European history. What do you think of the prospects?” he asked Fred.¹⁹ Herbert worried about the impermanent nature of the appointment, but Garrison assured him that Bugbee was unlikely to live and that prospects at Texas were bright. Garrison's words seemed unambiguous, but after his experience with Dartmouth Herbert was looking for fine print and disappearing ink. He wanted his brother's advice but could not wait for a reply. “I wired that I would accept.” Once the decision was made, Herbert found his courage. “I am going in to win and hope to succeed.”²⁰

Herbert knew that Haskins had recommended him for the Texas job, but there is no reason to believe that he knew Jameson and Turner may have been involved. If Haskins knew about the Texas position, surely his best friend, Turner, knew. Bolton's name may have come to Garrison from University of Texas president W. L. Prather, who had a doctorate from Penn and who was also searching for a likely candidate.²¹ The ambitious (and sometimes jealous) Herbert complained about “pull” when it benefited others, but he had plenty of pull, even though it operated out of his sight. Bolton's offers from Wisconsin Normal and Texas show how murky the hiring process was at the turn of the twentieth century. Searches were not advertised. The selection process was opaque and connections mattered; inside candidates often got the nod. A few prominent historians and university presidents controlled the professional destinies of aspiring academics, who often did not know that they were being considered for a professorship. Although Doctor Bolton was still a pawn in other men's games, this time he was the happy beneficiary of the secretive dealings of presidents and professors.

Herbert's decision to go to Texas settled his professional future, but important personal matters hung in the balance. Helen's health slowly improved, but Herbert was reluctant to leave until Gertrude gave birth. He lingered in Milwaukee until their third daughter, Laura, was born on October 7. “Easy labor, fine child, mother doing nicely,” he scrawled in a hasty note to Fred.²² The following day Herbert was on the train south, leaving Gertrude and the children, who would follow in December. It was the most decisive journey of his life.

As Bugbee convalesced in El Paso, a letter arrived from his admiring friend and former student, Eugene C. Barker. Texas had hired the new man from Wisconsin, Barker wrote. “He is rather good looking, a blond, about six feet tall; and I believe he will prove a pretty good teacher.” Barker, peeved with Garrison for having given Bugbee's summer courses to Bolton instead of him, “exploded.”²³ Explosions in front of Garrison were not wise. He expected professional behavior at all times, and the men who worked under him soon understood that there was an iron hand in Garrison's velvet glove.

Garrison and the university made a fine first impression on Bolton. “Prof. Garrison is a royal good man, well-trained, 48 years old.” Garrison's age (seventeen years older than Bolton), meant that Bolton might eventually head the history department (or “school” as it was then called), even if Garrison remained in harness into his sixties. “Barker is a young fellow, perhaps 26, rather ‘green’ looking, but pleasant,” Bolton wrote. Bolton's teaching load was relatively light: two European history courses in three sections that each met thrice weekly. His university accommodations included a “beautiful recitation room, with good maps and a private office,” in Old Main, which in Bolton's time was still comparatively new.

Garrison had some “odds and ends” for Bolton in addition to teaching. Founding editor of the Texas State Historical Association Quarterly, Garrison gave Bolton editorial assignments. The new instructor did not complain. Garrison was “building up a centre for southwestern history for which Texas has unsurpassed opportunities,” Bolton thought. He quickly intuited that Garrison would encourage him to work in this new field, southwestern history. “I shall get up Spanish at once, which they say is easy.” All in all, Bolton thought he had “fallen into good quarters” where he thought he could rise to the top.²⁴ For the first time Bolton believed that he was well positioned to succeed in his chosen profession.

Bolton liked Austin. The October weather was “perfect.” The city was “a big village in type and appearance, the good and bad all mixed.” The capitol impressed him. He lodged in “a ‘swell’ residence” where Garrison had put him “to avoid making a social error before I get started.” He noticed that almost everyone rode single footers (horses with an unusually quick and comfortable gait almost as fast as a trot). They were “common as niggers,” he wrote, an unfortunate choice of terms that signaled Bolton's quick assimilation of white southern sensibilities and values.²⁵ “I like the southern people extremely well,” he told his brother. He found them to be “kind, courteous, hospitable,” and the students “much more courteous than in the north.”²⁶ He did not mention that the university was racially segregated.

Moving to Texas to teach European history for a fifty-dollar raise had been a gamble. Once he surveyed the situation in Austin, Bolton knew that he had won his bet. Now he could specialize in history instead of teaching everything under the sun. Noticing that he was a more demanding teacher than either Garrison or Barker, he decided to modify his own teaching so that he would have more time for research. Even the administration stars seemed to be aligned in Bolton's favor. President Prather's association with Penn probably helped Bolton, who judged Prather to be an “honest, warmhearted, provincial man” who would “give one free scope.” The Board of Regents had treated Bolton “liberally,” paying him from September 1, rather than docking his pay for the days he had missed while waiting for his daughter's birth.²⁷ Texas was going to be a good thing for Bolton, and Bolton intended to be a good thing for Texas.

But the University of Texas was not quite as calm as it seemed in Bolton's first appraisal. The university had been embroiled in political controversies concerning funding, its relationship with Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College, and whether the university should serve the immediate, practical needs of the state's farmers or less concrete but loftier scholarly goals. Funding of the university by munificent land grants and oil revenues would eventually secure its future, but this inchoate treasury was also a source of political conflict.²⁸

The university was vulnerable to powerful political figures in Austin. In 1897 a state representative asserted that some university professors “not in sympathy with the traditions of the South” were teaching “political heresies in place of the system of political economy” cherished by Texans. A house committee investigated the charges. They questioned professor of political science David F. Houston, and Garrison. Both men assured the legislators that nothing was being taught that reflected poorly “on Southern institutions or that would be unacceptable to Southern people.” The committee closely questioned Houston (a South Carolinian) about his Harvard University Press book on nullification in South Carolina, which the committee believed to be “unacceptable from a Southern standpoint,” and “contrary to Southern teachings.”²⁹ Houston explained that he had written the book before coming to Texas and that he did not assign it or refer to it in his classes. The committee learned that the regents hired faculty on the basis of fitness rather than which region they haled from. Nevertheless, “other things being equal,” the regents hired “Texas men first and Southern men next.” The committee was satisfied that nothing was taught at the university that was “objectionable to Southern people,” but called for an annual investigation of the university by the state legislature to make certain that this happy circumstance was not disturbed. The regents appended a statement to the report that no political or religious tests were used in the selection of faculty, who were expected to be “in sympathy with the people whom they teach,” and that while the university “was in no sense partisan, sectarian, or sectional,” it was “in sympathy with the life, character, and civilization of the Southern people.”³⁰

At about the time Bolton arrived in Austin, controversies had arisen concerning certain professors’ interpretations of historical events and other educational matters. Representatives from church-supported colleges complained that some University of Texas professors held unorthodox religious views that “inculcated infidel ideas in the minds of the students,” as one observer put it.³¹ Other critics had complained that a professor of political science had said uncomplimentary things about the free coinage of silver, a key plank in the 1896 platform of the Democratic and Populist Parties, one that had strong support in Texas and the West. To eliminate the possibility of professors expressing such unpopular opinions, some newspapers advocated the elimination of the university's political science chair. Happily, the regents decided against that drastic measure. However, a member of the Board of Regents grilled the errant professor, and he agreed not to mention the topic of silver again.

Another Texas professor, speaking at a teachers’ meeting in Denver, made the flabbergasting mistake of saying that it was a good thing that the South had lost the Civil War. “The great question in the South is the lifting up of the colored man to citizenship,” the professor argued. “And it is being done,” he added. He spoke in defense of southern states (including Texas) restricting the political rights of African Americans, but this did not mollify Texans with diehard Confederate sympathies. Race relations were a touchy subject in turn-of-the-century Texas, a former slave state where racially motivated lynching was common.³² The Board of Regents excused the incident by claiming that it had been an impromptu address on the subject of “southern patriotism” given on short notice. If the gentleman had had more time to reflect before speaking, the regents implied, he would not have uttered such inflammatory statements. All of these incidents led J. J. Lane, a University of Texas professor, to write in his 1903 History of Education in Texas that he disapproved of student and (in some cases) faculty participation in politics. Such activities could only harm the university.³³

As in many other public institutions at the turn of the previous century, the University of Texas faculty were judged by bedrock cultural assumptions, shifting political currents, and the whims of crafty politicians. According to Garrison, political controversy involving President Prather's predecessor George T. Winston had caused “such a storm” that “two years of [Prather's] wise and sympathetic administration have hardly enabled us to orient ourselves.”³⁴ Garrison had been personally involved in those controversies and in helping to right the ship after Prather's arrival in 1899. He must have worried about how the Yankee Bolton would fit in. Surely he would never allow Bolton to teach anything about his doctoral specialty, free blacks in the South. The astute Bolton must have soon realized that his dissertation was a dead letter in Austin. If he objected to abandoning the field he had pioneered, he never mentioned it.

In the fall of 1901 Bolton simply put his head down and went to work in the classroom and on the Quarterly.³⁵ Meanwhile Garrison wrote a report on the status of historical studies on the southwestern United States for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. He sketched the regional situation in broad terms but concentrated on research activities in Texas, especially the acquisition of the important Bexar Archives. Garrison thought there was still more to be discovered in Mexico, which he had scouted in the summer of 1900.³⁶ “No man living,” he averred, “could estimate it accurately or indicate, except in a general way, the nature of the documents.”³⁷ The repositories in Mexico City were virtually unexplored. Mexico's provincial archives doubtless held additional treasures for the curious researcher. The archival investigations that Garrison outlined would become Bolton's lifework. Garrison had no doubt hoped when he hired him that Bolton would work the Mexican archives, but in late 1901 he could not have guessed how completely Bolton would embrace that project.

Garrison's report heralded his own ambitions for the University of Texas while paving the way for Bolton. At that time there were no other significant university libraries with historical research collections west of Missouri, so the University of Texas was well positioned to become a center of graduate training.³⁸ This situation would change in a few years, but for the moment there was no better place in the West for an aspiring historian. Bolton scrambled to get on board Garrison's southwestern express. “Garrison was the man in this year's national association,” Herbert told his brother. “Texas has the key to Spanish American history.” Bolton was “grubbing Spanish” so that he could “help turn the lock.”³⁹ Garrison enhanced his scholarly reputation in 1903 with the publication of Texas, A Contest of Civilizations in the respected American Commonwealths series.⁴⁰

Early in 1902 Garrison revealed to Bolton his long-range thinking about the younger scholar's future. In the fall of 1902 Bolton would begin teaching a course on “European Expansion, commercial and colonial activities” in colonial America. “I think I shall in time be able to block out a field of my own here,” he wrote Fred.⁴¹ This new course would at least have Herbert teaching American history, even though it was not in the area of his special training. Perhaps it was just as well that Garrison redirected Bolton's intellectual interests. By December Bolton had taken to describing his work on freedmen simply as “Niggers,” which suggests neither sympathy with nor a deep interest in the subject.⁴²

The rest of the Bolton family arrived in Austin as expected. Once settled, the Boltons fit into the social round of the young faculty and their families. “This is a great place for callers,” Herbert told his brother. People visited in the “forenoon, afternoon, and evening.” One couple in particular visited frequently. “They come in with a pack of cards to spend the evening,” or might invite the Boltons for singing. He liked his colleague, but he wasn't “a very hard worker, I think. Likes too well to go to church and calling.” Organized religion was not going to get in the way of Bolton's ambition. “Do you people attend church?” he asked Fred. “We do not,” though most of the Texas people did. “I haven't the time.”⁴³

Moving expenses had staggered the Boltons’ finances, a situation that usually caused Herbert to think about greener pastures. Garrison had virtually promised Bolton a raise, but the regents did not promote him. In the past, personal pride and pecuniary needs had made Bolton rail against politics and outrageous fortune, but not this time. “I shall not worry for another year,” he wrote. “Promotions are slow here, in spite of what they told me before I came.”⁴⁴ Rather than excoriating Garrison for misleading him about early promotion, Bolton worked hard to please him. Bolton was more philosophical at Texas because for the first time he was reasonably certain things were going his way. With his $1,500 salary he no doubt knew that he was getting top pay in his grade.⁴⁵ And now he saw the beginnings of something that would prove more important to him than money: the possibility of developing a field of historical investigation entirely his own.

Bolton rapidly developed his knowledge of Spanish and southwestern history so that he could begin archival research. “I have a new bee in my bonnet,” he told Fred in July. He had decided to go to Mexico City. “I want to lay my lines here deep enough, and my plans broad enough, so that if, in the future, chance should leave an open field, I will be master of the situation.” Bolton was tired of being at the mercy of others. To control his destiny, he planned to dominate the field of southwestern history that Garrison had pioneered. “To do it one must know the Spanish archives and the Spanish language.”⁴⁶ The department head must have been pleased that his hardworking instructor was willing to go to Mexico at his own expense. He did not yet understand the extent of Bolton's aggressive plans.

Once summer school was out, Bolton boarded a train for the four-day ride to Mexico City. After quickly orienting himself in the Mexican capital—“beats Milwaukee in many respects,” he observed—Bolton turned to the Archivo Nacional. “It's a bold venture, but I have the nerve.”⁴⁷ He burrowed into the Archivo with characteristic energy but struggled with the strange orthography and lack of finding aids. On Sundays he found time to sightsee. As might be expected, Bolton was a historically minded tourist. What he saw appealed to his romantic imagination. He traced the route of Cortes's entry into the city and saw the tree under which Cortes wept on la noche triste because he had lost so many of his men during his retreat from the Aztec capital in 1520. Bolton visited the Zocolo, the main plaza, and ventured out to Coyoacan, where Cortes had lived. Sites of American feats of arms during the Mexican War also seized his attention. He ambled along the remains of old causeways that harked back to the Aztec empire. There were sixteenth-century churches cheek by jowl with modern structures. “Everything here is a mixture of the very ancient and the very new.” Mexico City's modernity was perhaps most surprising to Herbert. “They tell me there are 400 miles of street railway in this city of the Aztecs—mostly electric.” Not everything in Mexico was commendable: once he left the modern city center, there were “myriads of peons—Indians of the laboring class—barefooted, blanketed &c. Someone said a yard of cotton will cover 4 Mexicans.”⁴⁸

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 Milwaukee, he would have jumped at a university presidency. But Texas had changed the trajectory of his ambitions. Now he was a dedicated scholar who was convinced of the importance of his work and the eventual rewards that it would bring. Bolton's reputation was spreading. Texas would have to recognize his achievements or he would go. In June 1905 the regents promoted Bolton and raised his salary to $1,800.⁶⁶ He was finally a regular member of the faculty with an improved salary (plus a stipend for managing the Quarterly and other university publications). There would be bigger payoffs in the future.

As Bolton continued to develop his expertise in the Mexican material, his relationship with Garrison became fraught with jealousy and mistrust. In early 1905 both men were evidently involved in Garrison's new application for Carnegie money to support Bolton's work in the Mexican archives.⁶⁷ Andrew McLaughlin, the Carnegie Institution's director of research, had apparently given Garrison strong assurances that the project would be funded, because the Quarterly carried an announcement about it. But McLaughlin's successor, J. Franklin Jameson, was mainly interested in underwriting the publication of guides to U.S. materials in foreign archives.⁶⁸ In February Jameson informed Bolton (and probably Garrison) that the Carnegie Institution's executive committee had turned down the Mexican project.⁶⁹ Jameson reasoned that without sound guides to foreign archives, historians could not make reliable decisions about what should be copied. Jameson's desire for a guide to the Mexican archives eventually would raise Bolton's professional stature and wound Garrison's pride.

Before leaving for Mexico in the summer of 1905, Bolton scattered a little professional seed corn. He wrote Turner about documents in the Archivo General that might be of interest to him. Heading the list was correspondence concerning the 1819 Transcontinental Treaty. There were also eighteenth-century documents about England and Texas. “Do you suppose that the American Historical Review would care to publish good material of this sort?” he asked.⁷⁰ Turner immediately (and without telling Bolton) forwarded Bolton's letter to Jameson, who was editor of the Review. “Bolton is a good man—trained here and at University of Penna,” he explained. “The stuff sounds interesting and…copies ought to be gotten, I imagine.”⁷¹

Turner's note prompted Jameson to contact Bolton, who sent a detailed report to Jameson. He revealed that he had found new Spanish material on the Lewis and Clark expedition and mentioned the possibility of renewing Garrison's application for funds to pursue work in Mexico. “If there are any questions that you would like to ask me personally,” Bolton offered, “I shall do my best [to] answer them.” He had done a great deal of research at his own expense, he explained, but he needed more funds to work more extensively. “The field is rich here, and it ought to be harvested.”⁷²

Garrison knew that Bolton and Jameson were in contact, but he may not have known the details of Bolton's correspondence or the sort of papers that Bolton had used to bait the hook for Jameson.⁷³ The documents bearing on Lewis and Clark and the Transcontinental Treaty were in the class of material that Garrison expected to monopolize himself, documents reflecting the Anglo advance in the West. Bolton was now on Garrison's turf. Furthermore, Bolton invited a direct correspondence with Jameson that undercut Garrison's role as the nominal director of research in Mexico while simultaneously establishing Bolton's reputation with Jameson as the true expert in the field.

Professional courtesy dictated that Jameson ask Garrison about Bolton's fitness to compile a guide to the Mexican archives.⁷⁴ Garrison's response was lukewarm. “I will only answer yes in a general way to the questions you ask me about him. You would, I believe, find his work reliable and satisfactory.” He added that he hoped to see Jameson personally at the AHA meeting and thought it best to put off further consideration of the work in Mexico until then. Garrison explained that he had intended to do the Mexican archival work himself, and he diplomatically suggested that he would go if Jameson could provide funding. In his honeyed but pointed conclusion Garrison remarked that he was pleased to learn of Jameson's interest in Mexico. “I shall take pleasure in doing anything I can to further your plans relative thereto, whether Mr. Bolton or I should have a personal share in them or not.”⁷⁵

There was no mistaking Garrison's preference as to whom the Carnegie Institution should fund to work in Mexico. Garrison had welcomed and applauded Bolton's work in Mexico as long as it had been seen as part of his larger operation, but he well understood that if Bolton authored a guide to historical materials in Mexican archives, he would become the leading authority, not Garrison. And Bolton understood this too. The opportunity to work in the Mexican archives under Jameson's direction was “just the kind of work I have been preparing to do and am intending to do independently and unaided if I cannot have the advantages of cooperation and financial help,” Bolton explained. He had a bibliographical essay “relative to the Mexican archives about ready” for the Quarterly, “but I shall withhold it at present.”⁷⁶ This was bait that Jameson was interested in. He rejected the publication of the Transcontinental Treaty documents, but placed Bolton's essay on the Mexican archives in the Review.77 This publication alone made Bolton the leading candidate for the Mexican guide project.

In early January 1906, presumably after seeing Garrison at the AHA meeting in Baltimore, Jameson invited Bolton to compile “a comprehensive guide to the materials for the history of the United States in the Mexican archives.”⁷⁸ He offered to pay Bolton's salary and expenses for one year. Jameson advised Bolton to consult with Garrison to determine when he might begin the work. Garrison put a smiling face on these developments in a newspaper article announcing the project. He claimed that Bolton had taken up the work because Garrison's other duties prevented him from doing so.⁷⁹ Bolton noted that Garrison figured “with characteristic prominence” in the article. “He claims everything in sight,” he added, “but this does not greatly trouble me.”⁸⁰ Bolton was coming into his own, and he felt secure enough to risk alienating Garrison. With Jameson on his side (not to mention Turner, Haskins, and McMaster), he could afford to be bold.

Bolton's serenity was well founded. He had shrewdly played an inside game that enabled him to get around Garrison. He outmaneuvered his department head in Austin by winning the support of the new university president, David F. Houston, who had replaced Prather. Bolton asked Houston if he had made a mistake in studying southwestern history, because Professor Garrison was “(let me whisper it) very sensitive to competition.” Houston told Bolton to “create the field and the chair will be made in due time. This is what he [Houston] wants me to do.” Bolton did not intend to be Garrison's errand boy at Texas.⁸¹

But Garrison was not yet finished with Bolton and Jameson. The question of the timing of Bolton's leave of absence depended on arrangements for someone to take Bolton's duties at the University of Texas and the Quarterly. Barker was in Pennsylvania finishing his doctoral work with McMaster, and Bolton could not leave until Barker returned. Bolton proposed to do part of the work in the summer of 1906 and return to Texas for the academic year 1906—1907. He would complete the Mexican work in the succeeding academic year.⁸² Just when everything seemed set, Jameson reported that the Carnegie Institution executive board had deferred funding for the guide projects.⁸³ He hoped that funding would be forthcoming, but in the summer of 1906 Bolton proceeded to Mexico without Carnegie assistance.

Bolton had found new work that subsidized his Mexican research trip. William A. Holmes of the Bureau of American Ethnology had asked Bolton to revise some articles and to write additional ones for a handbook on American Indians.⁸⁴ More than one hundred articles in the published book came from Bolton's pen, and much of it was written from documents he found while he was in Mexico in 1906. He was paid $1,000 for the first half of this work, a considerable infusion of outside income.⁸⁵

Bolton reported his new findings to Jameson, who finally secured the appropriation for the Mexican guide at $150 per month plus expenses. The two planned to meet in Washington to firm up plans before proceeding to the AHA meeting in late December.⁸⁶ “Please express my thanks to Professor Garrison for his kindness in making the arrangement possible,” Jameson concluded, but he expressed his gratitude too soon.⁸⁷ The very next day Garrison asked Jameson for financial assistance to examine in the Mexican archives “materials belonging to the period of the Anglo-American movement southwestward.” Bolton, he clarified, was working in the “earlier period of Spanish-American history,” and his archival research had dealt exclusively with that area. “My own judgment is that his work for the Carnegie Institution had best be prosecuted under the same restrictions.” Garrison believed that he had earned the right to exploit the Mexican archives in his own field, because he had pioneered research in Mexico. “I do not like to press my claims,” Garrison wrote, but “I trust that you yourself see the situation clearly, and that argument is unnecessary.”⁸⁸

Jameson's response was unequivocal. He had engaged Bolton for the preparation of “one comprehensive guide to the materials for United State history” in the Mexican archives. Turning to Garrison's long-standing hope that the Carnegie Institution would help him get documents from the Mexican archives, Jameson planned to aid in “the more elaborate exploitation” of foreign archives “that would do the greatest good for the greatest number,” but these projects lay “so much in the future that I have not considered them carefully.”⁸⁹ Jameson hoped that Texas and other state governments would be moved to fund projects of the sort that Garrison proposed. Garrison was out in the cold.

Everything seemed to be set. Barker would finish his degree, return to Texas in June, and Bolton would leave for Mexico. Then came Garrison's letter to Jameson. “I regret greatly the little hitch that seems likely in the matter of Dr. Bolton's leave of absence.” Barker was going to Harvard on a one-year fellowship. Garrison proposed to put off Bolton's leave for a year. Garrison insisted that he had no desire to interfere with Jameson's plans. “This is said in the frankest and most cordial spirit.”⁹⁰ There was a limit to Jameson's patience and it had been reached. Delaying Bolton's leave would cause much “difficulty and regret,” he informed Garrison.⁹¹ Just when was Barker expected to finish his degree, and when would Bolton's leave finally be decided? the irritated Jameson asked. Bolton solved the problem by going directly to the university president, who approved the leave.⁹² Houston also promised Bolton a promotion to associate professor with a good salary raise when he returned.⁹³

President Houston realized that Bolton's work had practical applications as well as scholarly merit. In May Houston referred several “Dallas capitalists” to Bolton for information about the long-lost Los Almagres silver mine.⁹⁴ Discovered in the eighteenth century, the mine was located somewhere north of San Antonio, Texas. Comanches had driven out the miners, and the mine's exact location had been forgotten. Anglo Texans learned of the place, assumed that the mine was fabulously rich, and fruitlessly searched for it. In 1904 Bolton had found an official account of the mine together with precise information about its location. After hearing from Houston's acquaintances, he sent to Mexico for the records and met with the Dallas men, who made him one of nine partners in the venture. Then he and one of his partners found the mine “exactly where the papers directed us…with startling precision.” Iron deposits as well as silver might make money for the partnership. “But, thunder,” he exclaimed, “I never expect anything except in return for a day's work, and in the form of wages.”⁹⁵ The mine proved not to be a moneymaker but was still useful to Bolton because it connected him with Texans who appreciated his knowledge of Spanish land records.⁹⁶ And from Houston's perspective Bolton's work demonstrated the utilitarian value of historical research in the university.

Six years in Texas had made a big change in Bolton's professional fortunes. He had carved out a field of his own and established the beginning of a national reputation. Hungry for professional recognition and advancement, Bolton now felt sure enough of his future to turn down tempting offers when they came. He was also secure enough to risk the wrath of Garrison by taking over the Mexican project that his department chair had pioneered and wished to dominate. Bolton established a legitimate claim to the field by virtue of hard work and significant publications. But he made his claim stick by adroitly outmaneuvering Garrison at every turn. President Houston supported Bolton because he recognized the value of his work to the university. Garrison wanted to do the work, but Bolton was actually doing it.

Bolton had established a substantial scholarly reputation in Texas, but he had had a lot of help. Jameson, Turner, Haskins, and perhaps others behind the scenes promoted his career. Nor should Garrison be forgotten. Without a Garrison, there could not have been a Bolton. By founding the state historical association and its journal, he created an organizational structure that promoted and published southwestern research. He was the first historian to foresee that the systematic exploitation of the Mexican archives by Texas faculty and students could elevate the scholarly reputation of the University of Texas. And he knew that the historian who opened those archives would become a very big man in the historical profession. By the time Bolton left for his year in Mexico, Garrison no doubt understood that he would not realize his dream of being that big man. But in a very real sense Garrison had founded his Texas school of southwestern history through Bolton, and there was no other way he could have done it. Garrison would die of a heart attack in 1910, just about the time he promised Jameson that he would be free to get back to Mexico.

When Bolton stepped onto the train to Mexico in the summer of 1907, he knew that his career had entered a new phase. He was looking at a big future. Texas would not be able to hold Bolton.