still loomed. He was prepared, but no matter what he had accomplished thus far, a few professors could take it all away from him. Yet the preliminary signs were all there. Bolton had received nothing but praise and recognition at Penn—two prestigious fellowships with an even better one promised, an invited lecture, generous support from a nationally recognized mentor, an office in a national organization. Turner was still thinking about him too. In April Turner informed Herbert that he had put his name in for a position, but he did not tell him where.93 Herbert should have gone into his exams with a high degree of confidence, but like virtually all well-prepared graduate students, he worried nonetheless.
His anxiety was misplaced. Bolton passed written examinations in economics and European and American history in early May, days of “severe travail,” as he called the process.94 The oral examination was the only hurdle that remained. Finally, Herbert could see the dawn coming. At Penn the orals were “supplementary ‘farces,’ ” he told Fred. “Unless I am inordinately asinine on Tuesday, I shall pull through.”95 A few days later he reported that he had passed the orals “with no great honor and no bad scars or scares.” Now that the ordeal was over, he was glad that he was “no longer a school boy. That gives me more satisfaction than the degree, (which has depreciated much within 24 hours).”96
But would it pay? Bolton still did not have a professional position, although McMaster had promised him a postdoctoral fellowship at Penn if a job did not materialize. Bolton was understandably concerned about his professional prospects, but he was in a very strong position to compete for jobs. At Wisconsin and Penn he had studied with some of the country's most important historians, who showed confidence in him at every turn. In the early summer, however, Bolton returned to Wisconsin without a job.
Bolton's fondest hope was that he would land a professorship with his brother at Wisconsin Normal. He expected Fred to help him get it, but there were no guarantees. He sent letters to high schools while teaching a summer institute for teachers in Appleton.97 Then a job opened at Albion College, a Methodist school in Michigan. Herbert applied, hoping that his acquaintance with a prominent Methodist minister would help his cause.98 Turner wrote for him too. Bolton's reliance on a church friend to vouch for him bordered on hypocrisy. He no longer belonged to the church. The word “church” appears only rarely in Herbert's correspondence with his brother; “prayer,” “god,” and “bible,” were never used. If he prayed for a good job, he never told his brother about it. Any appeals to god during his child's desperate illness likewise went unreported. Nevertheless, Albion called Herbert to Michigan for an interview. Methodist or not, Herbert was “elected OK ,” he wrote Fred. “You fix up the newspaper accts,” he added. “They are going to give me a column here, & [in] Detroit.”99 Evidently Fred did more than fix up newspaper announcements, for soon Wisconsin Normal offered Herbert a position teaching economics and civics at $1,000 per year, $100 more than Albion, but $300 less than Herbert had hoped for. So much for Methodism at Albion; back to Wisconsin.100
And so it came to pass that the Bolton brothers engineered the perfect ending to their years of struggle. Herbert's salary was small but it was secure, and he hoped for raises. Living near his brother in Milwaukee gave him great personal satisfaction. The feeling was mutual. As Fred wrote many years later, “No two young couples ever experienced greater mutual enjoyment than we did that year.”101 Surely this happy ending foreshadowed many years of contentment for the brother professors in their alma mater. Some happy endings are not destined to last.
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
