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
