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
