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.
F O U R · Many Roads to California
While Bolton negotiated the terms of his work in Mexico, Frederick Jackson Turner was engaged in high-level professional discussions of his own. From 1904 until 1909 Stanford University and the University of California avidly competed for Turner's services. Bolton would be the ultimate beneficiary of Turner's long courtships on the Pacific Coast.
In 1902 Turner had called Max Farrand to Madison to teach a summer seminar in American constitutional history, “to the delight” of the students, Turner noted. “I am finding him a most companionable friend,” he explained to Professor Henry Morse Stephens. Farrand was head of the history department at Stanford, and Stephens had just moved from Cornell to the University of California. “I am very confident that your removal to the coast is full of significance to the development of historical study in the country,” he added.1 This was the beginning of a delicate, three-sided courtship between Turner, Stanford, and Berkeley.
Turner's friendship with Farrand lasted all of their lives. A few years younger than Turner, Farrand had earned his PhD at Princeton University, where he had studied with Woodrow Wilson, Turner's friend and teacher from his Hopkins days.2 Turner and Farrand had much in common intellectually, and they were both avid anglers who spent summer weeks fly-fishing.3 Farrand, of course, saw much more than a fishing buddy in Turner. Adding Turner to the Stanford faculty would immeasurably enhance that young institution's intellectual reputation. He discussed the matter with university president David Starr Jordan, who enthusiastically agreed to recruit Turner.4
Selling Stanford to Turner would be tough. The institution had opened in 1891 as a memorial to Leland Stanford Jr., the son of railroad baron and California U.S. senator Leland Stanford. After their son died at age fifteen, Stanford and his wife, Jane, invested millions in the creation of the university, which they conceived as a gift to the people of California as well as a lasting memorial to their son. When her husband suddenly died in 1893, Jane Stanford carried on the work of building the university, but it still lacked a significant library, a shortcoming that hindered faculty research as well as graduate training.5
Farrand and Jordan recognized that Stanford needed a better library in order to attract Turner. It so happened that two major private libraries were available in California, the Bancroft and the Sutro. The former was named for Hubert Howe Bancroft, a wealthy San Francisco stationer and bookseller who wrote a multivolume history of California and the West.6 He scoured the world for manuscripts and books pertaining to his subject, acquiring copies when the originals could not be had. The Bancroft Library's special strengths were in the Spanish and Mexican periods of California and the Southwest. Bancroft erected a special building for his library in San Francisco and hired a staff of librarians and writers. In 1883 the first of thirty-nine volumes of The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft issued from the press. Once The Works were completed, Bancroft was faced with the question of what to do with his vast private library and archive. The city of Sacramento, the University of Chicago, and the Library of Congress all were rumored to have been offered the library for prices ranging from $50,000 to ten times than figure.7
Adolph Sutro was a Prussian-born mining engineer who became wealthy through his mining investments and the development of the famous Sutro Tunnel, which drained the silver mines near Virginia City, Nevada. Sutro had refined tastes that he satisfied by amassing a huge private library. He and his agents searched Europe, Mexico, and the United States to add to his collection. Sutro would buy the entire stock of a bookstore, or an entire library, to obtain one treasured item. He prevailed on poor monks to sell centuries-old monastery libraries with their rare incunabula (books printed before 1501). Sutro's library may have amounted to 200,000 books, pamphlets, and newspapers. It was one of the largest privately held libraries in the world, and in some ways one of the richest. Sutro owned more than 4,000 incunabula, perhaps more than any other library anywhere. His interests were different from Bancroft's, as reflected in Sutro's holdings in science, natural history, and European subjects. But there was some overlap, as in the cases of Mexican history and American newspapers. Cornell University historian and librarian George Lincoln burr judged Sutro's holdings in some categories as being unrivaled in America and perhaps even in Europe.8
Unlike Bancroft, who wished to sell his collection, Sutro offered his library to the public. In 1895 he promised to give the library, a building to house it, and twenty-six acres in San Francisco to the University of California, which turned him down because accepting would have required the abandonment of the new Berkeley campus. Sutro's heirs continued the search for a suitable public recipient, but no one would have it. So it was that two of the worlds’ great private libraries were spurned by the people of California, who would neither purchase nor receive a great library as a precious gift.
Like a good fisherman, Farrand lured Turner with libraries. He asked Turner for his estimation of the value of the Bancroft and Sutro collections. Like a wary trout, Turner circled the bait. Turner was not familiar with the Sutro holdings but supposed it was a good modern European library. As for the Bancroft, “if the $200,000 or so” that was supposed to be its price was “to be expended chiefly on early Indian and Spanish records,” Turner felt “less confident…if the documentary material for the American period of the history of the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Coast” could be obtained elsewhere. Remarkably, Turner believed that too large a proportion of Spanish records actually
