gives some attention to Bolton's graduate students because they helped to disseminate his work. They formed an unusually large and diverse group. More women than men studied with Bolton. Most of the women were master's students who became public school teachers. The majority of his doctoral students found academic employment at the college level all over the United States. Still other graduate students worked as what we now call public historians for the State Department, National Park Service, National Archives, and other federal and state agencies. Through them Bolton created a professional empire that spread his ideas about borderlands and the Americas in schools at every level and in historic parks and monuments. Artifacts of the once extensive domain of Bolton and his students may still be seen at the national monuments today.
Bolton established a professional empire perhaps without parallel, but he was not primarily an academic politician. He was a scholar. The central purpose of this book is to explore the development of his historical ideas, their impact on scholarship and society in his day, and their relevance to historical studies today. It is my hope that this study of Bolton will deepen our understanding of the American historians’ ongoing challenge: writing the history of a people who are racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse.
O N E · The Scholars’ Hard Road
In late December 1922 Herbert Eugene Bolton boarded an eastbound train at the Berkeley station and settled into his seat. Even in repose Bolton was a striking figure. At fifty-two years old, he was six feet tall with neatly trimmed sandy hair that was still full. Smiles broke easily upon his open face. He wore glasses over large blue, attentive eyes, and chain-smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes, but still looked fit in middle age. Bolton was chairman of the history department at the University of California, director of the Bancroft Library, and one of the most important historians of his day. Everyone in the history profession knew it. He was on his way to New Haven for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA).
The wintry landscape that slid past the Pullman car window triggered memories about his own past, as well as the history he had written. At some points Bolton's personal story and his grand narrative of the North American frontier seemed to merge. As the train sped across Nebraska, Bolton recalled his family's covered-wagon trek when he was only three. Seeking new farmland in the West, the Boltons had left Wisconsin in 1873. Busted, the family returned to Wisconsin, but this sad memory of frontier failure did not divert Bolton for long. Now riding down the Platte River Valley, “where ran the trail of the fur traders, the Oregonians, and the Californians, and along which Parkman came,” Bolton saw only prosaic haystacks instead of teeming herds of wild animals. “I would much prefer to see buffaloes, or Pawnee Indians, who belong here.” One of his friends interrupted this reverie with pleasant conversation, but bolton “could not help looking out from time to time, to see if perchance I might get a trace of [Pedro de] Villazur or of [Pierre] Mallet, or of the Pawnee.”1
Through New York the rails paralleled the abandoned Erie Canal, which his New England ancestors had traveled. “I can see them now, peering over the edge of the railing of a can[al] boat drawn by a tow line. That brown-eyed girl is my mother.”2 Not content with conjuring his mother, Bolton “saw old Leatherstocking or some of his associates ‘moving noiselessly’ through the thickets over the hills.” As the train rolled through the Hudson River Valley, Bolton imagined that he could see Rip Van Winkle and all the heroes of Sleepy Hollow.
Herbert Bolton was a romantic. For him the landscape was a grand stage upon which heroic figures, historical and imaginary, acted their parts. In his imagination, long-dead explorers and literary heroes joined him in the places where they had lived so memorably. He admired their exploits, and—in his own mind at least—shared their glory. One cannot understand Bolton or his work without recognizing his romantic attachment to the people and places about which he wrote. Where did this romantic historian come from?
Bolton was not born to be a romantic professor of history. Far from it. He came into the world on a small farm in Wisconsin on July 20, 1870. He was the fourth in a family of eleven children, three of whom did not live to maturity. The circumstances of his birth and early family life are the common stuff of nineteenthcentury rural America. His father, Edwin Latham Bolton, was born in Leeds, England, and migrated with his family to Utica, New York. They worked at the weavers’ trade, as they had done in England. According to family tradition, young Edwin took up surveying and led the Boltons out of the mills and across the country to western Wisconsin, although family mill earnings may have financed the move. In 1856 they settled on a farm in Wilton near Kickapoo Creek, about twenty-five miles from La Crosse. There the Boltons became independent farmers, working the raw land to build a new life for themselves.
Bolton's father was an immigrant, but his mother, Rosaline Cady, was not. She came from old New England stock. Ten generations back, one of her forbears, Richard Warren, had arrived in the New World aboard the Mayflower. She even had a distant connection to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her family had been settled in Vermont for two centuries before her father and mother moved to Wisconsin in the 1840s or 1850s. The children of Edwin and Rosaline were culturally and genetically Anglo-American right down to the soles of their feet.
By the time Herbert entered the world, the eighty-acre homestead near Wilton was doing well. Edwin built a larger house to accommodate his growing family. His rheumatic condition, a legacy of his Union Army service during the Civil War, was the only cloud on the horizon. In the early 1870s his illness was still manageable, but it would steadily grow worse. In 1873 the prospect of new lands on the Nebraska frontier filled Edwin with optimism. He sold his farm and moved his family to a new homestead near Lincoln. It was a bad year to go west: grasshoppers and drought ruined the farm before it was fairly begun. The Boltons returned to Wisconsin, and Edwin bought another farm there, but it was not as productive as the old one. Located at LaGrange, the new farm had poorer soil, fewer resources, and a mortgage. The Boltons had to scratch harder than ever. Even so, the family was poorer at the end of 1873 than they had been at the beginning, when they had turned their hopeful faces west.
Large families like the Boltons’ were the rule on American farms where children soon became useful. The Bolton boys were of inestimable value on the farm. By 1880 three of them were teenagers, old enough to work at men's jobs. Even Herbert could pick berries and do light farmwork. Everyone worked an “eight-hour” day, Herbert's older brother Frederick joked: “8 hours in the forenoon and 8 more in the afternoon!”3 Hoeing, weeding, and harvesting occupied the farmer's sons in season. Caring for livestock, building fences, repairing barns, and countless other farm chores took whatever time remained.4 There was work to do at the neighbors’ places, too. Planting, haying, harvesting, cutting, and hauling wood all demanded labor that the Bolton boys could supply in return for produce, handmade clothes, or other goods; they sometimes got cash but rarely. As soon as Herbert was big enough, he became his older brother Fred's constant work partner. A life of hard labor seemed to stretch endlessly before them.
Constant hard work was not the only discipline that the Bolton boys knew. Their Methodist parents “were both quite religious and we received rather strict, but wholesome counsel,” Fred recalled. “Had we told a lie, committed a theft, or damaged others’ property, the punishments would have been severe.” Swearing, smoking, and playing hooky from school were also infractions worthy of punishment. Fred thought that he and Herbert inherited their drive and perseverance from their father. “He was the personification of those traits.” The elder Bolton augmented his income by teaching school in the winter, an occupation that probably first inspired Fred and Herbert to become teachers.5 Fred and Herbert wanted to escape rural life and understood that education offered them a way to do it. Both parents encouraged their children to get an education, and the boys often saw their father studying when he took a break from farmwork. In January 1883 Edwin gave Herbert some advice in the autograph book that his mother had given him for Christmas: “Make the most of the advantages you may have. E. L. Bolton.”6 Herbert took his father's counsel to heart.
Herbert's
