guess they want you.”23 Herbert was certain that his brother was the best man for the place, but it helped to know someone. His brother got the job.
Such jobs were just stepping stones for the Bolton boys. The following year, Fred resigned so that he could attend the state normal school in Milwaukee. Education was a family affair, with most of the older siblings helping to pay for expenses whenever they could. Fred was only the third graduate of Tomah High School to attend college, so his matriculation in Milwaukee was a big thing, especially to Herbert. He asked his older brother about everything—girls, extracurricular activity, books, everything.24 Herbert was already looking past Milwaukee and hoped to attend the state university in Madison. He knew that he would “have to work a while,” but the dream was there. Fred was showing that with hard work and some help from home, the dream could be realized. “You encourage me,” Herbert wrote.25
A senior now, Herbert was anxious to be out on his own. Graduation was fast approaching. The teachers had chosen him to speak at commencement, and this honor brought out his insecurity. “But I can do my best.”26 As always, doing his “best” meant working hard on the task at hand. Commencement evidently came and went without great trauma caused by a botched valedictory. At least Herbert never mentioned it in his letters to Fred.
Now the road was open to the future. Nearly nineteen, Herbert had accomplished as much as he could have in the little community bounded by the farm, Tomah, and Tunnel City. Optimistic, attractive, and outgoing, Herbert faced the future certain of only one thing: a lot of hard work. Even so, success was not assured. The track for advancement he had chosen, higher education, was virtually unknown to him. From Tomah he could see only a few paces ahead as his brother proceeded. Yet he was determined to make something of himself through ambition and hard work.
Herbert did not know it, but a place was already being prepared for him. In 1884 forty-one historians had gathered at a resort in Saratoga, New York, to found the AHA. Their purpose was straightforward: the promotion of historical studies “without limitations of time or space,” as Harvard professor Justin Winsor explained.27 “The future of this new work is in the young men of the historical instinct,” he continued, “largely in the rising instructors of our colleges.” Founded for the promotion of history, the AHA would become primarily an organization of, by, and for college professors of history. They would form a new professional class: college professors with a doctorate. The AHA founders took the German academy and its faculties as their model. The new American doctor-professors would transform their universities into Germanic research institutions whose mission was to investigate history rather than to merely reiterate well-worn moral tales about the past. The transformation involved the establishment of doctoral programs so that as time marched on new generations of American-trained PhDs would fill the ranks of the professorate in the United States. It followed that institutions with doctoral programs would attain the highest level of prestige among colleges and universities.28 Thus research universities, graduate schools, and doctoral production formed a self-perpetuating and self-justifying regime. None of this was laid out in the AHA constitution, but it nevertheless came to pass.
The first AHA members’ historical interests embraced the American West. In 1885 the AHA passed a resolution that called for the careful recording of the history of the western states and territories.29 A second resolution called for cataloging historical documents concerning the United States held in European archives. A third resolution commended the German historian Leopold von Ranke, “the oldest and most distinguished exponent” of “historical science.”30 These resolutions were not unrelated. The AHA founders envisioned their historical enterprise as an excruciatingly detailed Rankean effort that would be global in extent. Before there could be a proper history of the United States, specialists must assemble the documents, whether they were in Leadville or London. The teenaged Herbert had no way of knowing about these resolutions, but they defined his life's work.
In the summer of 1889 the arcane discussions of historians did not concern Herbert. He was looking for a job. Like his brother, he hoped to teach school, but it was not an easy matter for an inexperienced high school graduate to convince school boards that he was up to the task. He searched for a position with characteristic energy and thoroughness. In a flurry of writing he sent letters to fourteen schools. Whenever possible, Herbert spoke with board members and clerks. Surely, he explained to Fred, after all of this activity he “must get something of a place.”31 Fred was especially interested in his brother's employment prospects because a portion of Herbert's meager salary would go to support Fred's education. Once Fred's schooling was complete, he would help finance Herbert's college years. The striving brothers would alternate years of school teaching with stints as college students. This was the scholars’ hard road of upward mobility that would culminate in university professorships for the Boltons.
But first Herbert had to get a job, and school boards were remarkably unimpressed with the nineteen-year-old inexperienced (but earnest) applicant. In the summer Fred worked for a lumber company in Granite, Wisconsin, so Herbert followed him there. When Fred departed for Milwaukee in late summer, Herbert took his job as store manager. This brought him into contact with a rough, migratory laboring class of lumberjacks and shingle weavers. It must have been difficult for a boy so young to look such men in the eye and tell them what they owed the company store.
Fred and Herbert may have been college men, or at least college bound, but they were not pansies. They wrestled with the lumberjacks on their days off and gave a good account of themselves. Herbert made friends with some of the more colorful characters who worked in the woods. He recounted some of their misadventures—and their debts to the store—in his letters to Fred.32 These encounters must have reminded the Boltons that they were not too far removed from the laborers’ life that they were trying to escape for good.
In September Herbert finally heard that the small town of York had decided to take a chance on him. He settled business in Granite and departed for his new job with a sense of purpose and affection for “the renowned (new) York,” the “home of my heart and the center of all rural attractions.”33 The school suited him. Most of his scholars were almost as old as he was. Some young men already had moustaches. The school was ungraded, which meant that he taught students of all ages in the same room. He was grateful that all but two of his charges were able to read and write.34
Teaching in York was good experience for Herbert, but he led a solitary life while preparing for Normal. As usual he asked Fred for advice about books to read. The uncertainty of regular pay at York troubled him too, because he had a hard time forwarding money to Fred. His affection for the small town quickly wore thin. “I should like to get into a town somewhere in civilization. It is so lonesome here. No one to talk with on a subject that interests me, or any-one wishing to pursue any line of book study.”35 The boy from a two-horse town looked down on the one-horse town that claimed his services. He quit at the end of the first semester.
Herbert's loneliness was real enough. He and Gertrude occasionally exchanged letters and saw each other when he went home, but he may have taken her for granted.36 “I'll be terribly sweet when I go home…and make up for it all. Someday I'll get left, won't I?” he cavalierly added. He had also heard a false rumor that Gertrude and several other Tunnel City students would not graduate on time. The story might have lowered Gertrude a bit in the estimation of a young man who was betting everything on the power of education to improve his condition in the world. Gertrude's intelligence and excellent academic performance had been among the qualities that recommended her to Herbert. Now, perhaps, she was lowering her sights, looking ahead to a life as wife and mother with some local farm boy or merchant. Besides, Herbert had a long way to go before he was ready for marriage and capable of supporting a family. Gertrude, “old girl,” as he sometimes called her, might turn out to be Herbert's old girl. In the fullness of his young manhood he no doubt assumed that the choice would be his, but life would be full of surprises for Herbert.
Once
