is the more remarkable in the case of Lewis & Clark 1804–6 whose was directed by President Jefferson to investigate every thing they found that was new and interesting.”62 Besides the history of sign language, its spread throughout the central plains region, and its military and diplomatic utility, Scott was also interested in it as a linguistic phenomenon. He faulted others who had written on the subject with failing to recognize it as a natural language “subject to all the general laws of linguistic science, save those of sound … [having] its own place in the hierarchy of all human speech, akin to all through our common humanity.”63
Even though Scott had an appreciation for the adaptability and expressiveness of sign language, he nonetheless theorized it as representing a simple root stage of language, analogous to the primitive germ out of which more advanced languages, such as Indo-European speech “with all its fullness and inflective suppleness,” had descended over generations. In this he seems to have been influenced by the views of the evolution of complex language put forward in the work of Yale University philologist William Whitney.64
Scott’s research for his book on sign language was cut short by the start of the Spanish-American War. By his own account, he then became “engaged for years in matters more important to [his] career than writing any book.”65 There is evidence that he continued to think about the project, however, even when he was in the Philippines. In a letter to his wife written when he was governor of Sulu in 1905, Scott asked Mary to send him some books on linguistics. Specifically, he asked her to buy a book on “deaf & mute language showing its structure etc—not of the artificial alphabetic language but the natural language of the deaf.” He wrote that Dr. Gallaudet of Washington could help identify the kind of thing he was interested in. He also asked her to send him several other books that he had used to prepare a talk General Nelson Miles had asked him to give on sign language at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. These included works on linguistics by Max Müller, F. W. Farrar, and A. H. Sayce. “I seem to want to know something about the real essence of spoken language,” Scott explained to his wife, “but the thing has become dim & I am in the mood for it now if I had the books—as it all bears on sign language more or less.”66 Several letters requesting materials from libraries in Texas suggest he had renewed efforts on his research again during the time he was stationed in San Antonio in 1911 and 1912 with the Third Cavalry.67
Scott’s interest in sign language had its origin in his passion for scouting and his ambition to make himself useful to commanding officers and to the frontier army, which he did. As that same army faced the challenges of an expanding overseas empire, Scott would continue to be called on to put his scouting skills to work—on the new frontiers of that empire in Cuba and the Philippines, and eventually back on the border with Mexico.
Chapter 3
The Right Kind of White Men
“It was your handkerchief that saved you,” the leader of the Mexican Rural Guards told him. Second Lieutenant Robert Lee Bullard stood frozen with fear inside the rim of a mountain crater in Sonora as three Rurales kept their rifles trained on him. While the Yaqui Indians attached to the Fourth Cavalry’s expedition south of the border were away from camp searching for signs of Geronimo and his band of Chiricahua Apaches, Lieutenant Bullard had taken the opportunity to go hunting. He was dressed “in Indian style—hatless, coatless, pantless; in shirt, drawers and moccasins only.”1 Absorbed in the pursuit of a pronghorn antelope among the rocks and crevices of the Sierra Madre mountains, Bullard had been unaware that he was in turn being tracked by the Mexicans, who mistook him for an Apache. When he finally noticed them, Bullard’s first thought was similarly that the crouching figures who had him in their sights were Apaches.
In August of 1886 all the Mexican borderlands were attuned to the movements of the Apache leader and the followers who had joined him in fleeing intolerable conditions at the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona, where the army sought to confine the Chiracahaus. In arduous campaigning, sometimes involving up to a quarter of its forces, the army had spent the previous four years in fruitless pursuit of three dozen hostiles, only seventeen of whom were fighting men.2 Penetration by American troops into Mexican territory also created tensions between the two countries. The urgency of Geronimo’s capture or death was one of the few things on which Mexicans and Americans agreed.
In words calculated to belittle the American soldier, the leader of the Rural Guard made it clear that Bullard owed his life to his own ineptitude—and to the Mexicans’ superior scouting skills and knowledge of the terrain. “Two hours or more we have followed you and three times have we rested our guns as just now to kill you for an Apache,” he told the chagrined Bullard. “But you were so careless, unsuspecting, so easy to get,” the Mexican concluded scornfully, “that each time luckily we waited to have you better, though each time we could have killed you.”3
In that tense moment in the mountain crater, as “the desert … and the solitude of nature filled the spot,” Bullard wrote later, the rookie army officer had expected death. “My life stopped; I stood nailed to the spot. I did not move or cry or think but waited in dumbness and numbness for the end.”
Aside from the personal drama of his situation, Bullard’s tableau captures the uneasy alliance between U.S. and Mexican forces in Sonora and Chihuahua less than forty years after the United States had forcibly wrested the northern frontier territories from Mexico, thereby acquiring the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, most of Colorado, and parts of Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma.4 The scene also illustrates the prominence of indigenous techniques of warfare, including knowledge of the country, tracking, and ambush. All parties to the Apache conflict relied on such methods, but Mexico was suspicious of the U.S. Army’s employment of Apache and other native scouts in Mexican territory. Dependence on Apache scouts was also a source of deep racial anxieties within the leadership of the U.S. military as it struggled to reconcile axiomatic Anglo-Saxon superiority with the manifest failure of well-equipped white troops to subdue, contain, or even keep up with an opponent described by one contemporary historian as “the most savage and intractable Indians in the country.”5
Finally, our attention, like that of the Mexican Rural Guards, is drawn to the incongruity between Bullard’s handkerchief, that vestige of civilized attire, and the rest of his self-described “Indian togs.” As the Yaqui scouts of Troop H ranged over the desert below, matching their skills as trackers against the U.S. Army’s most elusive quarry, the young lieutenant assigned to the expedition as quartermaster and commissary had been caught playing Indian.6 Bullard’s inept efforts to embody cultural knowledge by dressing up and chasing antelope after a romantic ideal of Indian hunting had attracted the attention of other actors in the contested landscape of the Sierra Madre. However, as the Mexicans pointed out to him in insulting terms, there was something in Bullard’s obvious inability to embody Indianness convincingly that stayed their hands from killing him, until they could get close enough for the telltale handkerchief to confirm their sense that they had the wrong target.7
By his own account, Robert Lee Bullard made a bad Indian. What is more, he was proud of how poorly he played the role. Bullard was not interested in truly transforming himself, either physically or culturally. He was not one to “go native,” to take on the identity, even provisionally, of an Apache or any one of the other so-called primitive peoples he encountered during the successive wars of colonial pacification in which he took part. He was, however, deeply interested in the tactical knowledge he believed could be acquired through inhabiting such roles. In this, his outlook and actions were in keeping with a long line of frontier soldiers.
Like other military men and civilian elites of his generation who found virtue in “the strenuous life”
