benefits of scouting precisely because they had lost touch with it.
During the four years Bullard spent at forts in the Southwest, he made his first observations and wrote his first notes on a project that lasted throughout his military career and into retirement. Bullard was obsessed with articulating a hierarchical schema of civilizations and races. Unlike Hugh Lenox Scott, who took an ethnographic approach to the living cultures of the native peoples who so fascinated him, Bullard’s intellectual project was characterized by a historical abstraction of civilizations past and present. The project was teleological of course. Anglo-Saxon civilization, epitomized by its political and industrial achievements, represented the pinnacle of human development. The question was how long it would take other races to attain the same level of advancement. Bullard’s study was an ideological project with immediate and real applications. Part of the colonial authority he increasingly assumed, as his career led to positions of command over men of races he viewed as inferior to his own, derived precisely from the claim he made to possess privileged knowledge about the character of primitive people. Like other army officers whose careers encompassed the trajectory of American expansion, his early impressions of Indian Country inculcated categories of perception and behavior, and especially ways of relating to subject peoples that informed his approaches to the colonial situations he later encountered in the Philippines and Cuba. For these men, the core of their later relationships to projections of Indian Country abroad was based on their formative experience of Indian Country on the plains and in the desert Southwest. For Bullard, dressing in “Indian togs” and going hunting was a way of assimilating the meaning of Indian Country. So was reading the landscape and romanticizing its past.
Bullard was less steeped than Scott in the poetry of Indian Country, less inclined to embrace “the land of romance, adventure, and mystery” that Scott anticipated as he rode the Great Northern Railroad to the end of the line in Bismarck in 1876.24 Whereas Scott depended on Francis Parkman to orient him to the landscape and people of the North, the book that Bullard had chosen to bring with him when he reported for duty to Fort Union was Don Quixote. Their choice of books says a great deal about the inclinations and temperament of each of these West Point graduates as they embarked on their frontier army careers. Each had his own dreams and romantic notions. Significantly, though, Scott, like Parkman, focused his imagination on the land before him and on relations among the peoples vying for control over it. He was especially fascinated by all the ways Indians had adapted themselves to survive on the northern plains. His descriptions of native peoples extol their oneness with the natural landscape. On the southern border, with only Miguel de Cervantes as guide, Bullard encountered a landscape that seemed to him alienating and uncivilized. “Mighty nature ruled here,” he wrote. “For the hand of man had barely touched her face.”25 Where Scott registered the sublime, Bullard read into the landscape grandeur, but also menace. He found the Sierra Madre wild and dark. He wrote that “the mountains were sometimes frightful in their grandeur, their black repulsiveness and loneliness.”26 Bullard’s descriptions of human settlement in the region emphasize its timelessness and remoteness from the world of movement and consequence, the modern world, the world of men who mattered.
Bullard showed none of the interest in contemporary Indian cultures that so absorbed Scott. His imagination was instead captured by “the occupation of the region in ages gone by a civilized people.”27 Bullard’s racially determined ideas about the advancement of civilizations throughout history allowed him to admire the pottery and earthen mounds of vanished civilizations while disparaging the culture and character of the contemporary inhabitants of the region.
Considering how much Bullard later referred to his experience of commanding Indians, it is striking how little attention he paid to the real Indians he encountered in the borderlands, either inhabitants, auxiliaries, or adversaries. Although they later formed a significant point of reference both for his reflections on military pacification and the development of his schema of civilization and barbarity, at the time Bullard seems to have written and reflected little on the Indian scouts, even those attached to his unit. Since he assumed that the contemporary Indians descended from the earlier civilizations whose achievements he found praiseworthy, Bullard viewed the contemporary Indians of the Southwest as the degenerate “half-civilized” descendants of the civilizations that had created the earth mounds and pottery that spoke to him of higher achievements in the past.
Aside from his imaginative affinity for the exploits of empire, Bullard also pinned his career hopes on mastering the languages of empire, even defunct empire; and, like his study of men and civilizations, Bullard’s choice of language was expedient, too. Aided by his copy of Don Quixote and a Spanish dictionary, Bullard began a study of Spanish which he kept up as long as American imperial engagement with areas of the old Spanish empire made it seem worthwhile. He continued this study throughout his time in the Southwest and during training in Alabama in anticipation of going to Cuba in 1898. The beginning of Bullard’s study of the Spanish empire and Hispanic civilization in the Americas and the Philippines also dates from his time on the border. In the margin of the diary in which he noted his interest in the “curiosities of Old New Mexico, the Pueblo Indians, their history and traditions,” Bullard mused that, as he was being introduced to one chapter of the history of the expansion of the Spanish empire, he was at the same time contemplating going on to Manila “to renew the impressions on the other side of the world of the Spaniard and his ways—Santa Fe on the great Plains of the west, America, and Manila, over the great seas in the far, far East.”28
Bullard reported to Fort Union in the fall of 1885. His first assignment was to guard a border supply base for pack trains that carried supplies for the use of scouts in the Sierra Madre. The following July, Bullard became quartermaster and commissary for a mule train as it moved supplies a hundred miles south across the border into the Mexican state of Sonora. He recorded some of his first impressions in a diary he kept on the journey: “We passed through beautiful park-like mountain villages; dry parched lowlands, brown, crumbling adobe Mexican villages with their great old Catholic churches far, far out of the great busy and inhabited world; through old towns and fields whose people had long long ago been killed or driven off by the fierce apaches. It was most interesting, new and strange to me.”29
The arid mountainous country through which Bullard’s company drove its mules had a long history as Indian Country, a place where successive colonial governments had been unable to exert effective control over native peoples. It was also the context in which Bullard had his first opportunity to observe the role of the Apache scouts who were attached to the army. He was not impressed: “From time to time detachments of troops came into our camp in passing or to obtain supplies and I gradually learned how troops worked in Indian warfare. We used Indian scouts after the hostiles but from what I saw of them I concluded that the scouts were almost as hostile and uncertain as the hostiles themselves. I saw a whole company of them get drunk and almost break away to go on the war path right under the eye of their commanders and at the muzzles of the rifles of our two companies of U.S. troops. That was a great object lesson in control and discipline or rather in the lack of these.”30
Bullard was contemptuous of contemporary Indians. The cursory observations he later committed to his diary rehearse common prejudices of the time; he found the Apaches lazy, prone to drunkenness, deceitful, brutal. In short, he constructed racial difference between Indians and whites along the lines of familiar stereotypes widely available in popular culture. At the same time, he had a wistful reverence for what he regarded as the more accomplished civilizations of the remote past. Ever susceptible to a romantic reading of the landscape, Bullard imagined the crater in which he encountered the Mexican Rurales as a remnant of one of the ancient volcanoes that had “vomited their fires upon these lands before Aztec, Toltec or white men ever came.”31 This was pure fancy on Bullard’s part; neither the Aztecs nor any of the other settled agriculturalists who had made the valley of Mexico the center of expansive civilization for a millennium before the coming of the Europeans, had exercised any influence over the north. The land did not favor the intensive cultivation which nourished the concentration of population in the valley of Mexico. More importantly, the inhabitants
