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Herbert Eugene Bolton. Albert L. Hurtado
Читать онлайн.Название Herbert Eugene Bolton
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520952515
Автор произведения Albert L. Hurtado
Издательство Ingram
As Bolton continued to develop his expertise in the Mexican material, his relationship with Garrison became fraught with jealousy and mistrust. In early 1905 both men were evidently involved in Garrison's new application for Carnegie money to support Bolton's work in the Mexican archives.67 Andrew McLaughlin, the Carnegie Institution's director of research, had apparently given Garrison strong assurances that the project would be funded, because the Quarterly carried an announcement about it. But McLaughlin's successor, J. Franklin Jameson, was mainly interested in underwriting the publication of guides to U.S. materials in foreign archives.68 In February Jameson informed Bolton (and probably Garrison) that the Carnegie Institution's executive committee had turned down the Mexican project.69 Jameson reasoned that without sound guides to foreign archives, historians could not make reliable decisions about what should be copied. Jameson's desire for a guide to the Mexican archives eventually would raise Bolton's professional stature and wound Garrison's pride.
Before leaving for Mexico in the summer of 1905, Bolton scattered a little professional seed corn. He wrote Turner about documents in the Archivo General that might be of interest to him. Heading the list was correspondence concerning the 1819 Transcontinental Treaty. There were also eighteenth-century documents about England and Texas. “Do you suppose that the American Historical Review would care to publish good material of this sort?” he asked.70 Turner immediately (and without telling Bolton) forwarded Bolton's letter to Jameson, who was editor of the Review. “Bolton is a good man—trained here and at University of Penna,” he explained. “The stuff sounds interesting and…copies ought to be gotten, I imagine.”71
Turner's note prompted Jameson to contact Bolton, who sent a detailed report to Jameson. He revealed that he had found new Spanish material on the Lewis and Clark expedition and mentioned the possibility of renewing Garrison's application for funds to pursue work in Mexico. “If there are any questions that you would like to ask me personally,” Bolton offered, “I shall do my best [to] answer them.” He had done a great deal of research at his own expense, he explained, but he needed more funds to work more extensively. “The field is rich here, and it ought to be harvested.”72
Garrison knew that Bolton and Jameson were in contact, but he may not have known the details of Bolton's correspondence or the sort of papers that Bolton had used to bait the hook for Jameson.73 The documents bearing on Lewis and Clark and the Transcontinental Treaty were in the class of material that Garrison expected to monopolize himself, documents reflecting the Anglo advance in the West. Bolton was now on Garrison's turf. Furthermore, Bolton invited a direct correspondence with Jameson that undercut Garrison's role as the nominal director of research in Mexico while simultaneously establishing Bolton's reputation with Jameson as the true expert in the field.
Professional courtesy dictated that Jameson ask Garrison about Bolton's fitness to compile a guide to the Mexican archives.74 Garrison's response was lukewarm. “I will only answer yes in a general way to the questions you ask me about him. You would, I believe, find his work reliable and satisfactory.” He added that he hoped to see Jameson personally at the AHA meeting and thought it best to put off further consideration of the work in Mexico until then. Garrison explained that he had intended to do the Mexican archival work himself, and he diplomatically suggested that he would go if Jameson could provide funding. In his honeyed but pointed conclusion Garrison remarked that he was pleased to learn of Jameson's interest in Mexico. “I shall take pleasure in doing anything I can to further your plans relative thereto, whether Mr. Bolton or I should have a personal share in them or not.”75
There was no mistaking Garrison's preference as to whom the Carnegie Institution should fund to work in Mexico. Garrison had welcomed and applauded Bolton's work in Mexico as long as it had been seen as part of his larger operation, but he well understood that if Bolton authored a guide to historical materials in Mexican archives, he would become the leading authority, not Garrison. And Bolton understood this too. The opportunity to work in the Mexican archives under Jameson's direction was “just the kind of work I have been preparing to do and am intending to do independently and unaided if I cannot have the advantages of cooperation and financial help,” Bolton explained. He had a bibliographical essay “relative to the Mexican archives about ready” for the Quarterly, “but I shall withhold it at present.”76 This was bait that Jameson was interested in. He rejected the publication of the Transcontinental Treaty documents, but placed Bolton's essay on the Mexican archives in the Review.77 This publication alone made Bolton the leading candidate for the Mexican guide project.
In early January 1906, presumably after seeing Garrison at the AHA meeting in Baltimore, Jameson invited Bolton to compile “a comprehensive guide to the materials for the history of the United States in the Mexican archives.”78 He offered to pay Bolton's salary and expenses for one year. Jameson advised Bolton to consult with Garrison to determine when he might begin the work. Garrison put a smiling face on these developments in a newspaper article announcing the project. He claimed that Bolton had taken up the work because Garrison's other duties prevented him from doing so.79 Bolton noted that Garrison figured “with characteristic prominence” in the article. “He claims everything in sight,” he added, “but this does not greatly trouble me.”80 Bolton was coming into his own, and he felt secure enough to risk alienating Garrison. With Jameson on his side (not to mention Turner, Haskins, and McMaster), he could afford to be bold.
Bolton's serenity was well founded. He had shrewdly played an inside game that enabled him to get around Garrison. He outmaneuvered his department head in Austin by winning the support of the new university president, David F. Houston, who had replaced Prather. Bolton asked Houston if he had made a mistake in studying southwestern history, because Professor Garrison was “(let me whisper it) very sensitive to competition.” Houston told Bolton to “create the field and the chair will be made in due time. This is what he [Houston] wants me to do.” Bolton did not intend to be Garrison's errand boy at Texas.81
But Garrison was not yet finished with Bolton and Jameson. The question of the timing of Bolton's leave of absence depended on arrangements for someone to take Bolton's duties at the University of Texas and the Quarterly. Barker was in Pennsylvania finishing his doctoral work with McMaster, and Bolton could not leave until Barker returned. Bolton proposed to do part of the work in the summer of 1906 and return to Texas for the academic year 1906—1907. He would complete the Mexican work in the succeeding academic year.82 Just when everything seemed set, Jameson reported that the Carnegie Institution executive board had deferred funding for the guide projects.83 He hoped that funding would be forthcoming, but in the summer of 1906 Bolton proceeded to Mexico without Carnegie assistance.
Bolton had found new work that subsidized his Mexican research trip. William A. Holmes of the Bureau of American Ethnology had asked Bolton to revise some articles and to write additional ones for a handbook on American Indians.84 More than one hundred articles in the published book came from Bolton's pen, and much of it was written from documents he found while he was in Mexico in 1906. He was paid $1,000 for the first half of this work, a considerable infusion of outside income.85
Bolton reported his new findings to Jameson, who finally secured the appropriation for the Mexican guide at $150 per month plus expenses. The two planned to meet in Washington to firm up plans before proceeding to the AHA meeting in late December.86 “Please express my thanks to Professor Garrison for his kindness in making the arrangement possible,” Jameson concluded, but he expressed his gratitude too soon.87 The very next day Garrison asked Jameson for financial assistance to examine in the Mexican archives “materials belonging to the period of the Anglo-American movement southwestward.” Bolton, he clarified, was working in