Bolton was the master of the Spanish Borderlands. To those who sat at the great round table of his seminar in the University of California Library this simple statement needs no elaboration. Every meeting of the seminar revealed again the breadth and depth of knowledge, the intensity and extensiveness of labor that contributed to his scholarship and his mastery. With due respect to his learned and noteworthy colleagues, it was Bolton who did most to develop the outstanding reputation of the University of California history department during his generation.
One of the most prominent of the many “Knights of the Round Table,” Father John Francis Bannon, has brought together a selection of Bolton essays on the area of his maximum interest—the Borderlands. Bolton took a special interest in that area where the Hispanic colonizing impetus met the English line of advance. Indeed, Father Bannon’s introduction suggests that though Bolton is frequently considered to be a “split personality,” the Bolton of the Borderlands and the Bolton of the “Greater America” thesis, he himself was much more interested in the former image, considering the latter as a straw man to be buffeted about.
Some of Bolton’s well known and most available pieces are presented in this well-printed volume: “The Mission as a Frontier Institution”; “Defensive Spanish Expansion and the Significance of the Borderlands”; “The Black Robes of New Spain”; and the “Epic of Greater America” (a final chapter illustrative of the “Greater America” aspect of Bolton’s contributions to historiography). Other selections are gathered from the preface material of Bolton’s studies of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, Athanase de Mézières, Eusebio Francisco Kino, Juan Crespi, and Juan Bautista de Anza. Some were originally papers read before historical meetings or published in quarterly reviews and journals. One was an early memorandum to President Benjamin Ide Wheeler of the University of California. Selected by Bannon as the lead chapter, it clarified the “Need for the Publication of a Comprehensive Body of Documents Relating to the History of Spanish Activities within the Present Limits of the United States” and is useful reading for researchers and publishers who would like to advance the Borderlands cause. The memorandum outlined a lifetime project which Bolton largely fulfilled. This paper and a seminar outline used in Mexico City in 1946 and published as Chapter Three, “The Northward Movement in New Spain,” make obvious Bolton’s range of historical vision and his ability to identify good research topics. Although little by little some of the Bolton dreams are becoming realities, the Borderlands need further monographs in preparation for an eventual synthesis. A new Bolton with the advantages of modern research techniques must lead a new group of young scholars along the trails of the Hispanic Southwest until they are capable of branching out alone.
In an appendix Father Bannon has compiled Bolton’s prolific publication record: over thirty books, more than seventy articles, and scores of short sketches. Four maps included in the volume are certainly below the Bolton standard, for he might have used more in an hour lecture.
