John R. Bartlett is encountered by every student who deals, in one way or another, with the history of the American Southwest. His Personal Narrative (2 vols., New York, 1854) is an often consulted store of information resulting from his service as chief commissioner of the United States team charged with marking the international boundary following the Mexican-American war settlement of 1848.
Hine has done an outstanding job in describing problems attending the assignment. To begin with, the eommissionership was politically sensitive, and five commissioners were successively appointed before the survey was completed. (Bartlett was number four.)
Beyond this, there was interminable dissension within the surveying party. Disagreement over the marking of the initial point of the survey, the Bartlett-Condé line on the Rio Grande River, erupted into a political controversy and contributed to Bartlett’s ultimate dismissal. There was fighting, murder, suicide, and desertion all along the trail. Scurvy and dreadfully insufficient logistical support were only a few of the commissioner’s difficulties. Bartlett himself was thrown from a mule and broke his shoulder. Later he lay prostrate for several weeks with typhoid fever. And then, in late 1852 and early 1853, his government denied him its confidence. “So it was,” says Hine, “that in the midst of charges, countercharges, and confusion, Bartlett lost” (p. 83).
Hine makes it clear, however, that in another sense, Bartlett did not lose. He was a distinguished and capable artist, ethnologist, and writer, and in these capacities his abortive adventure of the early 1850s proved more successful. The preparation and printing of his field journal under the title Personal Narrative remains a primary reference on the historical and ecological features of the region.
Bartlett’s greatest service, however, was his many sketches of southwestern life and terrain. In a similar manner these constitute the chief service of Hine’s book. He has impressively reproduced and brought together many of the sepia, pencil, and water color drawings executed by Bartlett and other artists among the expedition. It fell to one of Bartlett’s antagonists, and former subordinates, William H. Emory, to conclude the boundary survey which Bartlett had hoped to complete himself, but it was Bartlett’s commercially published report which proved the most memorable outcome of the venture. Hine has capably described the social, political, and geographical milieu out of which Bartlett’s work emerged.
Both the author and the Yale University Press deserve commendation for this volume, particularly in assembling and reproducing its nearly fifty sketches and water colors. It is a valued addition to the studies of William H. Goetzmann, Howard Lamar, and others in illustrating America’s mid-nineteenth century thrust into the borderlands of the Southwest.