Background
Herbert Eugene Bolton was born on July 20, 1870, in Wilton, Wisconsin to Edwin Latham and Rosaline (Cady) Bolton.
Bolton attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a brother of Theta Delta Chi.
Starting in 1897, Bolton was a Harrison Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and studied American history under John Bach McMaster. In 1899, he received his Ph.D. there.
Herbert Eugene Bolton was born on July 20, 1870, in Wilton, Wisconsin to Edwin Latham and Rosaline (Cady) Bolton.
Bolton attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a brother of Theta Delta Chi, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1895. In 1899, he received his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania.
When Herbert Bolton received his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 1899 it was clear that history was his central passion. His dissertation, on The Free Negro in the South before the Civil War, presaged his fascination with the American South. But, as was common in the less hyper-specialized academe of the early twentieth century, his scholarly background was broad enough to permit him to conduct classes in whatever was needed at his earliest teaching posts.
After two years as a member of the junior faculty in Milwaukee, he moved on to a post at the University of Texas, where he was initially hired to teach medieval history. But it would not be long before he returned his scholarly attention to the times and places that fascinated him the most.
In 1901, while teaching at the University of Texas, he served as editor of the state’s historical quarterly publication. He became intrigued by the lack of published historical information on the territories of northern New Spain and Florida.
Bolton’s work soon drew a following, and it was not long before he found himself lecturing to halls filled with fascinated students. Bolton’s earliest publications on his newly defined historical specialty were translations from Spanish source texts, released from 1903 through 1909, and in 1904, he co-authored with Eugene C. Barker a textbook for high schoolers entitled With the Makers of Texas: A Source Reader in Texas History. His archival research in Mexico turned up original documents from American explorer Zebulon Pike. In addition, he collected information about the Indian tribes of the region, which he published in the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (1907-1910).
At about this time, Bolton began publishing materials on a second area of specialized interest: the history of the Jesuit missionary efforts in Mexico, Arizona, and California. This new focus was once again the result of happy circumstance; in 1907 Bolton discovered the forgotten memoirs of Father Eusebio Kino and spent the next twelve years translating them. The result of his labors, Historical Memoir ofPimeria Alta, was published in 1919.
Bolton’s interest in the Jesuits continued throughout the remainder of his career. He published a biography of Kino, The Padre on Horseback, in 1932 and Rim of Christendom in 1936, which a reviewer from the Times Literary Supplement called “ a work of scholarship which is also a most readable account of a great man.” Bolton worked with the archival documents left by Pedro Fages, Fray Francisco Palou, Fray Juan Crespi, and Juan Bautista de Anza, all of whom participated in the Jesuit occupation of Upper California. Once again, he had discovered a previously neglected area of the history of the American West, and once again his scholarly influence brought this area into the mainstream of historical research.
In 1909, Bolton moved on to take a position on the faculty at Stanford University, a post that would allow him to devote some time to completing his many outstanding projects. During his two-year stay, he also took on a commitment for Charles Scribner’s Sons to produce a volume entitled Spanish Explorations in the Southwest, 1542-1706 (1916) for their “Original Narratives of Early American History” series.
In 1911, Bolton left Stanford for the University of California at Berkeley, drawn to its massive collection of Spanish documents. Here he threw himself into his work more diligently than ever, intensifying his research and his participation in the conferences of the American Historical Association. In 1915, he published Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century: Studies in Colonial History and Administration, which was acclaimed not only for its scholarly value but for its clear and vivid presentation of the physical geography in which this era of the history of the borderlands was played out.
In 1918, Bolton launched the Hispanic American Historical Review, still the most influential scholarly journal in the field of Hispanic American historical studies.
Mandatorily retired by Berkeley at the age of seventy, in 1940, he maintained his busy schedule of lectures and writing projects. When World War II broke out, Bolton was called back to his university post to train a few more students, retiring finally in 1944, when the war came to an end. But he still had important contributions to make to the scholarship of the Borderlands, including Coronado on the Turquoise Trail, Knight of Pueblos and Plains (1949) and Pageant in the Wilderness: the Story of the Escalante Expedition to the Interior Basin (1950). It was only in 1952, when he suffered a stroke, that he finally was forced to withdraw from active participation in researching the history that was his life’s work.
Bolton considered it to be of paramount importance to get as many primary source documents translated as he possibly could, and to make this material available to other scholars for study. He secured the interest of the publisher Arthur H. Clark Company in a proposed multivolume set of translated archival materials. Unfortunately, the job was far more exhaustive and exhausting than he anticipated, and he completed only three volumes for the series.
Quotations: "Confession without repentance is just bragging."
In 1932, Bolton was a president of the American Historical Association.
Bolton inspired in an entire generation of graduate students a deep appreciation for recreation of a first-person perspective on the pioneer spirit through the careful recovery of primary source materials. His then - unconventional approach - combining careful translation of archival texts with a personal visit to the areas discussed by those texts - conferred on his writings an immediacy and authenticity rarely encountered in the dry, deterministic theories put forth by his colleagues in the historical profession. By the time of his death, Bolton’s students, in whom he had instilled a passion for history as great as his own, had come to dominate the field that Bolton himself had created.
Quotes from others about the person
“Bolton spent the half-century engrossed in work: supervising copyists during the summers in Mexican archives, writing or translating until midnight nearly every night. For Bolton only heroic effort was good enough.” - Bushnell
“The twentieth century faded about Bolton, and in his mind he lived among his beloved Spaniards until his death months later.” - Bushnell
"His writings, particularly The Spanish Borderlands, still challenge traditional views of colonial and frontier history. They raise significant questions, such as the role of frontier on Spanish institutions and Spanish-Indian versus Anglo-Indian relations. The search for common historical elements between North and South America remains an open subject, and the call for greater hemispheric history has yet to be answered. Bolton taught enthusiastically until 1953 when he died at the age of 82, and left hundreds of graduate students, who have expanded Borderlands history and seek to make it relevant to 20th-century history." - Kathleen Egan Chamberlain
In 1895, Bolton married Gertrude James, with whom he eventually had seven children.