Extent:

Cartons 1-52; Carton 53, folders 16-18; Cartons 98-99; Box 145; Oversize boxes 1-80; File box 5

Scope and content:

This series consists of Bolton's research materials that he collected from various sources over the course of his career. The primary forms of the documents are photocopies, transcripts, and translations; there are few, if any, original documents. Bolton's arrangement of this series was maintained as closely as possible. Vivian Fisher, a member of the Bancroft Library staff who processed this series in 1961, retained the basic grouping of documents, which are divided geographically and then chronologically. Each of the thirteen groups is a subseries. Fisher also assigned item numbers from 1 to 820 to the documents. As she noted, each item number may represent a group of documents or a single piece. Documents specific to one topic were often gathered from many sources, which are noted wherever possible. The subseries frequently cover a period of more than a century, and the items are arranged by the date of original document (rather than the date Bolton worked with it, which is usually not known).

Researchers should note that the geographical divisions made by the subseries are not completely finite. Many documents detail various expeditions of exploration that began in one geographical area and ended in another. These documents were filed under the division that represents the majority of the material. In the case of letters or reports from one person, these may be found in more than one area of the collection.

In the following introduction to the collection, written by Bolton in 1951, the reader will find many details about the historical research and writing sides of Bolton's career. However, some of the archives that he mentions are not represented in the collection.

Arrangement:

Chronological

Other descriptive data:

This brief Introduction is designed to tell in general terms the story of gathering the historical materials in the Bolton Collection, and to indicate the more than sixty archives and repositories in various parts of Europe and the Western Hemisphere from which the documents have been obtained. Most of the repositories are outside of the United States, and the task of collecting the materials has involved extensive travel and research, covering many summers and a sabbatical leave of fifteen months. Added together, these periods would total three or more years devoted specifically to this activity, not to mention the many documents I have acquired by correspondence on the basis of my previous archival work.

In the accompanying list, with minor exceptions, the citation is given for the source of each document or group of documents. By actual count, the Collection contains more than 146,000 pages of archival materials. The story of assembling them is a chapter in the record of my activities over a long period of time, and is also a chapter in the historiography of the Southwest and the Pacific Slope of North America, and in the development of the concept of a synthetic history of the Western Hemisphere. My research and the assembling of the documents have been two phases of the same activity, which I have found necessary in order to supplement the rich collections at the University of Texas and in the Bancroft Library at the University of California.

To differentiate my gathering of unpublished materials from Bancroft, it might be said that he assembled his magnificent collection chiefly from within California and on the market, and not to a major extent from archives outside the Pacific Coast. This is not to minimize his tremendous achievement, but to indicate that he did not acquire much material from the great archives of the Western Hemisphere and Europe, of which our history is a part. My gathering, which has greatly supplemented that of Bancroft, has been done largely in the archives of Mexico and Europe, where a vast quantity of the early records of events on the Pacific Coast and the Southwest accumulated in the process of frontier expansion and administration.

A few personal comments may be pertinent here for the light they shed upon the Collection. I began my work in Western and Spanish-American history when I went to the University of Texas in the fall of 1901, having previously studied with the noted scholars Turner, Haskins, McMaster, Cheyney, and Munro in the universities of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, my major work as a student being in the United States history with Turner in Wisconsin and McMaster in Pennsylvania, no one of whom had any special knowledge of or interest in the field which I have subsequently cultivated.

When I went to Texas, Garrison and Barker were doing splendid work in the history of that area, beginning with the Anglo American occupation, on which their interests were definitely centered. The Spanish background of the Southwest and the Pacific Coast was new to me except in the most general sense, and I did not know a dozen words of the Spanish language. All my professors and all my text-books had dismissed the history of Spanish America in a few paragraphs, dogmatically asserting that "Spain failed," but in what the failure consisted they never specified. This dictum seemed to them as axiomatic as two plus two equals four, and was neither questioned nor explained. A vast continent, two-thirds of which was colonized by Spain and Portugal, and still is inhabited and ruled by Spaniards and Portuguese, who have developed great American nations, had little meaning for ultranationalistic historians, and consequently it did not enlist their curiosity. The explanation of this myopic view is that they limited American history to the United States, which in area is less than one-fourth of America. The other three-fourths of the Continent, including Canada and Latin America, did not count in their synthesis.

At the University of Texas, while I taught Medieval History, I became interested in the Spanish background of our Southwest, through what I saw around me and through participating with Garrison and Barker in the editing of the Texas State Historical Quarterly, a task for which I had some technical preparation, since I had made my way through high school as printer's devil on the Tomah Journal, a weekly newspaper published in my home town in Wisconsin. Perhaps I got some of my toughness from the editor, Lynn B. Squier, a cultured graduate of the University of Wisconsin, who, according to last reports was alive and busy at the age of ninety-nine. Possibly, with a sense of responsibility or of curiosity, he is waiting to see how I am going to turn out.

In Austin I studied the Spanish language with dynamic Professor Casís, and meanwhile translated many pages of Spanish documents for Blair and Robertson's fifty volumes on the history of the Philippine Islands, a work that was published as a result of the acquisition of those islands by the United States after "Dewey's Victory." The man who had the vision to conceive the project was Edward E. Ayer, once a resident of San Francisco and later a business man of Chicago, who made a fortune by selling railroad ties, and who also became a famous collector of rare books and manuscripts, which are now at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and of works of art, which are now in the Field Museum.

At the University of Texas there was a large mass of official Spanish documents relating to the colonial period of Texas, and called the Béxar Archives, because the records had accumulated at San Antonio de Béxar, capital and metropolis of the Spanish province of Texas. Across the eastern boundary, at Natchitoches in Louisiana, another important archive had accumulated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These records, mostly written in French, supplemented the Béxar Archive because of the intimate relations, friendly or hostile, between Louisiana and Texas. On both of these archives I drew freely, and on the basis of them and of materials that I gathered in Mexico, I published numerous articles and monography, including Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, and a two volume work on De Mézières, the distinguished Louisiana soldier, Indian agent, and explorer. In each case I made copies of many important documents, and they are included in my Collection. I just now learn that on the basis of my publication a novel has been written about De Mézières, from which one may infer he was a colorful personality.

Meanwhile I spent several summers in Mexico gathering materials from the central and frontier archives, and later on I worked fifteen consecutive months in Mexico preparing for the Carnegie Institution of Washington a Guide to Materials for the History of the United States in the Archives of Mexico (Washington, 1913, 553 pages), at the same time adding to my Collection. By the officials of the Archivo General the Guide is called "La Biblia," the Bible, and it is in daily use by them. The range of my gathering in Mexico is indicated in a general way by the Table of Contents of the Guide, as follows:

The Archivo General y Público de la Nación [now Archivo General de la Nación]:

Correspondencia de los Virreyes; Reales Cédulas y Ordenes; Historia; Operaciones de Guerra [now Historia - Operaciones de Guerra, Notas Diplómaticas]; Misiones; Provincias Internas; Californias; Justicia; Marina; and other sections.

The Museo National:

Papeles de Lancaster Jones; Papeles del Padre Fischer; Manuscritos de Ramírez; Documentos para la Historia de la Inquisición; Manuscritos de los Conventos; miscellaneous manuscripts. I gathered many important items for Pacific Coast and Southwestern History that are not indicated by this classification.

Other Collections in the City of Mexico:

Biblioteca Nacional, Ayuntamiento, Catedral Convento de Santo Domingo, Congregación de San Felipe Neri, Colegio de San Fernando de México.

The State Departments:

Biblioteca Nacional, Ayuntamiento, Catedral Convento de Santo Domingo, Congregación de San Felipe Neri, Colegio de San Fernando de México.

Archives of Mexico Outside the Capital:

Guadalajara: Ayuntamiento, Archivo de Instrumentos Públicos, Archivo General de Gobierno, Biblioteca Pública, Secretaria de Gobierno del Arzobispado, Cabildo Eclesiásticodel Arzobispado. Querétaro: Archivo del Colegio de Santa Cruz de Querétaro. Zacatecas: Colegio de Guadalupe de Zacatecas, Ayuntamiento, Secretaria de Gobierno del Estado, Biblioteca Pública.

In the states of San Luis Potosí, Durango, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Sonora, Tamaulipas, and Chihuahua there are important materials for the history of the United States and border areas, from which I have drawn for the Collection. At Parral, in the state of Chihuahua, a vast assemblage of official manuscripts for both secular and religious affairs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have accumulated, and from it I had made many hundreds of photostatic copies. From the city of Chihuahua I also gathered important documents.

In the section called Californias (Upper and Lower) there were eighty-one volumes of rare manuscript materials from which I gathered extensively. These documents consist largely of correspondence of the viceroys of Mexico with the local officials of California. While the bulk of the material of this section falls before 1822, there is extensive correspondence after that date. There is a wealth of original and little used correspondence of José de Gálvez, Portolá, Costansó, Rivera y Moncada, Fages, Armona, Verger, Crespi, Palóu, Serra, the Anza Expeditions, the founding of San Francisco, Monterey, and San Diego, Garcés on the Gila and Colorado Rivers, Yankee traders on the California Coast in the early nineteenth century, many interesting and important maps. Volume thirty-nine is rich in the history of New Mexico in the middle eighteenth century.

I spent several months in the archives of Europe, where I added extensively to my Collection. From the great Archivo General de Indias at Seville I gathered many documents, and likewise from the archives of the various government departments in Madrid. In Bavaria, at Hitler's town of Munich, a minor political uprising occurred while I was there, but I worked undisturbed and gathered important materials. At Valkenburg, Holland, the central Jesuit archives were preserved in a famous old monastery (The Jesuit Seminary), and from them I obtained a large and rare collection of materials for western North America, especially for the areas now included in Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Arizona, and California. Subsequently the Valkenburg Archives have been moved to Rome. At the British Museum I found many items of interest to me, one among them being the original of the gorgeous map made in colors by Captain Miera y Pacheco, showing the region traversed by the Escalante Expedition from Santa Fe to Utah Lake and return. Their objective was newly founded Monterey, but they failed to reach it. The map is reproduced in my recent book on Escalante called Pageant in the Wilderness.

From continental Spain I went to Mallorca, where Serra spent his scholastic and professorial days, and where there is much material regarding his early career. While there I heard of some Serra documents in a monastery at Barcelona which I had missed when I passed through that city. So I returned to Barcelona, went to the monastery indicated, and was rewarded by finding there the original letter written by Serra saying goodby to Spain, and with it the original of his first letter from Mexico written at Vera Cruz to a friend in Spain. Copies of these precious documents and thousands of others are in the Bolton Collection. An important part of the Collection consists of diaries and correspondence written by the founders of California and similar materials regarding the exploration, defense, and colonization of the frontier all the way from California to Texas and Louisiana.

My file of notes on the Indians of early Texas contains some six thousand cards giving archive data on a hundred or more tribes and sub-tribes, and if printed the notes would fill two or more good sized volumes. This information has been very little used by ethnologists, with the exception of the brief paragraphs that I published in Hodge's Handbook of American Indians.

Herbert E. Bolton
Berkeley, California
1951

The following is the list of sources from which the documents in this collection have been obtained. The full name of the archive appears underneath the abbreviated form used in the report.

Canada

Montreal

Archive of Montreal, Quebec

Czechoslovakia

Prague

Archive of Prague

England

Br Mus, Add Ms.

British Museum, Additional Manuscripts, London

Maggs

Henry Maggs, dealer, London (now in Bancroft Library and Huntington Library. M-M1716

PRO AO

Public Record Office, Admiralty Office, London

PRO FO

Public Record Office, Foreign Office, London

France

MG Paris

Ministère de la Guerre, Paris

Germany

Haupts

Bavarian Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich

Reich

Bavarian Allgemeines Reichsarchiv, Munich

Italy

BN Rome

Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III, Rome

FA Rome

Archivium Generale OFM, Collegio Sancti Antonii de Padua, Rome

Mexico

AGN

Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City

AHH

Archivo Histórico de Hacienda

Cal

Californias

Hist

Historia

Hist-CG, ND

Historia - Operaciones de Guerra, Notas Diplomáticas

Inq

Inquisición

Just

Justicia

Mis

Misiones

PI

Provincias Internas

RC

Reales Cédulas y Ordenes

Tier

Tierra

Vir

Correspondencia de los Virreyes, Series I

Vir, II

Correspondencia de lose Virreyes, Series II

AHMDN

Archivo Histórico Militar de Defensa Nacional, Mexico City

BN Mex

Biblioteca Nacional, Mexico City

Conway

Collection of G.R.G. Conway, Mexico City

Fomento

Ministerio de Fomento, Colonización e Industria, Mexico City

Gober

Ministerio de Gobernación, Mexico City

Guad BP

Biblioteca Pública, Guadalajara, Jalisco

Intern

Archivo de Relaciones Internas, Mexico City

Juárez

Juárez Archives, C. Juárez, Chihuahua

Linar

The Arzobispado de Linares, Monterrey, Nuevo León

Mich

Archivo Provincia de Michoacán, Morelia, Michoacán

MN Mex

Museo Nacional, Mexico City

MN Mex - Mis

Museo Nacional, Mexico City - Papeles de Lancaster-Jones - Documentos relativos a las misiones de Californias

NL Gob

Archivo de la Secretaría de Gobierno del Estado, Monterrey, Nuevo León

Parral

Archivo del Hidalgo del Parral, Parral, Chihuahua

Quer Ar

Archivo del Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro, Querétaro

Rel Ext

Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Mexico City

Salt

Archivo de la Secretaría del Gobierno del Estado, Saltillo, Coahuila

Sonora

Archivo del Bobierno del Estado, Hermosillo, Sonora

Sta Barb, Chih

Archivo de Santa Bárbara, Santa Bárbara, Chihuahua

Zaca

Colegio de Guadalupe de Zacatecas, Zacatecas

The Netherlands

Valken

Valkenburg Archives, Valkenburg [this archive is now in Rome - Archivam Romanum Societatis Jesa (ARSJ)]

Spain

AGI

Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla

Cont

Contaduría

Guad

Audiencia de Guadalajara

IG

Indiferente General

INE

Indiferente de Nueva España

Mex

Audiencia de México

PC

Papeles de Cuba

PE

Papeles de Estado

PR

Patronato Real

SD

Audiencia de Santo Domingo

AHN Mad

Archivo Histórico-Nacional, Madrid

AHN Mad - PJ

Archivo Histórico-Nacional, Madrid - Papeles de Jesuitas

BN Mad

Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid

Mallorca

Archivo de Mallorca, Mallorca

MN Mad

Museo Naval, Madrid

RA Mad

Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid

RA Mad - PJ

Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid - Papeles de Jesuitas

United States

Austin

Papers of Stephen F. Austin, Austin, Texas

Bexar

Béxar Archives, University of Texas, Austin, Texas

BL

Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California

BPL

Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts

Cal St Lib

California State Library, Sacramento, California

GLO

General Land Office of Texas, Austin, Texas

Harv Lib

Harvard College Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts

HEH

Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California

JC Brown

John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island

Lamar

Lamar Papers, University of Texas, Austin, Texas

LAPL

Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles, California

LC

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

LC - Lowery

Lowery Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Monterey, Calif.

Archives of Monterey, California

Nacog

Nacogdoches Archives, Nacogdoches, Texas

Newb Lib

Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois

NYHS

New York-Historical Society, New York City

NYPL

New York Public Library, New York City

Quer Ar-Watson

St. Francis Orphanage, Watsonville, California

SF Surv

Surveyor General's Office, San Francisco (now in the U.S. National Archives, Washington, D.C.?)

Sta Barb, Calif.

Archives of Santa Barbara, California

Sta Clara, Calif.

Archives of the University of Santa Clara, Santa Clara, California

Steph

H.B. Stephens Collection, University of Texas, Austin, Texas

Sutro

Adolph Sutro Library, California State Library, San Franicsco (now in University of San Francisco)

Texas A&M

Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College, Bryan, Texas

TSHS

Texas State Historical Society, Austin, Texas

Tulane

Institute of Middle American Research, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

USNA

United States National Archives, Washington, D.C.

US Sen

United States Senate Records, Washington, D.C. (now in the U.S. National Archives, Washington, D.C.?)

Van Houten

Van Houten Collection, Berkeley, California (present location of manuscripts not known)

Wagner

Collection of Henry R. Wagner, San Marino, California (present location of manuscripts not known; possibly Claremont College?)

Contents

Access and use