| had its source in the Caribbean Islands. From there Spaniards advanced upon the mainland from the southeast, establishing themselves in the Floridas, and planting their outposts as far north as the Carolinas and Virginia. The third and most important subsidiary migration began in Mexico. From that Spanish stronghold a northward-moving frontier advanced steadily during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, filling the plateaus of northern Mexico, and pushing on into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. By the dawn of the nineteenth century New Spain's mission stations, ranches, and presidios swept in a giant arc from eastern Texas to the Bay of San Francisco. Half a century later these holdings were to be absorbed by the relentless drive of the westward-moving Anglo-American pioneers. But this conquest could not erase the cultural tradition planted there by the Spaniards; Spanish culture remains a significant force in the civilization of the Southwest today. |
| The importance of this heritage was first fully realized by Herbert Eugene Bolton. During a fruitful career of teaching at the University of Texas, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley, Bolton evolved the concept of the Americas, North and South, as a single geographic unit, to be viewed as a continent, not as a multiplicity of nations. In this perspective, the United States became not simply an outpost of England, but a complex region understandable only in terms of the Anglo-French and Anglo-Spanish intrusions that had altered its behavioral patterns. This concept Bolton strengthened by a lifetime of research in the archives of Spain, France, and Mexico, as well as in the extensive Latin-American manuscripts of the University of California's own Bancroft Library. |
| The result was not only a shelf full of books, monographs, and edited tomes from Bolton's prolific pen, but the emergence of a new school of historical interpretation. Its concern was with the peopling of the continent, but particularly with the cultural conflicts and adaptations that occurred when two frontiers met, as they did in the southwestern United States where the northward-moving Spaniards and the westward-moving Anglo-Americans joined in conflict during the early nineteenth century. Bolton set the guidelines for the study of these areas in 1921 when he published a small volume in the "Chronicles of America" series which he called The Spanish Borderlands. Here he sketched in broad outline the story of the clashing frontiers and suggested the importance of a study-in-depth of a phase of frontier history that had been virtually neglected. |
| The Spanish Borderlands was a germinal book, for it stated rather than solved a problem. In it Bolton demonstrated the significance of the Borderlands in American expansion; years of research would be needed to show how those Borderlands were occupied and to appraise their exact role in the history of Mexico and the United States. This was a challenge to the dozens of disciples trained by Bolton in his seminars; over the years they and their academic children and grandchildren studied the Borderlands |
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