The Eagle Feather, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2016http://dx.doi.org/10.12794/tef.2016.342

Hubert Howe Bancroft: Behind the Facade of aProfessional HistorianHannah Joan Wilson1*

AbstractSince before the Mexican-American War, ingrained notions of American superiority over Mexicans appearedin narratives of Texas. This paper argues that Hubert Howe Bancroft, although referenced as an unbiased,realistic historian of Texas history in The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft XVI: The History of North MexicanStates and Texas volume 2, actually coded his narrative with images and text of United States’ social dominanceover Mexico. Using the lens of postcolonial theory, my research method performs a close reading of the elevenillustrations and the accompanying text, a comparison with primary cartographic sources, and an analysis ofearly historians’ tropes of Texas to examine the crafted historical narrative and function of images. It concludesthat, using manifest destiny in Austin’s colony maps, and the use of empathy in maps describing emotionalmilitary losses, Bancroft’s scientific Texas narrative is coded with United States’ Anglo American moral andpolitical superiority.

KeywordsHubert Howe Bancroft — Texas — Mexico — Cartography

1Department of Art Education and Art History, University of North Texas*Faculty Mentor: Dr. Kelly Donahue-Wallace

Contents

Introduction 1

1 Hubert Howe Bancroft 1

2 Bancroft’s Cartography 3

3 Conclusion 6

Author Biography 7

References 7

IntroductionSince before the Mexican-American War, ingrained notionsof American superiority over Mexicans appeared in narrativesof Texas. This paper argues that Hubert Howe Bancroft, al-though referenced as an unbiased, realistic historian of Texashistory in The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft XVI: The His-tory of North Mexican States and Texas volume 2, actuallycoded his narrative with images and text of United States’social dominance over Mexico. Using the lens of postcolonialtheory, my research method performs a close reading of theeleven illustrations and the accompanying text, a comparisonwith primary cartographic sources, and an analysis of earlyhistorians’ tropes of Texas to examine the crafted historicalnarrative and function of images. It concludes that, usingmanifest destiny in Austin’s colony maps, and the use of em-pathy in maps describing emotional military losses, Bancroft’sscientific Texas narrative is coded with United States’ AngloAmerican moral and political superiority.

In order to accomplish this goal, the paper examines theway this object, The History of North Mexican States andTexas volume 2 reflects the social and political context of theUnited States and its relationship with Mexico during thenineteenth century. It also aims to answer how Hubert HoweBancroft’s historical narrative of Texas and Mexico shows theunderlying position of United States’ superiority over Mexicoafter the Mexican-American War. Finally, utilizing the imageswithin the text, it will examine how the maps craft the unevenpower relationship between the United States and Mexico.

The following paragraphs employ an art historical object-based research method to analyze the text and images in TheHistory of North Mexican States and Texas volume 2. Myanalysis uses the theoretical framework of Edward Said’spostcolonial theory and its analysis of the relationship betweenthe powerful colonizing West and its Other, the colonized East[1, 2]. This approach is relevant for the study of Bancroft’stext, as Bancroft formulated his narrative bias on the belief thatMexicans were the weaker Other in contrast to the controllingAmerican power in the nineteenth century, where Texas servedas a proto-US state to illustrate the power difference.

1. Hubert Howe BancroftHistory of the North Mexican States and Texas volume 2 waswritten in San Francisco, California in 1886 [3]. The sec-ond volume of the History of the North Mexican States andTexas spans from 1801-1889 and includes fifteen illustratedmaps. Hubert Howe Bancroft was an American historian and

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publisher, and after moving to California, became a success-ful businessman in the world of publishing. After gaining areputation as a book collector and publisher, Bancroft beganwriting the history of the Pacific states, starting with a twenty-eight volume collection titled Native Races. Included in thiscollection is a two volume set of the History of the NorthMexican States and Texas, where Bancroft utilized his ownexperiences traveling to Mexico along with other first-handaccounts, specifically from missionaries, to add to the smallbody of work focusing on the Texas region.

A sequence of historical events culminated into the Mexican-American War. With the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, PresidentJames Monroe delivered his annual message to Congress inwhich he outlined the new basis for foreign relations betweenthe United States, Europe, and the rest of the Western hemi-sphere [4]. The effect was to cast the United States as thecontrolling power in the Americas. Looking inward, Amer-ica began a growing expansionist movement, and with theannexation of Texas, the ideals of expanding westward cameto a boiling point. Manifest Destiny, officially coined by JohnO’Sullivan in 1845, rallied support behind Texas annexation,and solidified the divine right of the American nation to domi-nate the continent [5]. In 1845, fueled by notions of territorialexpansion from manifest destiny and the Monroe Doctrine,President James Polk started The Mexican-American Warover the territory dispute of the Texas-Mexico border. Startingon May 11, 1846, and ending with the Treaty of GuadalupeHidalgo on February 2, 1848, the U.S. settled that the Texasborder was located at the Rio Grande, as well as giving theU.S. the land of Arizona, California, and New Mexico.

The Mexican-American War influenced societal under-standings between Americans and Mexicans, as it was anaggressive move to further American ideas of expansion. Af-ter the war, Americans felt justified and proud of PresidentPolk’s military action and territorial expansion, a right givenby providence [5]. Texas served as a constant conduit betweenthese two nations. Texan and American notions of hierarchyformed around the basis that Anglos were brave and deserv-ing of land, and their rights came before the Mexican people[6]. The social divide, created by these historical factors,continued throughout the nineteenth century, when historians,authors, and illustrators began to describe Mexico with theseingrained notions.

Several scholars whose work directly benefits my researchhave addressed the History of the North Mexican States andTexas [3, 7]. Two biographic scholars, John Walton Caugheyand Harry Clark, form the introduction to my assessment ofBancroft’s intentions. Caughey’s Hubert Howe Bancroft: His-torian of the West, a comprehensive biography of Bancroft,provides substantive argumentation for my research aboutBancroft’s motivations within his narratives of Mexico andTexas. Additionally, Harry Clark’s A Venture in History: TheProduction, Publication, and Sale of the Works of HubertHowe Bancroft provided invaluable information over Ban-croft’s intent for the specific, individual volumes of his work,

including History of the North Mexican States and Texas. Thisscholarship adds to my understanding of the creation, publi-cation and illustrations within History of the North MexicanStates and Texas, as well as insight into generalized percep-tions of Bancroft’s narrative.

More broadly, the History of the North Mexican Statesand Texas is an illustrated historical text and a noted work ofa professional historian. To understand this genre, I turned toLaura Lyons McLemore in “Early Historians and the Shapingof Texas Memory,” an essay within the broader collectionLone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas [8]. This studybenefited my research, as her analysis of the different types ofearly historians forms my individual assessment of Bancroft’smotivations as a post-Civil War historian. In her larger studyof historiography Inventing Texas: Early Historians and theLone Star State, she goes into further detail of Bancroft’sHistory of the North Mexican States and Texas. Writtenduring the 1880s era where the historical narrative shiftedfrom romanticism to realism, historians did not rely on moraljudgements, but upon large collections of original sourcematerial and texts. In her longer discussion, McLemore arguesthat Bancroft represented scientific history detachment, sayingthat he created a history of Texas that would present readerswith all the facts so they could form their own opinions.

Finally, Mapping Latin America was crucial in helping meto perform the specific analysis of my object. Unlike previ-ously mentioned scholarship, my own argument directly relieson reading illustrated maps within Bancroft’s History of NorthMexican States and Texas to gain insight into the social andpolitical context of the United States and its relationship withMexico during the nineteenth century. Rather than a typicalreading at face value, Mapping Latin America provides a di-rect model for reading and comprehending nineteenth-centurygeographical and militaristic maps to understand deeper con-notations of identity, space, and representations [9]. Overall,this study is essential in the context of reading maps to gainsocial interactions and understandings crafted in Bancroft’shistorical narrative.

The images included in Hubert Howe Bancroft’s Historyof the North Mexican States and Texas volume 2 consist ofeleven images in the twenty-two chapters discussing nine-teenth century Texas history. I disregarded the images rep-resenting the Northern Mexican states, as they do not relateto my specific argument. Two categories emerge from theremaining images. The first section of images illustrate thecolonization of Texas. The second grouping of images arebattle maps that accompany text about the Texas Revolutionand Mexican-American War.

My research reveals that the group of cartographic illus-trations of Stephen F. Austin’s Texas colony appears in Ban-croft’s text as justification for Anglo colonization due to Mex-ico’s inability to maintain control of the Texas region. Thethree images in this pattern consists of Austin’s 1835 colony,in the forms of Austin’s 1835 Map (Figure 1), and then therepetition of the image titled “Sectional Map of 1835” (Figure

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Figure 1. Hubert Howe Bancroft, “Austin’s Map of 1835,”1886, metal relief print.

2) and “Austin’s Map” (Figure 3) which is a closely croppeddetail of the Gulf area.

2. Bancroft’s CartographyThe main example of this type is the first representation ofAustin’s colony in the text, on page 75, titled “Austin’s Map”1835 (Figure 1). This map shows Texas’ location in rela-tion to the United States, where Texas lies west of the 102ndmeridian from Washington, and the upper section of the mapshows the bordering territories of New Mexico, Ozark Dis-trict, Arkansas Territory, and Louisiana. Additionally, the mapnotes several Native American tribes, including the Caddo,Cherokee, Waco, Towiash, Cushatte, Alabama, and the Co-manche Indians. The map also marks major cities, roads, andsectional divisions of the empersario grants from the Mexicangovernment, labeled by their mostly Anglo names such asCameron, Woodbury, McMullen, Power, Burnet, Austin, andWilliam. Topographical descriptions appear as prairies, moun-tain regions, and high peaks. Texas rivers are included withthe Red River and Rio Bravo marking the top and bottom bor-ders of the region. There are details of the location of naturalresources such as four fountains, salt lakes, salt springs, silvermines, and salt works. Also included are locations of animalresources, noting immense herds of buffalo, large droves ofhorse and cattle, and two droves of wild horses.

Based on my observations of nearly exact textual nota-

Figure 2. Hubert Howe Bancroft, “Sectional Map of 1835,”1886, metal relief print.

tions, geographic landmarks, and aesthetics, Bancroft selectedand reproduced Stephen F. Austin’s map (Figure 4) to evokeTexas’ colonial possibilities. The map promotes the expan-sion of the United States by providing information on how theland mass is to be settled, navigated, and exploited. StephenF. Austin’s map, first published by a Philadelphia attorneyThomas F. Leaming in 1829, advertised and promoted immi-gration to Texas [10]. Due to lack of exploration, Austin’scareful notation of geographic landmarks, cities, ports, andnatural resources, provided information for future Texas set-tlers. In his narrative, Bancroft specifically reproduced andrepeated an artifact of history that was a known colonial re-cruitment tool.

Austin’s map visually implies that Anglo settlement stretchedfrom the Gulf of Mexico to the Red River. The empresarioboundaries on the map, emphasized by bold text, indicatesAnglo settlement. Actual settlement was far less widespread.Settlement north of the Old San Antonio Road, also referredto as the Camino Real, was rare, and mostly failed [11]. Ad-ditionally, the map denotes how the settlers can explore andcolonize successfully. The location of Native American tribesserved as a warning to settlers. To ensure a successful claim ofland, avoiding conflicts with native tribes was critical. Naturalresources included on the map denote the bounty of Texas,and the necessity to colonize the new land offered by Mexicodue to its untapped resources and available space.

Bancroft’s text in the chapter “Colonization and the Em-presario System,” supports this reading of the “Austin’s Map”

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Figure 3. Hubert Howe Bancroft, “Austin’s Map,” 1886,metal relief print.

of 1835 (Figure 1) [12]. When Bancroft introduced the ideaof colonial expansion into Texas, he said, “if the reader willglance back at the history of Texas, he will find that no ad-vance in the colonization of that fertile country was madeduring the period of Spanish domination,” directly notingthat Mexico did nothing with the land during the time theyowned it. In fact, he notes that, “It remained for peaceableimmigrants from the United States to accomplish a work ofprogress which Spain had proved herself incompetent to per-form...” Bancroft, casting the ‘peaceable Anglo’ immigrantsas bringers of progress, juxtaposes United States success withMexican incompetence. Continuing this narrative, the Anglosettlers, led by Stephen F. Austin, who Bancroft described aspersevering, honorable, prudent, and responsible, putting hiscolony above himself to make sure it succeeded. Finally, thetransition between colonization and full notions of manifestdestiny begin with Bancroft’s explanation of the Texas colony:

Austin’s colony was an exceptional one. No spe-cific limits had even been assigned to his grant,and his immigrants, being of rambling disposi-tion, had scattered themselves over a large extentof the country, each settling in the locality whichmost pleased him. Although this dispersion atfirst was attended with inconvenience...if the set-tlers could sustain themselves...the expansion, byaffording facilities to new immigrants, would beof ultimate benefit to the country (69).

According to this textual narrative, Austin’s colonists ex-panded to every reachable section of the Texas area, andbased on their success they ultimately benefit the country asa whole. This plays directly into notions of manifest destiny,with Anglo expansion as natural, beneficial flow of events[5]. Both Bancroft and John O’Sullivan utilized language that

Figure 4. Stephen F. Austin, “Austin’s Map of TexasColonies,” 1836 (reprint from 1829 map), print.

Mexico was unable to exert real authority, and that Americansettlers, based on their ability to self-govern and sustain them-selves, had the natural right to ‘public’ land. Including that,“a tide of immigration into Texas set in from the United States,which in a few years converted her wilderness and wastesinto thriving farms and lucrative cattle-ranges.” This narrativetext surrounds Austin’s Map of 1835 (Figure 1), ultimatelyenshrouding its original colonial emphasis with the languageof manifest destiny into Texas.

Other period illustrations represented colonial ideals inmaps, comparable to Stephen F. Austin. For example, MathewCarey’s map “Missouri Territory Formerly Louisiana” (Fig-ure 5), illustrates the Missouri landscape created out of theLouisiana Purchase area. This image features similar traits to“Austins Map of 1835” (Figure 1), with attention to mountainranges, cities, Native American villages, and resources suchas copper mines. The framing of the open territory throughcolored areas directly relates to the grant divisions in Ban-croft’s map (Figure 1) and the colored areas in the originalStephen F. Austin map (Figure 4) where the linear divisionframes the available land for colonization. All three of thesemaps show ingrained ideas and notions about the Americanright to expand, through cartographic approval.

Battle maps make up the second pattern of images. Theimages within this section include two different routes ofarmies (Figures 6 and 7), the city of San Antonio during theGoliad massacre (Figure 8), a visual plan of the Alamo (Figure9), battle plan of the Texas Revolution (Figure 10), the City

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Figure 5. Mathew Carey, “Missouri Territory FormerlyLouisiana,” 1814, print.

Figure 6. Hubert Howe Bancroft, “Routes of Armies,” 1886,metal relief print.

of Monterrey (Figure 11), and the fortress of Perote (Figure12). Bancroft focused exclusively on images only from battleshistorically considered Anglo massacres, which directed theemotional weight of national memory to cast Mexico as anenemy.

The main example for this type of image is the specificimage of the “Ground-Plan of the Alamo” (Figure 9), picturedon page 206 in the chapter “Alamo and Goliad Massacres.”This particular image is a cropped view of the Alamo mission,where the acequia borders the edge of the image, while a keydescribes what the letters A-I represent on the aerial view ofthe mission plan. The plan shows the specific measurements ofthe Square of the Mission. The letters represent architecturallocations such as the entrance to the mission, the convent, thechurch, and the place where Travis, Crockett, and Bowie diedduring the battle.

Bancroft’s seemingly neutral rendering of the Alamo nev-

Figure 7. Hubert Howe Bancroft, “Santa Anna’s March,”1886, metal relief print.

ertheless shares the same pro-Anglo associations he drewupon with Austin’s map. My research reveals that Bancroft’simages of the “Ground-Plan of the Alamo” (Figure 9) and theGoliad Massacre in “San Antonio and its Environment” (Fig-ure 8) were directly copied from Henderson Yoakum’s Historyof Texasillustrations (Figures 13 and 14). Yoakum, noted forhis bias of Anglo superiority and manifest destiny, directlyimplies that the ‘Will of God’ contributed to the success ofTexas history and annexation [13]. Bancroft, although widelyconsidered unbiased, has selected two out of his eleven imagesdirectly from a highly partisan source. Moreover, he even ex-aggerated Yoakum’s textual bias, focusing more closely on theAlamo and adding to Yoakum’s map the locations of Travis’s,Crockett’s, and Bowie’s deaths (Figure 9). This maintainsthat Bancroft is illustrating the Texan viewpoint rather thana scientific, unattached representation of the Alamo battle.By focusing on a closely cropped image of the interior of theAlamo, and making specific reference to where the three Texasicons of the Alamo died, Bancroft subtly skewed the narrativetowards empathy to the Texan revolution from Mexico.

Bancroft’s text surrounding the image also influenced em-pathy for the Anglo side. Through the chapter title, “TheGoliad and Alamo Massacres,” Bancroft utilized a phrase thatsuggests the Mexican army was using unjust and extremeviolence. Bancroft clearly created opposing sides of good ver-sus evil, constructing the Texans within the Alamo as noble‘heroes.’ Bancroft introduced Travis as brave and complemen-tary, who “under all the unequal circumstances with whichhe was beset, not for one moment did he or his heroic bandthink of surrender.” Bancroft then described the Texan army

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Figure 8. Hubert Howe Bancroft, ‘San Antonio andEnvirons,” 1886, metal relief print.

as, “The men who cast their lot with him were as dauntlessas ever...Among them were such spirits as James Bowie, hissecond in command, David Crockett, whose fearlessness ofsoul was [equalled] only by his simple integrity...” Bancroft,in his narrative, created heroes out of the three men he addedto the visual image of the map. Bancroft’s addition of thebody locations indicated on the map are elevated in the textwith emotional descriptions, such as Crockett’s death “lyingmutilated on the spot indicated.” Each of these inclusionscreate emotional resonance with the Texans who died protect-ing the Alamo, rather than an unbiased, clinical approach todescribing the history of the battle.

To examine how Bancroft was using the images and textto sway the reader towards the position that Texans were pureand heroic, while Santa Anna’s army massacred them, is acomparison of another viewpoint of the Alamo battle. JoseJuan Sanchez Navarro, a distinguished Mexican soldier duringthe Texas Revolution, kept a private record of his observationson the assault of the Alamo [14]. In this image (Figure 15),he had drawn the plan of the Alamo as a far more technicalscheme of the actual battleground. In his rendition, he notedthe entire battle scene, and described physical components ofthe Alamo mission, including the position of canons. Ratherthan a close look at the interior of the Alamo from the Texas

Figure 9. Hubert Howe Bancroft, “Ground-Plan of theAlamo,” 1886, metal relief print.

perspective, Navarro had created a technical map showing theentire battleground. Bancroft, based on previous copies ofhistorical artifacts, could have chosen to incorporate a techni-cal image such as Navarro’s illustration. Instead of Bancroftbeing clinically dispassionate, as scholars have previouslyrecorded, he purposefully illustrated moments of emotionalTexas battles to create a negative view of the Mexican army.

3. ConclusionUltimately, through this research, I have examined how anoted, unbiased scholar such as Hubert Howe Bancroft con-tributed to the notion of United States’ dominance over Mex-ico. Bancroft, utilizing seemingly scientific cartographic im-ages of maps, actually included coded language that revealsthe uneven power relationship between the United States andMexico through the narrative of Texas history. By examiningthe eleven images in comparison to the nineteenth-centuryprimary documents and historian tropes, along with a closeexamination of the accompanying text, my research of Historyof the Northern Mexican States and Texas volume 2 stronglysupports that notions of manifest destiny and moral superiorityfueled negative viewpoints of Mexicans.

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Figure 10. Hubert Howe Bancroft, “Plan of Battle-Field,” 1886, metal relief print.

Author Biography

Hannah Joan Wilson graduated in 2016 as an Honors Col-lege Distinguished Scholar with a BA in Art History. Aftercompleting internships at the Kimbell Art Museum and theNational Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, Hannah is cur-rently working on her Master of Arts in Museum Science atTexas Tech University.

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Colonial Theory. Prentice Hall, New York, 1997.

[2] E. Said. Orientalism: Western Representations of theOrient. Vintage, New York, 1979.

[3] J.W. Caughey. Hubert Howe Bancroft: Historian of theWest. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1946.

[4] J. Monroe. The Monroe Doctrine. President Monroe’sMessage At the Commencement of the First Session ofthe Eighteenth Congress, Boston, December 2, 1823.

[5] J. O’Sullivan. Annexation. United States Magazine andDemocratic Review, 17:5–10, 1845.

[6] R.A. Paredes. The Mexican image in American travelliterature, 1831-1869. New Mexico Historical Review,52:5–29, 1977.

[7] H. Clark. A Venture in History: The Production, Publi-cation, and Sale of the Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft.University of California Press, Berkeley, 1971.

[8] L.L. McLemore. Early historians and the shaping ofTexas memory. In G. Cantrell and E.H. Turner, editors,Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas, pages15–38. Texas A&M University Press, College Station,2007.

[9] K. Zimmerer. Mapping mountains. In J. Dym and K. Of-fen, editors, Mapping Latin America: A CartographicReader, pages 143–165. University of Chicago Press,Chicago, 2011.

[10] R.S. Martin. Maps of an empresario: Austin’s contribu-tion to the cartography of Texas. Southwestern HistoricalQuarterly, 85:390, 1982.

[11] M.M. Campbell, A.M. Brunner, H.M. Jones, and S.H.Strauss. Forestry’s fertile crescent: The application ofbiotechnology to forest trees. Plant Biotechnology Jour-nal, 1:141–154, 2003.

[12] H.H. Bancroft. History of the North Mexican States andTexas. 2 vols. The History Collection, San Francisco,1884.

[13] L.L. McLemore. Inventing Texas Early Historians of theLone Star State. Texas A & M University Press, CollegeStation, 2004.

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Figure 11. Hubert Howe Bancroft, “City of Monterey,” 1886, metal relief print.

[14] C. Sanchez-Navarro and J.J. Sanchez-Navarro. La Guerrade Tejas: Memorias de un soldado. Mexico: EditorialJus, 1960.

Figure 12. Hubert Howe Bancroft, “Fortress of Perote,”1886, metal relief print.

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Figure 13. Henderson Yoakum, “Ground Plan of the Alamoin 1836,” 1856, print.

Figure 14. Henderson Yoakum, “San Antonio & ItsEnvirons,” 1856, print.

Figure 15. Jose Sanchez-Navarro, “Plan of the Alamo,” 1836,drawing.