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Borderland visualities: technologies of sight and the production of the nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands

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Borderland visualities: technologies of sight and the production of the nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands

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Borderland Visualities: Technologies of Sight and the Production of the Nineteenth-
Century U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Celeste R. Menchaca
American Studies and Ethnicity
Doctor of Philosophy
University of Southern California
August 9, 2016
Dissertation Committee:
Professor George J. Sánchez
Professor William Deverell
Professor Laura Isabel Serna

Table Contents

Acknowledgements i

Introduction 1

Chapter One 12
The Border Surveyor: Bodily and Scientific Encounters at the Nation’s Periphery

Chapter Two 62
Seeing Nature: Building a Temporal Southwest Borderland

Chapter Three 93
Seeing you, Seeing me: Challenges to Boundary Optics

Chapter Four 128
Staging Crossings: Policing and Performing Difference at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Conclusion 159

Bibliography 166

i

Acknowledgements

It certainly takes a village to raise a doctor of philosophy and over the past several years I
have had the great fortune and opportunity to learn from compassionate, intelligent, and giving
friends, family members, and scholars. As a first generation student, my educational journey was
not without its challenges, but the trials and tribulations were greatly lessened by those
individuals dedicated and invested in fighting for equitable education and social justice. To these
individuals, past and present, you are an inspiration and have led and opened a path toward
freedom.
Graduate school can be filled with its moments of isolation and aimless wandering, but I
had my American Studies and Ethnicity (ASE) family to keep me on track. This project could
not have grown without their critical feedback and encouragement. Thank you to my dissertation
committee members, George J. Sánchez, William Deverell, and Laura Isabel Serna, for their
tireless support, investment, and guidance. They not only taught me what it means to be a
scholar, but also what it means to be an educator. Their innovative scholarly work continues to
shape they way I think about borderlands and the inhabitants that daily move across such spaces.
To my colleagues in ASE—Jolie Chea, Amee Chew, Treva Carrie, Ryan Fukumori, May
Alhassen, Cecilia Caballero, Priscilla Leiva, Genevieve Carpio, Jih-Fei Cheng, Crystal Baik,
Deb Al-Najjar, Margaret Salazar-Porzio, Abigail Rosas, Sriya Shrestha, Mark Padoongpatt,
David Stein, Nic Ramos, Umayyah Cable, Joshua Mitchell, Floridama Boj-Lopez, Emily
Raymundo, Robert Eap, Jessi Quizar, Analena Hope, Jen Tran, Shannon Zhao, Jess Lovaas,
Sophia Azeb, Becka Garrison, Jessica Young, Kai Green, Anjali Nath—you provided a
welcoming and safe space for me to test out ideas, to fail, and to succeed. I would not have
survived the job market without Nadine Chan and Ana Paulina Lee. Their spirit and therapeutic

ii

talents led me through the emotional rollercoaster that is the academic job market. Jazmin Muro
was my pom-mate through thick and thin. She coached me through those days when words
would not materialize. And although states apart, we managed to meet every morning on Google
Chat to keep each other accountable and to finish our dissertations. Ryan Fukumori, Dan Lynch,
and Max Baumgarten were my conference co-conspirators. As a team, we built a history
graduate student conference and organized a special issue journal together. The creativity they
bring to the field of history is remarkable. I look forward to continue future projects with such
imaginatively brilliant scholars. Also, thank you to the brilliant scholars that I accompany and
travel with in the conference circuit—Laura D. Gutiérrez, Citlali Sosa, Lina Murillo, Jennifer
Macias, and Seth Archer.
My sisters—Susie, Tricia, and Laura—are my role models. As educators, they paved the
way for their youngest sibling to pursue her doctorate. They unconditionally gave me all the
things I needed to succeed in my pursuits—love, laughs, warmth, food, pool parties, deep
conversations, chisme, a place to write and think undisturbed, etc. They are the building blocks
that make up this dissertation. My nieces and nephews—Elliott, Evan, Celeste, Hailee, Skyelar,
Isabela, and Landon—not only kept me entertained during my educational journey, but they also
impressed me with their kindness, diligence, empathy, and support. I congratulate them on their
past and present achievements and enthusiastically look forward to their many future
accomplishments. My best friend, editor, and partner-in-crime, Santiago Rodarte, kept me
balanced and grounded as I moved toward the completion of my doctoral degree. His restless
dedication and abundant passion as an educator continuously breathed life into this exhausted
scholar. His jokes, playful antics, and unyielding encouragement will continue to serve as my
fountain of youth.

iii

From my parents, Manuel and Josefina Menchaca, I learned what it meant to be strong,
brave, and determined. My accomplishments were only made possible because of their resiliency
and sacrifice. They worked tirelessly day in and day out so that their children could have more
opportunities than were available to them in Mexico. My interest in history and the borderlands
derives directly from their experiences. My journey through this historical scholarship was and
continues to be an endeavor to learn my family history. It is to my parents that I dedicate this
dissertation, which ultimately is a culmination of their love, wisdom, and ganas a sobrevivir.

1

Introduction

It’s Written in the Stars: Calculations and Confrontations in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.
Southwest Borderlands

Since the passage of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, the United States has fortified the
U.S.-Mexico border with additional fencing, lighting, military gadgets, unmanned aerial
vehicles, and state-of-the-art surveillance cameras. The technologies of sight—scientific, visual,
and bureaucratic systems—that affix and inform the material and imagined production of the
current U.S.-Mexico boundary line, however, have an extensive history, one that begins well
before the creation of the Border Patrol in 1924. “Borderland Visualities” explores the emerging
relationship between science, technology, vision, and borderland bureaucracy during an earlier
period, the second-half of the nineteenth-century and into the first two decades of the twentieth-
century. My work investigates the operation of four different visually affixing regimes across
four chapters: boundary surveyors’ mechanical sight, naturalist and ethnographic eye-witnessing
of the 1850s southwestern military expeditions, indigenous and environmental challenges to
boundary optics, and border surveillance of Mexican female border crossers. I argue that state
officials and scientists used scientific, visual, and bureaucratic methods to manufacture a border
into a space where objects were rendered intelligible, therefore, presumed knowable and,
consequently, manageable. In turn, their spatial construction was met with challenges from
borderland inhabitants who envisioned a different landscape.
Historians of the American West and the borderlands have considered how conquest
across the United States included the formation of racial, gendered, sexual, and political
identities; the reconfiguration of communities, cultural politics, and space; and the construction

2

of mythic, romantic pasts and presents.
1
While these scholars have come to understand U.S.
western expansion in terms of empire, few have directly addressed the role that science,
technology, and vision play in methods of conquest and subject and nation-state formation in the
borderlands. Yet, the ascendency of vision and its social and cultural impact over the course of
the nineteenth-century cannot be ignored.
2
In “Borderland Visualities,” I use technologies of
sight as a lens to ask: What role did science and technology play in the cultural production of the
Southwest borderlands? How are racial, gendered, and class hierarchies sustained or dismantled
through visual technologies and acts of observation? And, how do borderland inhabitants push
against or support the imposition of scientific and bureaucratic regimes?

1

The list of scholarship that considers empire and the southwest is extensive. The following is a
list of a few works that inform this study: Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in
California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Laura E. Gómez,
Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York
University Press, 2007), Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past
of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987); John Nieto-Phillips, The Language of Blood:
The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s-1930s (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2004), Border Dilemmas: Racial and national Uncertainties in
New Mexico, 1848-1912 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Pablo Mitchell, Coyote
Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880-1920 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America
(New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians,
Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region (New York: Norton, 1991). A few works on
gender and conquest include: Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the form of a Women: Indians and
Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007);
Bábara O. Reyes, Private Women, Public Lives: Gender and the Missions of the Californias
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, Negotiating Conquest:
Gender and Power in California, 1770s-1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004), and
Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and
Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991).
2

Lorraine Daston, “The Empire of Observation, 1600-1800,” in Histories of Scientific
Observation, eds. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago: University Chicago Press,
2011); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of
Exploration and Empire, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001).

3

Over a fifty-year period, through the Louisiana Purchase, the Oregon Treaty, and the
U.S.-Mexico War, the United States had managed to increase its size from 890,000 to 3 million
square miles. Although the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 gave the United States a sizeable amount
of the North American continent, it was not until the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty that the southern
border was officially established. Although called for in the treaty, the Adams-Onís boundary
line was never surveyed. The northeast boundary between the United States and Canada was the
first surveyed from 1816-1822 and then again in the 1840s. While the U.S.-Mexico border was
not the first delineated boundary line, it was the most massive endeavor to mark an international
border in the United States to date. Stretching over 1,900 miles, the southern boundary line took
a vastly different shape than its predecessors. With fewer transportation networks and navigable
rivers, as compared to the northeast boundary line, William H. Emory, the chief astronomer and
surveyor of the commission, desired to secure the most high-tech and portable astronomical and
surveying instruments on the market. Instruments that could be assembled in parts, that could
withstand the harsh terrain and the excessively dry climate, would require, according to Emory,
“the skill of the best instrument makers.”
3
Also, because segments of the region were “destitute
of trees to [make] stands for the instruments,” Emory ordered durable portable stands to be
made. The scarcity of trees also made things difficult for marking the border. Whereas teamsters
of the northeast boundary commission marked the line with monuments carved out of nearby
trees, teamsters of the southwest commission had to use whatever plant life and rock forms were
available. Their monuments were embedded into the landscape. Markers could be an animal’s

3
William H. Emory, Chief Astronomer and Surveyor, to James Buchanan, Secretary of State,
New York, Feb. 4, 1849; Emory Correspondence, 1849-1851, Entry 425; Records of Boundary
and Claims Commissions and Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park,
MD.

4

skull balancing a lengthy twig, a rag serving as a flag, a mound of stones, or simply a piece of
cloth tied to the thorny branch of a desert plant.
These markers are, however, deceptively simplistic. At first glance, their makeshift
composition would suggest a disinvestment in the job, therefore, a hasty determination of the
line. However, the organic matter on display, for Emory and his fellow surveyors, marked the
most sophisticated and cutting-edge use of instruments and mathematics of the period. At almost
any opportunity available to him, Emory touted their work of determining the longitude and
latitude as accurate and precise. Emory was not alone in this sentiment, Mexico's first engineer,
Francisco Jiménez, also made note of the commission's deployment of scientific techniques, as
he reflected, “The most modern methods of observation and calculation have been employed,
that up to now had not been used in the country, and for that reason the results obtained
correspond to their object.” The 1850s U.S.-Mexico border is a significant case to study in the
cultural production of landscapes and bodies, particularly through the lens of science and vision.
I title my introduction, “It’s written in the stars,” to evoke the ideology of manifest
destiny, the belief that the U.S. was divinely ordained to expand westward, and its connection to
the technologies of boundary making. For contemporaries, the 1850s boundary line was not
simply a political invention but a technological one, where the border was written in the stars,
destined by the hand of providence, technological progress would move the nation forward. I
maintain that technologies of affixing—scientific, visual, and bureaucratic systems—were
integral to the establishment of U.S. authority for marking an international boundary line.
Marking a border transformed land into property that people had to respect; it was a project of
measuring and record keeping, a project of knowledge creation and regulatory power. Acts of
observation demarcated belonging; this is where we begin and you end. This process was

5

naturalized through epistemologies of science, where a common language of measurements,
numbers, natural history collection, and ethnography defined the edges of a nation.
Yet, as past and recent studies in borderlands history suggest, the process of conquest is
never entirely complete or is, at the very least, more nuanced.
4
“Borderlands Visualities” joins
the complex conversation on conquest to consider how the borderlands are always in the process
of becoming. The peripheries of a nation are constituted through a process by which they are
imagined, contested, and then re-imagined. My project is an exercise in unraveling the
simultaneous assembly and disassembly of the southwestern borderlands region across the
second-half of the nineteenth-century and into the first two decades of the twentieth.
I apply a mixed-methods approach that utilizes colonial studies, visual studies, and
material from the natural sciences to unpack the cultural production of the U.S. southwestern
borderlands. Archival materials from governmental, institutional, and individual surveying and
exploration programs, expositions, ethnographic studies and the border patrol are infused with
the tenants of mid-nineteenth-century Enlightenment. Their documents insisted on the objectivity
of absolute truth and of a rational and ordered world, which could be unveiled through direct
observation or mechanical apparatuses. Such documents reveal more about their authors than the
indigenous or environmental subjects of their studies. I employ colonial studies methods to
examine the borderlands archive as records of ascription, of imagined and/or implemented rule,

4
Cameron B. Strang, “Indian Storytelling, Scientific Knowledge, and Power in the Florida
Borderlands,” The William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2013): 671-700; Pekka Hämäläinen,
Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Brian DeLay, War of a thousand
Deserts: Indian Raids of a Thousand Deserts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008);
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region
(New York, Norton, 1991).

6

order and governance, and of uncertainty and desire.
5
This approach begs the question, what did
boundary officials’ incessant data collection reveal about territorial desire, anxiety, and the
cultivation of identities? Applying a visual studies methodology, I search for visual traces; not of
maps or artistic renderings of imperial exploration, but the abstract traces of sight and
observation.
6
I look for the remnants of borderland subjects “seen” by the surveyors,
ethnographers, naturalists, and border patrol officials throughout the nineteenth-century. This
methodology asks, how did vision shape a borderland and its subjects? Additionally, I do a
cultural reading of mathematical and natural sciences. I unpack mathematical formulas as
evidential fragments of visual practices and explore the cultural amalgamation of surveying
equipment with the human body. This analysis inquires, how did numbers and surveying
technologies enact empire? These documents and interdisciplinary methods illustrate how
science, sight, and bureaucratic technologies informed relations of power, constructed place, and
constituted subjects in a moment of intensified U.S. western expansion.
An additional methodological approach includes an examination of what I call
bureaucratic performances, the rituals of enacting state power. Bureaucratic power is maintained
by, but not reducible to, government commissions, reports, census, laws, archives, etc. I argue
that bureaucratic performances are also integral to the practice of affixing a boundary line. Here,
I refer to U.S. immigration official’s surveillance of non-heteronormative Mexican female
migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in the first two decades of the twentieth-century.
Reviewing board of special inquiry transcripts, I found that immigration officials performed their
role as border guards as a means to exercise authority and classify bodies and Mexican female

5
Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
6
Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2011).

7

migrants enacted performances of respectability in order to ensure crossing by simultaneously
upholding and defying state classification.
Anthony Mora and Judith Butler, among others, shape my framing of bureaucratic
performances. In his study on identity formation and articulation in nineteenth-century New
Mexico, Mora defines nationalism, or national identity, as an imagined association defined by a
set of cultural public performances intended to signify a sense of belonging. In the case of New
Mexico, officials and individuals ascribed these acts with racial meanings in order to structure a
particular narrative about the nation’s identity and/or justify imperial aspirations.
7
Mora draws
from Judith Butler’s work on performance and gender to frame his discussion of national
identity. Similar to Butler, Mora argues that identities are cultural performances, stylized
repetition of acts that institute racial, national and gender categories in everyday practices. Butler
theorizes that these racial and gender performances are presumed to be innately, naturally, and
immutably expressed through and on specific bodies types.
8
Mora observes that since racial and
gender performances constitute national identities, the assumed stability of race and gender acts
comes to define the boundaries of the imagined nation and determines who can access and
exercise citizenship.
9
Racial and gendered performances are also enacted along the U.S.-Mexico
border through bureaucratic regulations and immigration policies.
10
At the border, performances
of authority and admissibility constituted the border crosser.

7
Mora, Border Dilemmas, 64.
8
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge,
1994), 95.
9
Mora, Border Dilemmas, 64.
10
For a few works that explore the gendered elements of immigration see Margot Canaday, The
Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2009); Martha Gardner, Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration,
and Citizenship, 1870-1965 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Eithne Luibhéid,
Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

8

Chapter one, “The Border Surveyor: Bodily and Scientific Encounters at the Nation’s
Periphery,” turns to the surveyors of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey and their training,
instruments, and visual practices to better understand how statecraft was simultaneously laid out
and dismantled at the periphery of the nation in the 1850s. Boundary Survey correspondence,
West Point textbook, scientific training manuals, travel narratives, newspaper accounts reveal
how boundary officials reaffirmed themselves as proper seeing subjects through their methods of
observation and scientific instruments. Their entanglement with scientific apparatus and research
designs required a performance of racial and gendered scientific authority. When Chief
Astronomer William H. Emory and his team of surveyors came upon the borderlands they were
armed with a plethora of gadgets including, but not limited to, sextants, astronomical transits,
chronometers, a four-feet reflecting telescope, an artificial horizon, and magnetic compasses.
These instruments, with their directed vision, helped to transform the landscape into a set of
angles and numbers. It was a multi-dimensional field of vision that overlaid imaginary
coordinate planes across the terrestrial landscape, brining what the astronomers saw as an unruly
frontier into managed and known geography. The boundary commission was, then, in part a
conquest of mechanical scientific sight that remodeled the imagined landscape, as well as, the
subjectivities of both its inhabitants and the encroaching visual agents.
Yet, empire was messy. Making meaning out of place was not simply the work of
diligent surveyors with their clean data for the service of the nation. It also entailed individual
agendas that, often times, exceeded the state. In chapter two, “Seeing Nature: Building a

2002); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-
1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Derider M. Moloney, “Women,
Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency in Early U.S. Deportation Policy.” Journal of
Women’s History 18, no. 2 (2006): 95-122.

9

Temporal Southwest Borderland,” I examine the natural history and ethnographic collection in
both the Boundary Survey and Amiel Weeks Whipple’s Pacific Railroad Survey to argue that
expressive acts of empire in the American Southwest varied according to individual state agents.
In his quest to map the flora and fauna of the borderlands region, both north and south of the
newly determined boundary line, John Russell Bartlett, U.S. Boundary Survey commissioner,
met with inconsistent support from state authorities. Despite congressional reluctance to
Bartlett’s natural history mapping, Bartlett followed through with his plans without state support.
Amiel Weeks Whipple’s interest in ethnography mirrored that of Bartlett’s national history
collection. Whipple’s extensive report on Indians differed from all the other Pacific Railroad
Surveys, which offered minimal to lengthier individual reports of the native peoples surrounding
their respective potential rail lines. The figures of Bartlett and Whipple complicate provide a
window into the complex underpinnings of westward expansion. Individual agents expressions
of empire, at times, had more to do with regional understandings of place than did the nation-
state.
In creating a cartographic and numeric representation of the U.S. southwest borderland,
William H. Emory, chief engineer and commissioner for the U.S.-Mexico boundary
commission, peeled off the layers of indigenous presence and historical past from the landscape
and replaced it with blank spaces on the map. However, chapter three, “Seeing you, seeing me:
Challenges to Boundary Optics,” seeks to demonstrate, that despite ceaseless assertions made by
boundary officials that the southern line mostly sat in a barren and desolate frontier, the region
was both energetic and already bordered. Delineations of territorial domain varied with different
political Indian economies such as hunter-gatherer, sedentary, and raiding. Boundaries could be
expressed by claims to resources, violence, war, vengeance, missions, natural landscapes, rock

10

cartography, and oral traditions. As a result, cartographic visions did not operate singularly in the
southwest borderlands. Surveying practices collided and/or cooperated with other established
ways of seeing. This chapter explores how indigenous, Mexican, and Anglo-European locals
commanded the terms of exchange with the Boundary Survey, whether that trade was for goods
or to serve as guides. It examines how borderland inhabitants undermined the Boundary Survey’s
“right to look” by inhibiting the border making process, by misguiding the commission,
obstructing their scientific sightlines, and/or raiding their supplies.
The ocular embodiment of the 1850s U.S.-Mexico border, by the early decades of the
twentieth-century, transformed into a bureaucratic border with technological infrastructure. Over
a fifty-year period, telegraph wires, railroads, bridges, boundary markers, and a dozen or so entry
points mediated the developing borderscape. While the historiography of this early period
portrays the border as relatively fluid and its inspection policies as “soft” for Mexican male
migrants and their families, it was not porous for all. In the final chapter, “Staging Crossings:
Policing and Performing Difference at the U.S.-Mexico Border,” I examine thirty-seven board of
special inquiry cases held between 1906 and 1917 that feature Mexican women detained,
debarred, or deported along the Texas-Mexico border for being single or pregnant, mothers or
prostitutes, women in sexual relationships outside of marriage, and/or women involved in an
interracial union. For these women, the U.S.-Mexico border, both real and imagined, set the
stage for a slew of institutional enactments and performances of crossing. The immigration
interrogation room in El Paso, Texas served as a theatre of border performance, a site where
immigration officials and border crossers engaged in efforts to signify each other and themselves
through bodily comportment, where distinctions between proper and improper behavior were
applied to certain racial and sexual identities. Through their questioning, officials constructed the

11

sexual and gender identities of Mexican female border subjects. However, for female border
crossers, the board of special inquiry served as a site for performative interventions, temporarily
upsetting inspectors’ authorial power. Border enforcement documents and news reports reveal
how the enactments of gendered and sexual subjectivity of Mexican female immigrants were
woven with the regional racial position of Mexican immigrants in the southwest, which
conditioned the forms of enforcement and implementation of U.S. immigration policy along the
southern border.
“Borderland Visualities” changes the field of southwest borderlands history thorough an
analysis of the cultural production of the nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico boundary line (the line
itself), which is largely absent from borderlands scholarship. Most narratives skip this period,
suggesting that the border pre-1900 is fluid and it was not until the 20th century that it became a
hardened fixture in people’s everyday lives. Yet, the border started somewhere and was
experienced by someone. There is nothing natural about drawing a line in the middle of a
continent. This act had to become naturalized so that it appeared to be common sense. While
there was little hope to control the area militarily, as evidenced by the barren landscape due to
raiding warfare, the survey’s highly specialized, calculated knowledge, became then a ritual in
asserting possession. Surveying and natural history collection were acts of geographical
appropriation, where the peripheral spaces of the U.S. were to be explored, charted and brought
under control. Likewise, performances of admissibility sustained and challenged the bureaucratic
border of the first two decades of the twentieth-century. Space is a way of organizing power
relations and for the border it was done so through the culture of science, numbers, vision, and
bureaucratic performances.

12
Chapter One
The Border Surveyor: Bodily and Scientific Encounters at the Nation’s Periphery
Intermittently, from 1849 to 1858, General William Hemsely Emory served as the chief
engineer and fourth commissioner to the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey, the pivotal 1850s
surveying expedition that first determined and marked the international boundary line between
both countries.
1
His journey to mark a national border began as follows.
On the eleventh of September in 1811, William Hemsley Emory was born into an
aristocratic military line. Capitalizing from his family’s wealth, Emory was raised on a Maryland
Eastern Shore plantation resplendent with thoroughbred horses and thirty to forty enslaved men,
women, and children. Like his grandfather and father before him, William became a soldier.
2

However, unlike the veterans of his patriarchal lineage, William H. Emory was also a scientist.
3

1
William H. Emory’s full service with the boundary survey lasted between 1848-1857. Emory
first received his appointment as chief astronomer in 1848, but did not embark on the expedition
until the summer of 1849. The final on-the-ground field observations were gathered in 1856, but
his Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey was not published until in 1857.
2
William H. Emory’s grandfather, John Register Emory, served in the Revolutionary War and
Thomas Emory, his father, served in the War of 1812, see L. David Norris, James C. Milligan
and Odie B. Faulk, William H. Emory, Soldier Scientist (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1998), 1.
3
William Whewell, Cambridge University graduate and founder of mathematical economics,
first coined the term “scientist” in a 1833 meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science. During Emory’s 1840s and 1850s American West surveys, the titles
“savant,” “philosopher,” “man of science,” and “scientific man,” were more widely used to both
designate persons who exclusively pursued a career in science and for persons who broadly
practiced “natural philosophy,” “natural history,” or “science” within or external to institutions.
Historian Robert V. Bruce notes that in the 1850s “the professional scientist was looked down on
by most Americans,” and was viewed by the public “as lacking interest and ability in practical
affairs,” (81). According to Laura Dassow Wall, it was not until after 1862 that the term,
“scientist,” found popular usage and acceptance inside and outside the profession. By this time
Louis Agassiz used “science” to promote Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School and the
American Association for the Advancement of Science associated “natural history” with amateur
rather than professional standing and practice. Perhaps owing to the disparagement of scientific
pursuits among elite circles during his time, in his memoir, Emory may have remembered
himself more as a military man than a civil engineer. Yet, between 1833 and 1862 a shift in

13
Through his father’s political connections, Emory secured a spot in the prominent military
academy, West Point.
4
By the start of Emory’s enrollment in 1827, Superintendent Sylvanus
Thayer’s restructuring of the institution into an advanced, technical, and practical application of
mathematics and the sciences was already underway.
5
West Point, if not igniting Emory’s
interest in, at least provided him with the introductory training to scientifically document the
material world.
6

terminology and professionalization was underway and Emory found himself amidst this change.
I give Emory the title of “scientist,” rather than a “man of science,” because of his relentless
efforts to construct himself as a leading expert in astronomy, surveying, and cartography.
Labeling him a scientist underscores the cultural and social process of him becoming a scientist
or rather a modern subject specialized in the practical sciences. Furthermore, his methodological
practices, like the insistence on direct observation and accurate data collection, his
correspondence with national leading scientists, and paper presentations at the American
Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference connected him to centers of
scientific study and advancements in the United States. Laura Dassow Wall, Seeing New Worlds:
Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1995), 6; and Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 75-93. William Goetzmann also named members of the
Corps of Topographical Engineers, like Emory, “soldier-scientists” in an effort to underscore
their dual identity as military fighters but also as engineers engaged in public works and
development projects across the West, see William H. Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the
America West, 1803-1863 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 5. L. David Norris, James
C. Milligan, and Odie B. Faulk, borrow and continue Goetzmann’s “soldier-scientist”
nomenclature with their 1998 publication on the life of William H. Emory, see Norris, Milligan,
and Faulk, William H. Emory.
4
Thomas Emory reserved a West Point appointment for his son through John C. Calhoun, South
Carolina Senator, see Norris, Milligan, and Faulk, William H. Emory, 1.
5
Thayer modeled West Point curriculum after the French military educational system at École
Polytechnique. West Point offered its first introduction to civil engineering course in 1824. An
engineering course was available prior to 1824 at West Point and was taught by Claudius Crozet,
a graduate of Ponts et Chaussée in Pairs. Crozet did focus on the “fundamentals of mathematics
and analytical geometry” but his course centered on military science rather than the civil aspects
of engineering. See Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 14; Thomas Crackel, West Point: A
Bicentennial History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 125.
6
In his unpublished memoir, Emory does not recall any stories of himself as a young
scientifically acquisitive child who spent his afternoons gathering specimens of natural history.
To suggest his love of science began before West Point would be unsubstantiated. Also, despite
having an “educated Swede” and undergraduates of Cambridge College to serve as his school
tutors and his briefly attendance at “Washington College” in Maryland, Emory remembers that

14
Upon leaving the academy, Emory found garrison labor “dreary and monotonous,” and
consequently accepted an appointment to serve as an assistant United States civil engineer, but
not before he enthusiastically fulfilled military orders to capture “hostile” Creek Indians in
Alabama and “move them by force” west of the Mississippi.
7
Although content and fulfilled with
his employment as an engineer, Emory returned to the military two years later. He sought to both
utilize his skills in the practical sciences and affix himself to political influence and power by
joining Colonel John J. Abert’s newly established brainchild, the Army Corps of Topographical
Engineers.
8
According to Abert, unlike the Corps of Engineers, whose function was to construct
military fortifications, the topographical engineers mainstays were mapping and surveying the

he entered West Point with little previous instruction and mentioned he would have benefited
from attending a preparatory school before entering the institution. While he was an expert in
“field sports, riding, shooting and sailing,” having grown up on the “luxurious Eastern Shore
estates,” he knew no French and was “utterly ignorant” in mathematics, a study he considered
was the “foundation[al] rock on which the W. Point course [was] built.” This would suggest that
his formal introduction in the practical sciences began at West Point. See William H. Emory,
"Reminiscences of General William Hemsley Emory," n.d., Special Collections Division, United
States Military Academy Library, 7-8, 17, 19. Others describe Emory as a “serious scholar who
devoted himself particularly to scientific subjects,” but also “became known for his
horsemanship and for his skills as a military tactician,” see Norris, Milligan, and Faulk, William
H. Emory, 2.
7
At the time of deployment, Emory recalled that he embarked for the military campaign in
Georgia with a “light heart.” However, writing his memoir post-emancipation, Emory indirectly
commented on the injustice underscoring Indian relocation, acknowledging that Creek removal
“from the beautiful and rich cotton country which they inhabited, and which was coveted by the
Georgia and Alabama planter, to their new home, West of the Mississippi,” had the markings of
an underhanded land grab by wealthy southern planters. He may have reached this position only
after his amateur ethnographic work among Indian tribes while surveying the West. Emory,
“Reminiscences of General William Hemsley Emory,” 39, 42.
8
The same year that Emory began his career with the Topographical Engineers he married
Matilda Wilkins Bache, the great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin and daughter of
Alexander D. Bache, director of the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Alexander Bache was a leading
man in science and knew how to garner government support for his scientific endeavors with the
Coast Survey. Matilda Bache’s brother-in-law, Robert J. Walker, an advocate of U.S. territorial
expansion westward, was connected to George M. Dallas, vice president under James K. Polk.
Walker also supported Emory’s long-time friend Jefferson Davis’ political campaign. In 1838,
Emory was on the path to engage with elite scientific and political circles, see Norris, Milligan,
and Faulk, William H. Emory, 4.

15
physical and natural features of United States territories.
9
Abert first assigned Emory to complete
various harbor improvements along the Atlantic coast, then sent him to survey and mark the
northeastern United States and Canadian border (1843-1844) as well as appointed him to serve
on Stephen Kearny’s Army of the West (1846-1848), a military unit whose strategy was to
occupy vital positions and resources across the West during the U.S.-Mexico War.
While West Point provided the scaffold on which Emory would observe and understand
the natural landscape, as will be further demonstrated in the chapter, it was his time engaged in
the field following graduation that prepared him to collect, gather, and organize topographical
and ethnographic knowledge of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. His participation in the Indian
relocation military campaign, at the very least, both acquainted and linked Emory to the difficult
circumstances that faced native populations in the South. At the U.S.-Canadian border, Emory
first practiced and enhanced his skills to mark a national boundary line. With Kearny’s Army,
Emory commenced his foray into the American West. Kearny added Emory to his contingent in
the last hour to serve as military staff, but also, when time permitted, to lead the collection of
economic, geographic, and ethnographic data on the region. This appointment equipped Emory
with both a familiarity of the West and on-the-ground lessons on how to gather and categorize
spatial knowledge. By the time Emory entered the port of San Diego in the summer of 1849, he
was armed with an assemblage of experience ready to produce another national boundary line.
Emory was but one of a variety of observers that found himself at the southwestern-most
extremities of the United States. Soldiers, ethnographers, naturalists, laborers, mechanists, local
guides, as well as, a diverse racial company of African Americans, Anglos, Chinese, Native

9
Historian William Goetzmann includes that the Topographical Engineers also, “laid out
national boundaries and directly promoted the advance of settlement by locating and constructing
wagon roads, improving rivers and harbors, even performing experiments for the location of
subsurface water in the arid regions.” Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 4.

16
Americans, and Mexicans became embroiled with the boundary commission. While all these
actors played a vital role in the (dis)functioning of the boundary commission and the resulting
(dis)assembly of a national boundary line, this chapter brings to the forefront Emory and his
fellow astronomers and surveyors. Considering this, Emory’s path to the periphery of the nation
was hardly trivial. His childhood on a southern plantation, his previous technological training at
West Point, his work on the Northeast Boundary Survey, his military exploits in both the South
and with Kearny’s Army shaped how he saw the American West, but also how he imagined it’s
southern boundary line. Taking the astronomer and surveyor as subject, this chapter asks, what
role did a figure like Emory, play in the production of the U.S.-Mexico border, and for that
matter, what role did the border play in the production of the boundary commission’s
astronomers and surveyors as expert observers?
According to prominent historian of U.S. western exploration, William Goetzmann,
Emory and the other topographical engineers were instrumental to and “self-consciously”
engaged in the national project of settling and developing the American West. With their western
surveys and explorations, he argued, they were the poster children of manifest destiny, the belief
that the United States was divinely ordained to expand westward. However, writing in the 1950s
and 1960s, Goetzmann’s scholarship on exploration and empire was tinged with the period’s
consensus history, in that, it romanticized and celebrated figures like Emory, as “western
heroes,” whose “heroic deeds” ushered in an “important phase of western development” by
“clear[ing] a way for the course of empire in the West.”
10
While his analysis oversimplifies the
reordering of racial, economic and political power, Goetzmann does interlink science and empire
through his extensive coverage of nineteenth-century explorations and their scientific

10
Goetzmann, Army Exploration, preface, 4.

17
achievements and shortcomings. He traces the emergence of a culture of science against a
western backdrop, where topographical engineers gathered and collected scientific knowledge of
the region for the purposes of future settlement. This chapter extends Goetzmann’s cogent
analysis by asking how did the culture of science produce or create place, specifically, an
imagined West. Emory and others were trained at West Point, but how did their training shape
their practice of observation and understanding of the natural world? Who held the authority to
define what constituted a scientific expert in the field? What role did race and gender play in the
production of these agents of empire? How and to what purpose did these men first create and
then organize ways of knowing the region? How did these surveyors use the knowledge they
made to tell stories about themselves as modern subjects? How did science and western
expansion come together to create, reinforce, and/or destabilize racial and gendered hierarchies
in the West?
The “fixing” of the U.S.-Mexico border in the mid-nineteenth century is one site in which
these questions played themselves out. This chapter, then, turns to the surveyors of the boundary
survey and their training, instruments, and visual practices to better understand how statecraft
was simultaneously laid out and dismantled at the periphery of the nation. These surveyors
collected certain knowledges while discarding others. They gathered and recorded data to create
ontologies of the border landscape and its inhabitants.
11
Visual observation was central to the
process of westward expansion and knowledge production of the borderlands. The gaze of the
surveyor was varied and multifaceted. Historian Giselle Brynes lists three types, commercial,

11
I use Ann Laura Stoler’s definition of ontology to describe the ways in which the border came
into existence by the act of naming. Stoler writes, “I understand ontology as that which is about
the ascribed being or essence of things, the categories of things that are thought to exist or can
exist in any specific domain, and the specific attributes assigned to them.” Ann Laura Stoler,
Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 2009), 4.

18
scientific, and panoptic, which centered on property and production, assessing the land’s
qualities and origins, and the omnipotent birds-eye view of the panoramic landscape. To look
was to possess, therefore, to look was to empower the viewer with authority to reimagine the
landscape. Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that the authority to claim the “right to look” is derived
from the exclusive ability to control information, images, and ideas. The act of looking produces
an observing subject, one endowed with perceptual knowledge and power. How, then, did Emory
and his surveyors use their authority to become seeing subjects, “a person…constituted as an
agent of sight” on the border?
12
This chapter will first consider the boundary commission
surveyors’ training prior to their arrival at the border and the limitations to sight that challenged
their truth claims about an accurate boundary line. It will then conclude with how science and
technology informed the self-fashioning of the surveyor’s body and the boundary line as a
modern entity.
Disciplining Sight Lines: Learning to See like a Scientist
Let us return to the character that introduced this chapter, William Hemsley Emory.
Emory did not arrive to the newly acquired United States territory with a blank slate. He was
already conditioned to see an abstract imaginary line. At age fifteen, Emory entered West Point,
and thus began phase one of his metamorphosis into a seeing subject.
Among practitioners of science, astronomy held an admirable measure of prestige, one
linked to practical mathematical utility and high standards of accuracy, likewise, it was a
discipline bound to surveying and vision. The first task in surveying is to determine the relative
position of points on the surface of the earth, and in the 19th century, this was accomplished
through astronomical determination. To fix a geographical location, to locate and then place its

12
Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Subject of Visual Culture,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 10.

19
latitude and longitude on a map required measuring the position of celestial bodies with
astronomical instruments. This feature intimately linked astronomy to not only surveying but
also navigation and trade, tying the practice to imperial ambitions and commercial enterprises.
Additionally, in the first few decades of the 17th century, Johannes Kepler compared the process
of reflection and refraction of light in astronomical instruments to similar processes in the
mechanics of the human eye. By the 1850s, astronomical training in Europe, along with
mathematics, physics and mechanics, increasingly shifted its focus to applied calculation and
experimentation. A process that began over a century earlier, specialists of these exact sciences
turned to measure and calculate as a means to decipher the laws of nature and the human body.
13

However, during this same period, the state of training in astronomy and surveying in the
United States was limited in size and scope as compared to its European scientific counterparts.
By the time the boundary commission began operations in 1849 there were only a handful of
institutions its members could have received formal training in surveying, let alone, scientific
instruction. These included the United States’ first engineering school, West Point Military
Academy (1803), a private military academy, Norwich University (1819), and a nonmilitary
scientific college, Renselaer Polytechnic Institute (1824).
14
These three institutions, which

13
See Marie-Noëlle Bourguett, Christian Licoppe, and H. Otto Sibum, introduction to
Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of precision from the seventeenth to the twentieth
century (New York: Routledge Press, 2002).
14
Norwich University was first named the American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy
in 1819 and renamed as its current moniker in 1836. See Keir B. Sterling, “The Role of Army
and Navy in American Natural History, 1803-1860,” in Science in Uniform, Uniforms in
Science: Historical Studies of American Military and Scientific Interactions, eds. Margaret
Vining and Marton C. Hacker (Washington, D.C.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2007), 33-48;
James R. Endler, Other Leaders, Other Heroes: West Point’s Legacy to America Beyond the
Field of Battle (Westport: Praeger, 1998), 51; and Mary Ann James, “Engineering an
Environment for Change: Bigelow, Peirce, and Early Nineteenth-Century Practical Education at
Harvard,” in Science at Harvard University: Historical Perspectives, eds. Clark A. Elliott and
Margaret W. Rossiter (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1992), 67.

20
offered students instruction in practical sciences and civil engineering, were modeled after
L’École Polytechnique, a French military school system established in 1794 that stressed
mathematics and engineering.
15
West Point’s course of study deviated largely from other
contemporary U.S. colleges whose focus rested largely on a classical curriculum that privileged
the study of ancient languages like Latin and Greek as a framework for understanding
civilization.
16
While private institutions, other than Norwich and Renselaer Polytechnic, did
provide courses in natural philosophy, chemistry and mathematics, their mission was not to
furnish specialized vocational knowledge or nurture future professional scientists but, rather, to
shape the intellect and cultivate the “mental and moral discipline” of its students.
17
It was not
until the mid-1840s and 1850s that these universities established technical schools and only well
after the Civil War when American colleges fully implemented programs in practical and
professional science.
18

With West Point as the premiere engineering institution, the boundary commission filled
its leading personnel with its graduates. From the allotment of appointments in 1849 to the
distribution of the final report in 1857, all but one of the boundary commission’s lead surveyors

15
Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 14.
16
Stephen E. Ambrose, Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999), 26.
17
Mary Ann James, “Engineering an Environment for Change,” 61; James L. Morrison, “The
Best School”: West Point, 1833-1866 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1986), 111.
18
The Harvard’s Abbott Lawrence School of Engineering, Yale’s Sheffield School of
Engineering, Brown’s Department of Natural Philosophy and Civil Engineering and University
of Michigan’s Department of Physics and Civil Engineering were all established between 1846
and 1855. See James R. Endler, “The Educators,” chap. 4 in Other Leaders, Other Heroes: West
Point’s Legacy to America Beyond the Field of Battle (Westport: Praeger, 1998). On practical
science programs after the civil war see Robert V. Bruce, “The New Education,” chap. 24 in The
Launching of Modern American Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). The
Morrill Act of 1862 provided federal lands for states to establish colleges in the instruction of
agriculture and the mechanical arts.

21
and chief astronomers were alumnus of the academy.
19
Edmund La Fayette Hardcastle, Charles
J. Whiting, William F. Smith, Nathaniel Michler, and Charles Nesbit Turnbull made up the
remaining assistant surveyors and astronomers trained at the institution. And although civilians
did amount to more than half of the total assistant engineers outfitted to the commission, the
leadership was concentrated to a particular group of specialists who arrived with a set of
theoretical tools to help them see, order and catalogue a landscape.
By 1824 West Point reserved the teaching of military drills, tactics and strategies mainly
for the summer and filled the academic year with nine to ten hour days and six days a week of
class instruction and study in mathematics, natural and experimental philosophy, chemistry, civil
engineering, mineralogy, geology, and topographical and architectural drawing.
20
The focus was

19
The chief surveyors and astronomers include John McClellan, James Duncan Graham,
William H. Emory, and Amiel Weeks Whipple. Lieutenant Amiel Weeks Whipple served as
chief astronomer and acting surveyor for only a brief moment during the commission when the
appointed surveyor, A. B. Gray, was absent due to illness. During debates over the disputed
Bartlett-García Conde compromise, Whipple’s appointment by Bartlett was later challenged as
an unauthorized designation, see William H. Goetzmann, “The United States-Mexican Boundary
Survey, 1848-1853,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 62, no. 2 (October 1958): 176 and Paula
Rebert, La Gran Línea: Mapping the United States-Mexico Boundary, 1849-1857 (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2001), 23. Although all Corps members involved in the boundary
commission were West Point graduates, by July 1, 1848 the Corps of Topographical Engineers
was made up of forty-five officers those of which six were not West Point graduates, see
William H. Goetzmann, appendix to Army Exploration in the America West, 1803-1863 (New
Haven, Yale University Press, 1959), 435-437. Note that there is a discrepancy in Goetzmann’s
appendix, which lists George W. Hughes as not a graduate of West Point, see “Hughes, George
Wurtz,” in Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774-1949. The Continental
Congress, September 5, 1774, to October 21, 1788 and the Congress of the United States from
the First to the Eightieth Congress, March 4, 1789, to January 3, 1949, inclusive (Washington:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950), 1343.
20
This is by no means an exhaustive list on the topics studied at West Point. For more on West
Point curriculum see Morrison,“The Best School,” 73, 91; Gerald D. Saxon, “Henry Washington
Benham: A U.S. Army Engineer’s View of the U.S.-Mexican War,” in Mapping and Empire:
Soldier-Engineers on the Southwestern Frontier, ed. Dennis Reinhartz (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2005), 131; and Edward Carlisle Boynton, History of West Point, and its military
importance during the American revolution: and the origin and progress of the United States
military (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1863), 422. West Point, in its founding, did not set out to

22
such on the practical application of the sciences that when graduating students joined mounted
regiments, some commanders complained of their deficiency in horsemanship skills and
knowledge of military tactical concepts.
21
Despite having the best scientific collections and
equipment at their disposal, students often “drilled on obsolete artillery pieces” or in practice
“had to ride on out-dated, ill-fitting saddles.”
22
The Academic Board’s substantial emphasis on
scientific and mathematic curriculum, made even adding a course on riding difficult.
23
Although
the Academy’s purpose was to manufacture professional soldiers, in West Point historian James
L. Morrison’s estimation, the institution instead produced “engineers capable of functioning as
soldiers.”
24

So what did Emory and the rest of the boundary surveyors spend most of their time
studying? Optics, the science that deals with the properties and propagation of light and the study
of vision, was one such subject. William H. C. Bartlett, Principal Assistant Professor of
Engineering from 1827-1829 and Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy from 1834-

be a technical scientific institution and, in fact, fell far behind other European universities by
offering only the elementary basics in the sciences. It was not until after Sylvanus Thayer was
hired as Superintendent in 1817 that the school began to mirror itself after the French military
educational system. The turn to an advanced, technical and practical application of mathematics
became evident with the introduction of a civil engineering course in 1824. All leading boundary
officials, with the exception of James D. Graham, directly surveying the U.S.-Mexico boundary
attended the academy after this transition, particularly between the years of 1822-1848 and with
the majority enrolled after 1831. These include, Graham (1813-1817), John McClellan (1822-
1826), William Emory (1826-1831), Charles J. Whiting (1831-1835), Amiel Whipple (1837-
1841), William F. Smith (1841-1845), Edmund Hardcastle (1842-1846), and Nathaniel Michler
(1844-1848). See Theodore J. Crackel, West Point: A Bicentennial History (University Press of
Kansas, 2002), 48, 125. An engineering course was available prior to 1824 at West Point and
was taught by Claudius Crozet, a graduate of Ponts et Chaussée in Pairs. Crozet did focus on the
“fundamentals of mathematics and analytical geometry” but his course centered on military
science rather than the civil aspects of engineering. Goetzmann, Army Exploration, 14; Crackel,
West Point, 125.
21
Morrison, “The Best School,” 100; Crackel, West Point, 127.
22
Morrison, “The Best School,” 100.
23
Crackel, West Point, 127.
24
Morrison,“The Best School,” 111.

23
1871,
25
introduced his West Point students to the latest theories on optics. He spent the time in
between appointments fulfilling engineering duties as a member of the Corps of Engineers,
where Bartlett gained valuable field experience that he could then relay to the classroom.
26
Once
at the academy, Bartlett became well known for his series of textbooks on Acoustics, Optics,
Astronomy, Mechanics and Molecular Physics. Although not as coveted as his work on
analytical mechanics, his textbook, An Elementary Treatise on Optics: Designed for the Use of
Cadets of the United States Military Academy, published in 1838, acquainted students to a wide
range of topics including but not limited to the power of lenses, optical images, the eye,
microscopes and telescopes, and the dispersion of light. Optics, as it relates to both vision and
the components of optical instruments, such as lenses or mirrors, plays an important role in how
a geographical location is determined and conceived and so deserves a close reading to better
comprehend how boundary officials understood the embodiment of sight.
Through Bartlett’s course on optics, Emory and others came to realize the mechanical
capacities of their bodies, specifically the power of their corporeal eyes. West Point cadets
learned that when an object is brought close to the eyes, the retina must adjust in order to focus
on the object. Bartlett wrote, “it is certain that the eye must possess the power of self
adjustment,” either by way of the lens moving back and forth like that of a microscope or where
the lens curvature alters to adjust to the convergence of the rays. At this point it was not yet

25
George W. Cullum, Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point, N.Y., from its establishment, March 16, 1802, to the army re-
organization of 1866-67 (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1868), 1:365; Crackel, West Point, 125.
26
During his tenure in the Corps of Engineers, Bartlett came upon a hindrance while laying
down the stone fortification for Fort Adams. In light of this, between 1830 and 1831 he
experimented with various building stones and found that the building materials had extensive
physical and chemical properties that changed under different conditions. He published his
findings and methods in the American Journal of Science. Edward S. Holden “Biographical
Memoir of William H. C. Bartlett, 1804-1893,” in National Academy of Sciences Biographical
Memoirs, vol.7, (Washington, D.C.: The National Academy of Sciences, 1911), 176.

24
known that the lens is a muscle that contracts and expands in its adjustment, which aligned with
Bartlett’s second estimation. Either way, Bartlett understood the “adjusting power of the eye” to
bring into focus distant or near objects within milliseconds. The rapidity of their bodily
mechanics made their eyes an impressive specimen of visual sensation. However, the limitations
of their sight, to see extraordinarily distant, close or miniscule matter, would require instruments
of the highest precision. At West Point, cadets would become entangled with astronomical and
surveying mechanical apparatus’.
The educational training of boundary officials offered at West Point, and the scientific
institutional complex at large, mechanized their vision. They sat at the intersection between
material body and mechanical technologies. As mentioned above, the examination and
popularization of the human eye as an optical instrument dates back to Johannes Kepler’s 1604
work, Astronomiae Pars Optica (The Optical Part of Astronomy).
27
Here the process of
reflection and refraction of light in optical instruments were extended to the human eye. While
Bartlett does not explicitly liken the eye to an optical instrument, the correspondence of the two
is implicit as it sits within this larger history of comparison. He described the eye as a “collection
of refractive media,” and noted how the crystalline lens changes shape to focus light at different
planes.
28
This is much like an optical instrument that uses mirrors and lenses to process light
rays to magnify an image. Bartlett continued that when an “object is too near to be distinctly
visible, some refractive medium [must] be interposed to assist the eye in bending the rays to foci
upon its retina;” this would be the task of the single microscope otherwise known as a

27
Nicholas J. Wade and Michael T. Swanston, Visual Perception an Introduction, 3rd ed. (New
York: Psychology Press, 2013), 75.
28
William H. C. Bartlett, An elementary treatise on optics designed for the use of the cadets of
the United States military academy (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1839), 93.

25
magnifying lens.
29
Here the mechanical apparatus perfects human vision. It “assists” the physical
limitations in the mechanical operations of the eye by bending light rays, yet the labor power of
vision maintains its loci in the eye’s retina. In this instance body and mechanical apparatus
converge to make the unseen seeable. It is an “entanglement of performance and instrument”
where human sight, beyond analogy, becomes mechanized to reach the highest pinnacle of
objectivity, an objectivity offered by the instruments’ detached and enhanced viewfinder.
30

Students practiced this entanglement in observational exercises with the sextant and a mounted
zenith telescope in the West Point observatory. Cadets came away from the course with a
working knowledge on optics and how the instruments they used in the field would assist the
already intricate optical design of the eye in seeing beyond the limits of human sight. The West
Point engineers and surveyors on the boundary line entered the field with this knowledge of
optics; they stepped onto the terrain ready to mechanically adjust their sightlines.
Jacob Whitman Bailey, professor of chemistry, mineralogy and geology from 1834-1857,
further transformed West Point cadets into embodied observers. Embodied engagement included
the development of skills, techniques and tools necessary for managing bodily observation. First,
Bailey was internationally recognized for his microscopic investigations of algae. His pioneering
research in microgeology and his improvements on the microscope earned him the coveted title,
President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
31
This is significant
because it demonstrated his use and manipulation of the microscope to see organic phenomenon
beyond the capacities of his ocular organ. In this way, Bailey was the archetype for mechanized

29
Emphasis added. Bartlett, An elementary treatise, 101.
30
I borrow the concept, performance of entanglement, from Bourguett, Licoppe, and Sibum,
Instruments, Travel and Science, 7.
31
Endler, Other Leaders, 99; George W. Cullum, Biographical Register of the Officers and
Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., from its establishment, March 16,
1802, to the army re-organization of 1866-67 (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1868), 1:505.

26
vision, using the machine for greater visual access. Furthermore, fellow scientist, Augustus
Addison Gould, commented on Bailey’s impeccable scientific practices, remembering that “His
observations were always of the most careful and accurate character; and he early began the
important practice of making notes of them, accompanied by delineations, leaving nothing to
recollection or mere indefinite statements; thus having always at hand permanent data for his
subsequent papers.”
32
Bailey’s devotion to careful “observation”, his disregard for simple
“recollection,” and his incessantly detailed and organized note taking surely carried over into to
his classroom lessons with students at West Point. For scientists like Bailey, the field or
laboratory notebook was an exceptional tool for transferring and organizing what one sees and
observes into image, text, symbols and/or numbers, ultimately culminating into precise and
“permanent data.” These scientific practices of countless notated observations were not exclusive
to Bailey but emerged as standard operations in an American nineteenth-century Baconian
scientific atmosphere, where the golden rule was to observe, record and systemically arrange
data as a means to arrive at the true and rational representations of natural law and phenomenon
guided by divine design.
33
Bailey operated on an empirical basis, meaning that, to objectively
know could only be achieved through direct experiments by use of ones senses. In this context, it
was only through Bailey’s “careful” and “accurate” observations that his data could be conceived
as “permanent” or even legitimate. One had to discipline both their visual frame and habits of
data collection. Through faculty mentors like Bailey, West Point cadets were exposed to and
came to embody the standard observational operations and practices that would later find their

32
Cullum, Biographical Register, 1:506.
33
George H. Daniels, “The Reign of Bacon in America,” chap. 3 in American Science in the Age
of Jackson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968).

27
way to the rivers, deserts, mountains and forests that blanketed the 32° parallel, of what would
become the southern international boundary line.
West Point was one institutional site in which the boundary commission expert observer
was first brought into being. Their constitution as an authoritative agent of sight rested on the
theoretical and mechanical teachings of vision and the observational practices of scientific
disciplinary standards transmitted to them through texts, lectures and practicum. Through their
educational training, the boundary commission engineers and surveyors became seeing subjects.
Sight belonged to the mechanics of the body, thus, the proper disciplining of senses were
instrumental to things like proper surveying. West Point, as an institution, disciplined their
bodies to perform the appropriate skills, techniques, and procedures required for scientific sight.
Building a Borderscape: Seeing a Line by Numbers
For the boundary officers, precise and accurate observation was fundamental not only for
empirical science but for their mission at hand. Emory had demanded extreme vigilance, warning
that, “An error in the latitude or longitude of either extremity, of a few seconds, would produce a
great departure of the line from the point it was intended to strike; the utmost precision was
therefore, necessary to be observed in all determinations connected with the line.”
34
Emory’s
program was aimed at exact measurement for the service of the state; exact measurement to
determine what and who belonged to whom and where. With the stakes so high, it was not
enough to simply see. An agent had to scientifically observe. Standard practice dictated hundreds
of elaborate lunar, stellar and planetary observations to be made in a single night. The greater
number of observations and computations meant the more accurately fixed an astronomical
position on the ground. The boundary officers, in their quest for an evermore-accurate boundary

34
William H. Emory, Report on the United States and Mexico Survey, Made under the Direction
of the Secretary of the Interior, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1857, S. Exec. Doc. 108, 1:5.

28
line, threw upon the landscape a “regime of vigilant surveillance” one in which celestial
sightlines quantified earthly terrain.
35

Despite Emory’s sentiment for the most accurate line, financial limitations, he argued,
dictated the procedures and methods adopted. When Emory formulated his design for fixing the
boundary line he maintained that triangulation, “the most rigid mode” of operation, would be too
costly both in securing expertise and time, therefore, money. With these restraints, Emory
executed the “next method in order of accuracy;” he planned to ascertain latitude, longitude and
azimuth through astronomical determinations. Emory desired the “utmost precision” in his plan
of operation but he was also pragmatic, being constrained to a limited budget and deadline.
Selecting a less than precise mode of determining the boundary line would require a sleight of
hand, especially when the Mexican Boundary Commission, who also held high standards for
accuracy, desired nothing less than triangulation. Principal Astronomer to the Boundary Survey,
J. D. Graham, also professed that triangulation was “not necessary to the satisfactory
accomplishment,” of producing a boundary line. Astronomical determinations would be suitable
enough and “practicable without retarding the progress of the surveys.”
36
Besides, Emory
purported, the Mexican Boundary Commission lacked the high technical instruments required for
their preferred method anyway.
37
Considering the U.S. commission’s decision might produce a
discrepant border line, Emory and his team would have to reduce all possible errors in their
approximation of the line and use the best instruments available in order to tout their work as

35
I borrow the term, “regime of vigilant surveillance,” from Simon Schaffer, “Astronomers
Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation,” Science in Context 2, no. 1 (1988): 115.
36
U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, made in compliance with a
resolution of the Senate calling for information in relation to the commission appointed to run
and move the boundary between the United States and Mexico, 32d Cong., 1st sess., 1852, S.
Exec. Doc. 119, 350.
37
Emory, Report on the United States and Mexico Survey, 1:5.

29
“probably the best determined geographical position in the Interior of the continent.”
38
Emory
was not one to be modest; his use of “probably” underscored the questionability of the line while
simultaneously celebrating such an extraordinary achievement in what he imagined as the
unknown interior of the continent. The chief astronomer’s devotion to and emphasis on methods
of operation meant attaching value to less than accurate measurements and numbers. And to
achieve this, meant minimizing error by seeing properly and disciplining the body.
West of the Rio Grande, the boundary line would not entirely follow topographical
features; meaning that to produce an idealized straight line would require a numerical network
arranged on top of the region. Mathematical formulas converted sight into numbers, configuring
as near exact coordinates on the earth’s surface. The U.S. boundary officers, as astronomers and
engineers, embraced the “quantifying spirit” of the earlier century, harboring a dedication for
order, measurement and calculation and carried that passion West.
39
As a surveying method,
triangulation was based on trigonometric principals. First, the surveyor would measure a baseline
by connecting two astronomically observed points; this baseline would be a segment of the
boundary line. Second, the baseline would serve as the base of a triangle where in which the
angles of the triangle would be calculated. The rest of the baseline, the boundary line, could then
be known by interweaving alternating triangles across the landscape and calculating their
vertices. The earth’s spherical configuration added a more complicated set of trigonometric
formulas to the equation. While never the main procedure of operation, triangulation was not
entirely avoided in the boundary commission and was used as a final effort against a recalcitrant

38
William H. Emory, Chief Astronomer and Surveyor, to John Russell Bartlett, U.S. Boundary
Commissioner, Washington, D.C., February 14, 1853; Letters sent by the fourth U.S.
Commissioner, 1849-58, Entry 399; Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and
Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park, MD.
39
Tore Frängsmyer, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Ridger, introduction to The Quantifying Spirit
in the 18th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 2.

30
earth. Reporting back to the Secretary of State, Emory and Salazar mentioned that the
“difficulties of the country” made finding longitude challenging, requiring a more accurate
reading through “direct measurement and triangulation.”
40
Through this practice, the surveyors
remodeled a three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional conjured mesh of geometric shapes.
To the surveyor, jagged mountain ranges, furrowed canyons and arid deserts were seen as
triangles, angles and coordinates on an imagined plotted grid. With the surveyors faith in
numbers and in mathematics they saw and marked what they believed was the best
approximation of an abstract line. They constructed a borderscape, a landscape that did not exist
in “reality” but, rather, was a constructed space fashioned through the culture of science and
numbers.
In lieu of triangulation, Emory applied a program of geodetic survey, one in which the
earth was considered a sphere rather than a smooth, flat plane. A geodetic survey, Emory
announced, would require “for its success the most accurate and elaborate observations, and a
skilful application of those observations by analytic formulae, involving the figure of the earth
and other elements, a perfect knowledge of which has not yet been attained, although researches
upon the subject have occupied the minds of the great astronomers.”
41
Thus, a geodetic survey
placed atop the fringes of the U.S. border would require not only a finite visual sense for
accurate observation but also a translation of this line of sight into numeric form, skills Emory
embodied from his West Point and on the field training. The mysteries of space and earth were
comparable to the unknown mysteries of the interior of the nation. Like the great astronomers

40
William H. Emory, U.S. Boundary Commissioner and José Salazar Ylarregui, Mexican
Boundary Commissioner to unknown, Fort Bliss, August 14, 1855; Letters sent by the fourth
U.S. Commissioner, 1849-58, Entry 399; Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and
Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park, MD.
41
Rebert, La Gran Línea, 30.

31
before him, Emory painted himself as an explorer who set out to make tangible the unknown. He
was simultaneously the modern scientist and the pioneer of space. He was an embodiment of a
long lineage of great minds, a manifestation made possible only in the assigned act of
constructing a boundary line.
Astronomical determination of the boundary position, its correct latitude, longitude and
azimuth, similarly employed mathematical sight and held the same visual adherence to numbers
for the boundary astronomers. To determine latitude, Emory used the Talcott method. Captain
Andrew Talcott was a fellow West Point graduate whose mathematical method for finding
latitude brought results as accurate as ten feet within the “true” astronomical position of
latitude.
42
What did this translate to? It implied the boundary line could be any where from one
to ten feet off its “true” position. This was entirely acceptable under Emory’s standards for
accuracy. The method required observing and marking the meridian passage, where the
astronomer measures the zenith, the point when a star is vertically above the observer, as it
crosses the astronomers meridian, their positioning on the line of longitude.
43
This is a tricky
endeavor because atmospheric refraction causes the star to appear directly above the observer
when in actuality it is lower in altitude. When light rays from a distant star enter the earth’s
atmosphere they bend rather than follow a straight path to the observer, this causes an error in
latitudinal measurement. Talcott’s mathematical calculation (L= 1/2 (d+d') + 1/2 (z-z'))

42
Also called the Horrebow-Talcott Method, which paid homage to the Danish astronomer Peder
Horrebow who had “discovered the technique about a century earlier.” The Talcott Method
found the latitudinal point within 0.1 second of arc. Richard Stachurski, Longitude by Wire:
Finding North America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 48.
43
The altitude of the star is called a zenith. It is “A point on the celestial sphere directly above
the observer’s head is called the zenith. Imagine a line running from the zenith through the
observer’s position to the center of the earth. Latitude is the angle between this zenith line and
the equator.” Stachurski, Longitude, 45.

32
corrected, as best possible, atmospheric refraction in latitudinal determinations.
44
Thus, vertical
observation assumed a mathematical solution.
Emory and his team of surveyors and astronomers along with their geodetic survey were
engaged in engineering an attitudinally-bordered space centered on mathematic sight. To find an
astronomical point on the earth’s surface (latitude and longitude) meant observing celestial
bodies in space. The border became a spatial architecture that was not only horizontally
implanted on the terrain but also vertically determined. The boundary astronomers visually
conceived a borderline in different altitudinal registers. Historical scholarship on mapping
empire generally focuses on the two-dimensional output of cartographic techniques along with a
discussion of the mapmaker’s bird-eye view, “a strategy used by artists, cartographers and
writers to describe a landscape in its totality.”
45
A map was the representational materiality of
this perspective. It positioned a disembodied observer floating above viewing the panorama
below. In this context the bird’s-eye perspective “was entirely imagined”
46
and sat in
contradistinction to actual observation. But if instead of examining the visual representation of
sight, such as maps, and alternatively turning to the act and practice of astronomical observation
itself, visuality and the authoritative claim to look then requires the skills to go beyond the bird-
eye perspective or the terrestrial field of sight to look vertically. Boundary astronomers derived

44
The letters to the equation correspond to Richard Stachurski diagram where he provides a clear
breakdown of the equation. He writes that the “surveyor could use pairs of stars, S and S' in the
diagram, that crossed the meridian, one to the south of his zenith and one to the north, and
measure only the small zenith distance between them, z and z'. The latitude then is equal to one-
half of the sum of the declinations, d + d', added to one-half of the distance z – z'.” Stachurski,
Longitude, 48.
45
Giselle Byrnes, Boundary Makers: Land Surveying and the Colonisation of New Zealand
(Wellington, N.Z.: Bridget Williams Books, 2001), 62. For exception to this, see Matthew H.
Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
46
Emphasis in the original. Byrnes, Boundary Makers, 62

33
their power from knowing how to properly observe and identify what to look at in different
stratum. In order to engineer a border on the land, boundary astronomers used their instruments
and tools to see the sun, Polaris, earth or Jupiter’s moons, or any other acceptable set of stars or
celestial bodies. Visuality was not bound to the earth’s atmosphere through a disembodied
cartographer. Boundary astronomers were marking more than the edge of the U.S. empire; their
visuality extended the frontier into space, an effort that preceded Fredrick Jackson Turner’s
famed 1893 speech that prophesized the terrestrial, social and political end of the American
frontier at the rim of the Pacific coast.
To see attitudinally required “fixing” a borderscape. Boundary astronomers and
surveyors, in their correspondence to the state, used the language of “fixing” the boundary line to
refer to the determination of latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates on the land. Ultimately, this
brought border within global cartographic standards. This “fixing” of the boundary line occurred
on a two-dimensional map but was also engineered in physical space. Over a distance of between
nine hundred and a thousand miles, the boundary commission built 50 astronomical stations to
observe the occultations of stars by the moon and other.
47
Border markers had to visually mark
coordinates. The laborers of the commission, and sometimes the soldiers escorting the
expedition, erected monuments wherever the line crossed a water source, a road, a town, a mine,
basically, any point with human traffic. The material ranged from cast iron or marble stone to a
pile of stones with or without mortar. Additionally, the large cadre of astronomers, surveyors,
laborers and infantry physically moved through the landscape, set up camp and then left debris in
their wake. Their instruments reconstructed the topography. Barometric, thermometric and

47
U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, made in compliance with a
resolution of the Senate calling for information in relation to the commission appointed to run
and move the boundary between the United States and Mexico, 32d Cong., 1st sess., 1852, S.
Exec. Doc. 119, 237.

34
meteorological observations remade mountains summits near or on the boundary line.
Instruments like the custom-made Fox dip-circle for magnetic inclination, declination, and
intensity transformed a mountain’s features into a designated altitude, into a number. Numeric
features became “part of [a mountain’s] identification.”
48
The boundary commission constructed
a borderscape of numbers, but they also left a physical imprint upon the land. Under the auspices
of the surveyor, the U.S.-Mexico boundary line was in a state of becoming. In the following
section, we’ll see how Emory and his surveyors used the borderscape they created to discipline
their bodies into properly performing agents of sight.
A Recalcitrant Earth: Errors of Sight
The observer, in appropriate Enlightenment fashion, believed in the ability to order and
record the world through quantifying practices. For boundary technicians the world could be
known exactly as it was seen. They did not prescribe to contemporary philosophical theories
which hypothesized that what was seen was more of a useful fiction than reality. What boundary
surveyors saw, they believed corresponded directly to a measurable entity in the physical world.
Yet, imperfections in sight and contemporary technology as well as a noncompliant environment
troubled boundary official’s faith in the ability to see and mark a boundary line. So again,
following Enlightenment practices, boundary observers took to the field ready to control for all
possible errors of sight.
The West Point trained surveyors of the boundary commission quickly learned that their
training in a controlled environment at West Point was not easily transferable to the boundary
line. Their schooling in how to see and use mechanical devices to amplify their sight was not
entirely reproducible on the field. Due to rough terrain and inclement weather, instruments

48
Bourguett, Licoppe, and Sibum, Instruments, Travel and Science, 13.

35
routinely broke and were rendered inoperable. Chronometers where particularly vulnerable to
losing time because of uneven topography and the mercury from artificial horizons leaked out
owing to the dry weather.
49
Vibrations created by the movement of people and animals in the
camp tainted astronomical readings. Billowing smoke from campfires and fog obstructed the
viewing of stars crossing the observer’s meridian.
50
Even frustration with the journey placed the
tools in jeopardy as when First Assistant Engineer Henry Force, upset with his mule, beat the
animal with a micrometer telescope, damaging the spider lines used to measure minute
distances.
51
If anything, these obstacles pointed to a futile attempt to order nature into a
systematic grid of national lines.
The physical environment of the southwest, its deserts, rivers, mountains and valleys
altered the learned practices of sight practitioners. The boundary became a field laboratory to
make adjustments in seeing a scientific landscape. Looking to improve observational techniques,
Lt. Col. Amiel Weeks Whipple, boundary assistant astronomer and West Point graduate, created
a guide in 1856 after his service with the boundary commission to better train the field surveyor
in locating astronomical positions in temporary camps. Whipple was determined to locate and
account for all possible factors that could potentially inhibit accurate seeing.
52
To limit floor

49
William H. Emory, U.S. Boundary Commissioner, to Robert McClelland, Secretary of the
Interior, Washington, D.C., August 30, 1854; Invoice and receipts for astronomical instruments
by Major Emory, Entry 436; Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitration,
Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park, MD.
50
Bartlett Papers: The Mexican Boundary Commission papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-
1853, MSS MFilm 00647, reel 9, Official Journal, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
51
Joseph Richard Werne, The Imaginary Line: A History of the United States and Mexican
Boundary Survey, 1848-1857 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2007), 95.
52
In this tension for accuracy in the field we also see a distinction between observational and
experimental science. Lorraine Daston makes note of the distinction in her work tracing the early
development of observational science. Daston points out that experiments are moments when
one intervenes in the course of nature by manipulation of a controlled environment and
observations are studied as they occur in the natural environment. Lorraine Daston, “The Empire

36
vibrations, Whipple instructed the surveyor to dig a one and a half to two feet deep trench around
the stand that supported the astronomical devices. To keep the skies clear of cooking fires,
Whipple directed the engineer to keep the flames 300 feet away and downwind from the
observation site.
53
Isolation of the optical apparatus’ was key in validating the collected data. It
was an attempt to siphon off the outside world and make it external to the viewer while
simultaneously acknowledging its troublesome presence. It was a (dis)embodied practice of
being both part of and external to the borderlands. Whipple did not lose his faith that a
mechanical device could objectively locate a line on the landscape; rather he placed his energy in
controlling external hindrances to obtain the most accurate results possible.
Even when error in instrument readings occurred, the trust in optical devices remained
strong. Whipple stressed to take multiple readings from several sets of stars and to observe daily
for the index error, an error produced by the misalignment of an instrument. By determining the
index error, one can correct any inaccurate reading by adjusting it against the deviation. Even in
miscalculation, the instrument, with the assistance of a trained viewer, could still determine the
most scientifically approximate boundary line. Whipple’s instructional guide aimed to improve
the mechanical vision of engineers in surveying the West from lessons he learned on the
boundary line. In doing so, he devised new strategies to see the abstract and manipulate the
environment surrounding the instruments to accurately observe the phenomena desired. The
observer would have to be patient and diligently disciplined. Technicians like Whipple instructed
others on how to look once in the field, strongly believing in the ability to read, manage and
master an ever-shifting landscape.

of Observation, 1600-1800” in Histories of Scientific Observation, eds. Lorraine Daston and
Elizabeth Lunbeck (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 85-86.
53
Bartlett Papers: The Mexican Boundary Commission papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-
1853, MSS MFilm 00647, reel 9, Official Journal, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

37
Thus, marking a boundary line was ripe with miscalculations. Natural errors could also
include tripod placement on the ground, unequal atmospheric refraction, atmospheric changes
that expand parts of the telescope, and wind producing vibrations. An instrument error, like the
one described by Whipple, could be caused by an instrumental imperfection, regardless of
careful adjustments by the observer. Personal errors were those caused by the human eye.
Fatigue from late night or continuous observations could slow the observer’s reaction times,
which would result in inaccurately documenting the transit, the exact point an image crossed the
wires of a micrometer or some other field of view. During the boundary commission,
astronomers referred to the difference in recorded transit times as the personal equation. Even
without fatigue, individual observers, when compared, had different observational reaction times.
In 1820, German astronomer Friedrich Bessel first used the term, personal equation, when after a
series of examinations he “established that on average he was 1.041 seconds slower than his
colleague,” in documenting stellar observations.
54
Simon Schaffer contends that astronomers
during this period did not consider these individual discrepancies as a psychological
phenomenon requiring quantitative experimental psychological analysis, which would come
much later in the nineteenth-century. Instead, astronomers tried to manage the differences
between observers through even more disciplined habits of observation along with new
mechanized technologies. The solution was “astronomical discipline,” as when one astronomer
recognized that,
There will be a constant difference between the eager, quick, impulsive man who
habitually anticipates, as it were, the instant when he sees star and wire together, and the
phlegmatic, slow-and-sure man who carefully waits till he is quite sure that the contact

54
Simon Schaffer, “Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation,” Science in
Context 2, no. 1 (1988): 110.

38
has taken place, and then deliberately and firmly records it. These differences are so truly
personal to the observer that it is quite possible to correct for them.
55

Correction was a matter of properly disciplining bodily habits and character constitutions.
Mechanization could also lend a helping hand, as Schaffer argues, William Bond justified
extravagant instrumental expense on the premise that high-quality German reflectors and transit
instruments were necessary to minimize the personal equation. Accurate and experienced
performance along with quality instruments was very nearly enough to detect and control for
human error.
Boundary officials knew their measurements were unreliable amidst a recalcitrant earth
and the flawed human eye; mathematical models, they believed, would turn the unreliable into
close approximations of world around them. It was a steadfast dogma, which held that “absolute
measures were true representations of nature.”
56
Ferdinand Hassler, the first superintendent of
the United States Coast Survey, duly noted that “It becomes the duty of an accurate observer in
no case to rely merely upon the accuracy of his instrument and in his own skill, but to adopt such
a method of observing as will counteract, as far as possible, the errors of the instrument and
those to which he himself is liable in making his observations.”
57
Methods of counteraction
included the calibration of the observer’s body and the many parts of observer’s theodolites,
zenith telescopes. The entanglement between proper astronomical performance and instrument
required strict vigilance. But it also included a set of mathematical computational skills that

55
Walter E. Maunder, The Royal Observatory Greenwich: a Glance at its History and Work
(London: Religious Tract Society, 1900), 177, quoted in Simon Schaffer, “Astronomers Mark
Time,” 125.
56
David Turnbull, “Travelling Knowledge: Narratives, Assemblage and Encounters: The making
of knowledge is the making of space,” in Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of
precision from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, eds. Marie-Noëlle Bourguett, Christian
Licoppe, and H. Otto Sibum (New York: Routledge Press, 2002), 219.
57
Stachurski, Longitude, 27.

39
could minimize problems like the pesky personal equation. Emory used Greenwich astronomical
tables with infallible astronomical computation and mechanized calculation to get to the nearest
accurate line as possible. Whipple controlled for the instrumental index error by taking the
mathematical average of multiple observational readings. The boundary commission used
Talcott’s mathematical method for finding latitude when atmospheric refraction caused a star to
appear higher in altitude then it in “reality” sat. Perceptual or measurement errors assume a
deviation from a direct standard or true representation.
58
Boundary officials assumed there to be
a direct standard of representation that, in a state of discrepancy, could be fixed with a
mathematical model. The presumption was that the greater astronomical accuracy, meant the
greater conformity to the representations of the landscape, and therefore meant the greater
control over the region.
59
The surveyors employed stringent bodily and mathematical methods to
reduce human, environmental and instrumental errors. Seeing space properly meant controlling
the construction of that space. Building a borderscape required managing bodily and mechanical
errors of sight.
Finding and Fixing “Homogenous” Time on the Land
While the environment proved an obstacle for surveyors, finding longitude was another
predicament entirely. Longitude is a coordinate located on the Earth’s surface that sits a number
of degrees east or west of the Prime Meridian, the zero or starting point of a line that runs from
the North Pole to the South Pole. Time is an element of longitude. Each degree from the prime
meridian is divided into sixty minutes, with each division further divided into sixty seconds.
Longitude, then, is a practice that imprinted temporality onto the landscape. Finding and marking

58
On perceptual errors, see Wade and Swanston, Visual Perception, 63.
59
See Edney and his discussion on methods of triangulation. Edney, Mapping an Empire, 21.

40
the longitudinal geographic coordinates along the U.S.-Mexico border made time an essential
component to boundary production.
With today’s solar atomic watches it is hard to imagine a period when knowing exact
local time, therefore longitude, was questionable, imprecise or unknown. When boundary
astronomers took to survey the borderline, time was not yet standardized and Greenwich,
England was not designated at 0˚ longitude. To find longitude, Emory would have to either carry
time from one known place to an unknown location as a means for comparison or locate it
astronomically. Both methods in the mid-19th century were imprecise. During this period there
were at least nine different ways to locate longitude, none of them perfect, and the boundary
commission drew on a variety of them—lunar techniques, chronometers, and flashing signals—
to place time on the ground.
60
Lunar techniques could include: observing the moon against a
fixed set of stars as it passes longitude, adjusting the rate of crossing from a known to an
unknown longitudinal pole; observe the moon as it eclipses stars; and “measuring the angular
distance between the moon and the sun or selected stars.”
61
In this case, seeing time on the land
required altitudinal sight. It required a specific celestial skill set and patience when the moon or
climate did not cooperate.
Flashes of light and timekeepers were additional strategies for seeing and marking a
temporal location. Surveyors connected longitude from the Pacific Ocean to the junction of the
Gila and Colorado River and between observatories in El Paso with signals. Captain Edmund
Hardcastle’s job was to explore the mountains between the two points and “determine upon

60
Robert Treat Paine listed nine techniques for finding longitude as an astronomer for the
geodetic surveys of Massachusetts in the 1830s. See Stachurski, Longitude, 49; and Bruce,
Launching of Modern American Science, 80.
61
Stachurski, Longitude, 51.

41
peaks from which to make signals in the determination of the differences of longitude.”
62

Captain Hardcastle read the topography for marking time. When he located an acceptable peak, a
signal—an explosion of gunpowder, a lit fire or an extinguishing light—was used to compare
time between two locations thereby revealing longitude.
63
This method worked best for seeing
smaller increments of time. Another approach involved transporting chronometers, timepieces
set to local time of a known longitude, to an unknown position. Chronometers were unreliable as
they were sensitive to motion, temperature and could lose time not only within days but also
within a few hours. The difficult terrain, the vast range in temperatures and the extensive length
of the boundary line made chronometers an unpredictable and error-ridden choice for fieldwork.
With lunar observations, chronometric time and signals, boundary officials used a variety of
techniques for seeing and marking time on the landscape. The confluence of time with space was
instrumental to imperial frameworks of engineering space as knowable and manageable. Placing
time on the boundary line, tethered the frontier to the administrative auspices of the nation by
synchronizing people, information and markets. Even before the establishment of the
international meridian in 1884, boundary officials placed a precarious temporal web atop an
abstract boundary line.
Seeing time on the boundary line was an imperial project intermeshed with constructs of
modernity and the colonized other. National time imbedded in the longitudinal construct of space

62
William H. Emory, Chief Astronomer and Surveyor, to Colonel John J. Abert, Chief of the
Corps of Topographical Engineers, San Diego, January 5, 1850; Letters sent by the fourth U.S.
Commissioner, 1849-58, Entry 399; Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and
Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park, MD.
63
To select a flash point one must conduct an experiment to “see if the point is visible, by
lighting a fire just before dark and letting it to burn.” William H. Emory, Chief Astronomer and
Surveyor, to Lieut. W. F. Smith, Corps of the Topographical Engineers, Frontera, January 16,
1852. Letters sent by the fourth U.S. Commissioner, 1849-58, Entry 399; Records of Boundary
and Claims Commissions and Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park,
MD.

42
was a complementary strategy that both framed territories as empty and their inhabitants as
primitive beings as well as constituting a modern nation-state moving forward in a state of
progress. In her study on time and Asian cinema, Bliss Cua Lim develops the concept of modern
time consciousness, or homogenous time, the parceling of temporality into uniform intervals that
depart from earlier unequal temporal divisions based on such things like daylight and local
customs.
64
Lim argues that modern historical time served colonial endeavors across the globe by
placing those colonized within primitive and anachronistic time to justify imperial expansion.
Astronomical time enabled colonial expansion in surveying its territories. An Enlightenment
understanding of astronomical time turned the physical world into rational ordered measurement.
Isaac Newton had conceived of time as uniform and mathematical; time as number. As faithful
followers of Newtonian physics, boundary officials placed temporal numbers of longitude on the
terrain. Astronomical time established the illusion of a spatial instantaneous present, one
centered on modernity and progress.
Emerging modern perceptions of space, time and labor engulfed the environment in
which the boundary commission operated. Experiments on the use of telegraphic wire to measure
longitude were already underway at the U.S. Coast Survey under the direction of Alexander
Dallas Bache, William H. Emory’s brother-in-law, when the boundary commission ran their
observations between 1849-1855.
65
In 1851, the Lowell mills textile factory in Massachusetts set
their time to the meridian of Lowell. Linking the work clock to the most physical approximation
of noon “lent an aura of impartiality and natural law to the work schedule.”
66
This marked a

64
Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2009), 10.
65
Stachurski, Longitude, 89; Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time
(New York: Viking, 1990), 54.
66
O’ Malley, Keeping Watch, 54.

43
national scientific movement to regulate and control labor and therefore capital. The formation of
regional standard times, although still problematic, rationalized interstate commerce and trade
into an imagined orderly Enlightenment schema. Railroads constructed spatial distance as travel
time, but prior to the national time standard in 1883 plural competing regional times troubled the
synchronicity that mechanized travel demanded. In these competing regional times, modern
homogenous time revealed its fissures. While the manufacture of spatial time during the
boundary commission was inconsistent, the ideological work of time-as-space-as-progress was
formidable in constituting a modern expert observer. As we will see, technology juxtaposed to an
imagined barren and primitive continental interior performed the ideological labor of constituting
a modern observer as representative of a progressive nation-state.
Instruments and the Modern Nation and Body
The technology of precision instruments, the tools that placed time atop of the border
terrain, served to construct boundary officials and therefore the nation as the pinnacle of
modernity and progress. In his final report, U.S. Head Commissioner, Lt. Col. William H. Emory
emphasized the use of advanced technology to locate the most accurate and “true” line. Emory
emphasized that “The important points in the boundary have all been determined by the largest
and most improved portable instruments…[like] telescopes, by Troughton & Simms, of London,
and [others] of equal power.”
67
Mexico's first engineer, Francisco Jiménez also made note of the
commission's deployment of scientific techniques, he reflected, “The most modern methods of
observation and calculation have been employed, that up to now had not been used in the
country, and that for that reason the results obtained correspond to their object.”
68
Both Emory

67
Emory, Report on the United States and Mexico Survey, 1:52.
68
Francisco Jiménez, Diario-memoria de los trababjos científicos practicados bajo la dirección
de Francisco Jiménez, Ier Ingeniero de la Comisión de Límites Mexicana conforme a las

44
and Jiménez invested in the principle that an optical device, such as the lens of a telescope,
alongside the techniques of the observer, could transform the visible landscape into objective,
empirical data. Precision instruments allowed for precise measurement, a symbol of exact
science in a modern age. The sextant, theodolites, high-powered telescopes, magnetic compasses
and many more instruments molded a modern observing subject. Boundary officials marketed
themselves and their instruments as carrying progress to the edges of the nation-state.
Operating amongst an intractable government unwilling to exceed commission
expenditures, Boundary officials endowed their instruments with national significance in order to
obtain the high-powered equipment of their preference. Before embarking on the journey to mark
the boundary line, second chief astronomer for the boundary commission, Colonel J.D. Graham
busily gathered all the materials necessary for the endeavor. Dismayed at the inadequacy and
shortage of instruments belonging to the State Department he requested from Secretary of State
James Buchanan the “valuable” and “indispensable” instruments that were used in the North
Eastern Boundary Survey (1838-1843) and the Ohio and Michigan Boundary Survey (1835), of
which now belonged to the War Department.
69
He attached value to the requested zenith
telescope by linking it not only to the superior technological capacities of the apparatus but also
to previous state projects for territorial expansion. The zenith telescope now had historical
signification that transformed the sleek metal object into a powerful icon for state power and
boundary making.

instrucciones del Señor Comisionado Don José Salazar Ilarregui, a quien se hace entrega de
ellos, Special Collections, University of Texas at El Paso, quoted in Rebert, La Gran Línea, 16.
69
William H. Emory, Chief Astronomer and Surveyor, to James Buchanan, Secretary of State,
Washington, D.C., January 11, 1849; Emory Correspondence, 1849-1851, Entry 425; Records of
Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at
College Park, MD.

45
A few years later, Graham again placed national historical value upon his instruments,
but this time manufactured the nation’s modernity by coupling it to his European equipment.
With composed unease Graham informed the Secretary of State of missing components to an
astronomical instrument commissioned from Troughton & Simms, of London. The instrument
had been shipped in multiple boxes to New Orleans and was unintentionally left there when the
commission continued on to El Paso. Graham, arriving later, was to accompany this valuable
instrument on its final stretch to the frontier. To his distress, the box containing the eye-lenses,
the axis and telescope, the levels and the micrometer of the instrument had been misplaced.
Graham lamented over the loss of this equipment by fondly recalling when he had it custom
made by the prestigious London instrument maker, Troughton & Simms, in 1844 for use on the
northeastern boundary. He further reminisced, “it [was] the instrument with which the first
determination of latitude was ever made in America, I believe, by observing the transits of stars
over the prime vertical,” and it established the latitude for the Cambridge Observatory in
Massachusetts by the illustrious American astronomical and survey instrument maker William C.
Bond.
70
Graham embellished the fact of it being the first instrument to determine latitude in the
United States; however, it may have certainly been the first high-quality, powerful machine to do
so with accurate precision. This particular instrument derived its prestige and credibility from its
association with a preeminent British company. For Graham, the United States would have
nothing less than a high ranked modern instrument at an extraordinary cost.
Eighteenth century astronomical instrumentalist culture tied an instrument’s expense and
size to its quality. Historian Christian Licoppe writes “the more costly an instrument, the larger

70
U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, made in compliance with a
resolution of the Senate calling for information in relation to the commission appointed to run
and move the boundary between the United States and Mexico, 32d Cong., 1st sess., 1852, S.
Exec. Doc. 119, 327.

46
the scale on which it allowed the observer in the field to operate.”
71
The larger the instrument
meant the greater validity for both the observer and the astronomical project. Recall Emory’s
statement early in this section that the boundary commission utilized the “largest and most
improved portable instruments,” London had to offer. The limitations imposed by an uneven
1,000-mile southern boundary terrain prohibited the use of large bulky stationary instruments,
but Emory qualified that of the portable instruments employed they were certainly the largest.
Graham operated from the same position, turning to renowned foreign instrument makers to
assign credibility and authority to his national surveying projects. The symbolic power that
welded his London based instrument to early latitudinal determinations in the United States
worked to extend Western European technological modernity to the fringes of United States.
Utilizing foreign-made instruments also transformed a heterogeneous borderland into a
universalized grid. Emory and his scientific team entrusted the instrument to faithfully record
scientific data as it travelled from the designers’ workshop in Europe to the rugged frontier. The
displaced instrument, with a few adjustments by the operator, would turn a foreign environment
into digestible global data. Graham’s requested instrument had already made universal scientific
sense of the North Eastern border as well as the Ohio and Michigan borders. As diverse as the
landscape is between the northern and southern boundaries of the U.S., Graham’s belief in the
ability of an astronomical apparatus to engineer a space into manageable comprehensible data
was profound. Graham, by engineering a precise boundary line through his high caliber foreign

71
Christian Licoppe, “The project for a map of Languedoc in eighteenth-century France at the
contested instersection between astronomy and geography: The problem of co-ordination
between philosophers, instruments and observations as a keystone of modernity,” in Instruments,
Travel and Science: Itineraries of precision from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, eds.
Marie-Noëlle Bourguett, Christian Licoppe, and H. Otto Sibum (New York: Routledge Press,
2002), 58.

47
instruments that held historical national significance, imagined himself as carrying modernity
and state making practices to an unmarked, but soon to be universalized, frontier.
Emory’s use of foreign instruments drew partly from the fact that few elite craftsmen in
the U.S. could produce instruments with equal precision. However, he was not above using
American made apparatuses. William Cranch Bond, Harvard Astronomer, for example, was
already making a name for himself as an expert leader in the trade of astronomical and surveying
instruments in the U.S. In 1851, during the operations of the boundary commission, Bond won a
Council of Medal in traditional mathematical sciences for his use of an electro-magnet to mark
transit observations with a pen on a rotating drum at the Great Exhibition in London.
72
His win
was in the company of other elite French, German and English makers and had even triumphed
over the favored Troughton and Simms design. The chief astronomers of the boundary
commission made sure to outfit their unit with a variety of Bond instruments. This was another
maneuver in affixing modernity to the nation through scientific equipment and transporting it to
the southern boundary line. The prestige of an American made instrument used on the boundary
line was just as effective, if not more so, as utilizing high-quality European instruments in
instructing U.S. congressional officers and the public of the great scientific work being done in
the name of territorial national expansion. The boundary commission’s instruments, founded on
complex mathematical principles, represented the innovation of American scientists that would
lead to the most accurately placed national border to date.
Yet, it would be a mistake to assume that the union between instrument, modernity and
the border was a deliberate state strategy. There existed a deep disconnect between what the
astronomers envisioned as modern scientific work and what the state was willing to fund.

72
J.A. Bennett, Divided Circle: A History of Instruments for Astronomy, Navigation and
Surveying (Oxford: Phaidon, 1988), 155.

48
Congressional leaders, not versed in scientific dogma, often questioned such extravagant
instrumental expenses. When Graham or Emory could not have instruments especially made
abroad, due to time or expense, they did their best to retrieve existing instruments from
institutions like West Point, the U.S. Coast Survey and the War Department. As disgruntled
representatives of the nation-state, boundary officials tried their best to legitimize their work to
an apathetic Congress who wanted a speedy and accurate boundary line with minimal expense.
The dismal conditions of equipment on the boundary were even too much to bear for the
civilian astronomers of the commission. J. Hamilton Prioleau, a civilian assistant surveyor from
South Carolina, complained to his West Point trained superior, Lieutenant A. W. Whipple: “I
find it utterly impossible to run the line you require…with the instruments at present furnished
me; and I hereby refuse to run the said base line one inch further until I am supplied with
instruments which can be depended upon.”
73
Whipple responded to Prioleau’s insubordination
with indignation. Whipple reminded him that the principal surveying instruments had not yet
arrived, but regardless he was given accurately tested leveling rods, a surveyor’s lever, a well
graduated azimuth circle moreover with a telescope revolving tangent, and compasses by
Gambey with a delicate needle nonetheless. According to Whipple, Prioleau had no reason to
complain and further gave him the option to be relieved from conducting the topographical
survey from Indianola to El Paso if he found himself incapable and, if so, would then hand the
task over to Prioleau’s assistant. The threat of being replaced by his subordinate failed to ruffle
Prioleau; he tenaciously refused seeing that the quality of work and his name were at stake.

73
U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, made in compliance with a
resolution of the Senate calling for information in relation to the commission appointed to run
and move the boundary between the United States and Mexico, 32d Cong., 1st sess., 1852, S.
Exec. Doc. 119, 185.

49
According to Robert Hine, Prioleau was a scientific gentleman and not a frontiersman.
74
To be
asked to survey with unsuitable instruments may have been an affront to his integrity as a man of
science.
For the leading personnel of the boundary commission, only men capable of molding
themselves into a man of science could serve as surveyors of the boundary line. The earlier era
filled with rugged explorers like Thomas Nuttall, who surveyed much of the Far West unassisted
in the 1820s, was long gone. Chief astronomer for the boundary commission, Col. J.D. Graham,
drew on his scientific authority to avert congressional influence in appointing unqualified men to
his corps. Judge James Hall followed political channels to get his son on the commission. He
contacted Samuel F. Vinton who contacted Secretary of State, A. H. Stuart, who then contacted
Graham to see if there could be anything done for his son. Hall informed them that because
James Hall Jr. was “reared on the western prairies, he is a good hunter; rides like a Camanche;
and is expert in the use of all weapons, especially the rifle,” making him “particularly well
qualified for” the boundary commission.
75
Graham denied the younger Hall a seat on the
commission, responding that while his ambition to traverse an unknown region was laudable, the
commission at the moment was in the process of reducing its numbers. Although enough of a
reason to justify rejection, Graham proceeded with “I think none but persons of well-tried
science and practical experience ought now to be attached to this service. Success to the
expedition seems really to require this rule.”
76
Hall Jr.’s courageous western ways simply did not

74
Robert V. Hine, Bartlett's West: Drawing the Mexican Boundary (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1968), 31.
75
U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, made in compliance with a
resolution of the Senate calling for information in relation to the commission appointed to run
and move the boundary between the United States and Mexico, 32d Cong., 1st sess., 1852, S.
Exec. Doc. 119, 339. Misspelling in the original.
76
U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 340.

50
impress Graham. What Graham needed was a trained scientist who could see and place accurate
coordinates on land and not a hunter, adventurer or Comanche. He had no qualms in informing
this “respectable gentleman” that his son was, in fact, not qualified to be among the ranks of the
Corps of Topographical Engineers and useless as a member in the expedition’s scientific
program.
This is not to suggest that all members of the boundary commission were men with an
impeccable applied science education. The second boundary commissioner, John Russell
Bartlett, on the other hand, lacking the years of experience under Graham’s belt and not a
scientist by training, was subservient to political cronyism, aware of his obligation to appoint the
sons of the political elite regardless of their technical abilities.
77
Operating under the title
Lieutenant Colonel, Head of the Scientific Corps, a privileged position of sight, Graham could
and did demand persons of “well-tried science” and “practical experience,” when the opportunity
arose. For Graham, a valuable operator had, at the very least, minimal skills and “rudiments” in
surveying, someone he would be “willing to take pains to instruct,” someone that through
training in methods and procedures on the field, on the boundary line, could become an agent of
sight.
78
The wide range in surveying experience of the commission’s early outfit reflected a
transitional period where apprenticeships and institutional training existed both tumultuously and

77
Emory was not beyond participating in the patronage system and Bartlett did not entirely
struggle against political cronyism. For example, Emory and Bartlett’s younger brothers both
served on the commission. Frederick Emory was employed as substitute assistant surveyor and
George Bartlett as quartermaster. There is no indication that Frederick Emory had the substantial
educational background of his brother and although Bartlett did not serve in any scientific
capacity he was still hired. Edward C. Clarke most likely gained his employment with the
Boundary Survey simply by being the son of John H. Clarke, U.S. Senator from Rhode Island.
78
U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, made in compliance with a
resolution of the Senate calling for information in relation to the commission appointed to run
and move the boundary between the United States and Mexico, 32d Cong., 1st sess., 1852, S.
Exec. Doc. 119, 334.

51
cooperatively side-by-side. But by the commission’s final field survey in December 1855
personnel with formal technical training and/or extensive experience had gained predominance.
79

The final surveying mission was to be quick and accurate. With a ready made pool of expert
surveyors, astronomers, and engineers there was no time to waste on training new workers on the
intricacies of field work on the border. Any new additions would have to already be conditioned
to see like a scientist.
Additionally, along the border boundary officials used their knowledge on how to
operate an apparatus of sight to differentiate the modern from the primitive body. Trained in
using some of the most sophisticated astronomical equipment, field surveyors themselves
became bastions of modernity and progress. The observer’s techniques and instruments were
substantiated out in the field in direct opposition to the Native peoples of the region. In a
recurring newspaper column on his adventures as a member in the boundary survey Theodore F.
Moss
80
describes to his readership an interview he and Commissioner John R. Bartlett had with

79
Twelve surveyors, engineers and computers brought their experience from the earlier Bartlett
commission to survey the new boundary line as designated by the Gadsden Treaty, including
Lieutenant Nathaniel Michler, Lieutenant A. W. Whipple, M.T. W. Chandler, J. O’Donoghue,
Hugh Campbell, Maurice von Hippel, Charles Radziminiski, Arthur Schott, J. Houston, Charles
Weyss, Frank Wheaton, and E. A. Phillips. Captain George Thom and C. N. Turnbull, both
former West Point cadets, and Caleb Burwell Rowan Kennerly, student of Spencer Baird and
graduate of University of Pennsylvania, M.D. (1852) made up three of the five new additions to
the surveying or astronomical parties. D. Hinkle and B. Burns were the remaining two surveyors
and based on Emory’s track record and the development of more scientific institutions across the
nation, these men most likely trained at professional schools. See John D. Graham, Head of
Scientific Corps, to John Russell Bartlett, U.S. Boundary Commissioner, Copper Mines of Santa
Rita, August 22, 1851; Letters received from the third U.S. Commissioner, 1850-1860, Entry
424; Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitration, Record Group 76; National
Archives at College Park, MD; and Rebert, La Gran Línea, 25-26.
80
The article is simply signed by T. making authorship difficult to ascertain. Of the list of
employees during Bartlett’s commission, two stand out as a possibility: Thomas Thompson, a
surveyor from Connecticut and Thomas F. Moss, the geologist from Pennsylvania. For list of
employees see U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, made in
compliance with a resolution of the Senate calling for information in relation to the commission

52
Chap-po tah, a Lipan chief.
81
The Lipan were an Apache tribe that extended from New Mexico
to Texas and also into parts of northern Mexico. The boundary line was to cut right through their
lands. The firearms in Bartlett’s carriage captivated Chap-po tah’s attention, some of which,
Moss recounts, were “beyond his comprehension.”
27
“Taking up Mr. Bartlett’s spy glass, and
supposing it to be some other shooting contrivance,” Moss goes on to write, Chap-po tah
“wished to be shown how it was fired off. The instrument was adjusted and a distant tree pointed
out, which he was told to look at with the glass; his credulity had born over-taxed, and all the
Spanish we could muster would not convince him that it was the same far off tree.” That is, no
matter how hard they instructed, Chap-po tah lacked the ability to comprehend the mechanism of
magnification. Chap-po tah was unwilling to validate the image reproduced in the telescope and
in doing so lacked the power of modern perception, attention, and comprehension. His inability
to understand optical technology cast him as non-modern subject. In the reverse, Bartlett and his
crew of naturalists as well as the readers who knew the functions of a simple telescope could
claim for themselves superior vision. Through Chap-po tah’s presumed lack of modern
perceptual knowledge, Bartlett and his crew, who would otherwise be denied technical scientific
expertise by West Point trained engineers, embodied mechanical sight through their telescopic
knowledge. In these border encounters racial and modern difference was delineated through
mechanized vision.

appointed to run and move the boundary between the United States and Mexico, 32d Cong., 1st
sess., 1852, S. Exec. Doc. 119, 376.
81
In his personal account, Bartlett spells the Lipan chief’s name as Chi-po-ta. John Russell
Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California,
Sonora, and Chihuahua, connected with the United States and Mexican boundary Commission,
during the years 1850, ’51, ’52, and ’53 (New York: D. Appleton, 1854), 76.
27
Bartlett Papers: The Mexican Boundary Commission papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-
1853, MSS MFilm 00647, reel 11, Newspaper releases (June 29, 1850 to Aug. 4, 1852),
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

53
Gender also underlined the scientific visual body and demonstrated how modernity was
not easily applicable to all racial body types. Theodore F. Moss painted Chap-po tah not as the
masculine noble Indian or furious fighter of literary narratives but as an infantilized novice in
advanced technology; after all, Chap-po tah could not even distinguish between a firearm and a
simple spyglass. As described in chapter one, the surveyor’s theodolite was a powerful military
weapon of conquest, a tool of brute masculinity. Chap-po tah’s “assumption” that the telescope
was a firearm eerily underscores this instrumental entanglement with conquest. It hints at Chap-
po tah’s nuanced recognition of imperial tools as means for territorial expansion, more so than
Moss would have his readers believe. However, in Bartlett’s personal narrative, Chap-po tah is
characterized as an excitable young boy, playful, and easily amused at such simple things as
when Bartlett offered him a seat in his carriage, rather than as a stoic masculine chief. Bartlett
further described Chap-po tah, as “corpulent, owning to the life of ease which he gave us to
understand he had been leading,” furthermore he was “ludicrous [in] appearance,” being so large
and on a disproportionately small mule. It’s unclear whether Bartlett believed modernity had
turned Chap-po tah into its worst manifestation or if Chap-po tah’s indigenous ways made him
“ludicrous [in] appearance,” standing next to modern boundary officials who paid careful
attention to their bodily comportment.
82
Bartlett shifted in his sentiments regarding Chap-po tah
masculine modernity. At times, Chap-po tah “knew enough of civilization to be aware that when
distinguished gentlemen meet it was customary to take a drink,” and at other times he
“manifested much curiosity respecting all he saw,” contrary to his race. Either way, Chap-po tah
was far behind on the evolutionary ladder of civilized respectability and his inability to utilize
simple visual technology infantilized him among a highly technical border stage.

82
Bartlett, Personal Narrative, 77.

54
Chap-po tah’s refusal to acknowledge the tree in Bartlett’s telescope draws attention to
the culturally constructed nature of optical objectivity. The written account was rife with
translation and manipulation for narrative appeal. Both parties communicated through mediators
in a third language, Spanish. The violence of translation had already set the conditions for this
cultural exchange. Furthermore, because the account is from the perspective of boundary
officials, readers could not know what Chap-po tah meant by refusing to believe the tree seen in
the telescope was not the same tree off in the distance. Rather than demonstrate ignorance, it
suggests the existence of multi-visual registers operating in the region. Chap-po tah’s
understanding of visual perception differed from Enlightenment tenants of objective scientific
vision. It was one other scopic regime operating in the borderlands that collided with surveyors
and their instruments, explained away by Moss as evidence of technical and thereby modern,
civilized illiteracy.
Astronomical instruments and surveying tools played an important role in the constitution
of an embodied observer. The shiny brass telescope casings that held intricately placed lens and
mirrors with advanced endless screws for seamlessly turning a divided circle or scale nearly
perfected the imperfect human eye.
83
Precision instruments allowed for a type of mechanized
vision, one that enhanced the limitations of human sight; making the unseen seeable and
recordable within a universal scientific framework. Rather than analyzing both instrument and
operator as two separate units, it would be useful to see how boundary officials and their
instruments converged as one. The lens amplified the observer’s power to observe. It was an
entanglement that required both human and instrument calibration. Observers calibrated

83
On the impact of the endless screw for mechanical division of scales see J.A. Bennett, Divided
Circle: A History of Instruments for Astronomy, Navigation and Surveying (Oxford: Phaidon,
1988), 138.

55
themselves by disciplining their bodily and sensory practices. Observers calibrated the screws
and gears of their instruments for accurate readings. On the border, human performance of
scientific sight converged with mechanical apparatuses of precision. At this crossing, between
human and instrument, sat the qualifications for a modern body.
Modernity came to the boundary line not only by longitudinal placement but also in the
form of scientifically regulated observational behaviors. Boundary officials racialized themselves
as proper seeing subjects by making the racial Other incapable of scientific vision.
84
Mastery
over the use of instruments and mastery over their body translated to mastery over the land. The
daily recalibration of their instruments, their theodolites and chronometers, required a
performativity of racial and gendered authority. They enacted their right to look by engineering
the very stage on which their performance was made legible. John Bartlett and Thomas Moss
placed Chap-po tah outside the national imaginary and categories of masculinity and in doing so
interpellated their own bodies as modern, white and belonging to the conquering nation.
Conclusion: Making the Border and the Body Modern
When Alexander von Humboldt entered the field of exploration at the turn of the
nineteenth century he ushered in a new standard for the precise measurement, calculation and
quantification of natural history. As part of his objective systematic regime, Humboldt insisted
that a “series of observations and…accurate and repeated measurements, gathered from all over
the world by a network of scientists and travelers,” could reveal the intricate laws governing the

84
Mitchell defines modernity as making time and space homogenous categories that can be
divided into measurable and equally divisible units. Modernity in New Mexico came in the form
of regulation of personal behaviors through modern practices in science, mass consumer culture,
separate gender spheres, and education. For example, modern science assisted in the creation of
racial hierarchies based on sexual types. The coming of the railroad to New Mexico in 1880s
marked the modernization efforts of New Mexican leaders. Pablo Mitchell, Coyote Nation:
Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005).

56
physical world.
85
It was not enough to simply discover an unknown species and place the
specimen in its proper taxonomy. Humboldt invested his energy in understanding larger
botanical processes at work, noting the distribution of plants and their height measurements in
order to better comprehend the natural order that governs plant geography. Humboldt’s
quantification in the field of natural history and geography initiated new scientific expectations
for examining the physical and biological phenomenon and translating observations into
elaborate theories and graphs.
86
Predating the boundary commission by fifty years, Humboldt’s
exploration of the Americas set the stage for a new scientific program of fieldwork observations
and meteorological measurements.
William H. Emory, the figure who ushered in this chapter, could not have disagreed more
with Humboldt’s practices. Although savants praised Humboldt for his quantifying and
stratification methods in natural history, Emory found the famous explorer wanting in
cartography and geography. In his Final Report on the boundary commission, Emory critiqued
Humboldt’s application of “hypothetical geography,” the use of first person accounts, oral
histories and a conglomeration of maps, produced in the same manner, to construct a
geographical idea or approximation of a particular region. What Emory named as “conjecture,”
was understood by earlier and even contemporary mapmakers as a process guided by reason.
Systematic compilation of secondary data required the collection and careful comparison of the
most reliable and, if possible, most current geographic maps. Historian Raymond B. Craib
suggests that this cartographic method of compilation was seen as a “rational, rather than

85
Marie-Noëlle Bourguett, “Landscape with Numbers: Natural history, travel and instruments in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,” in Instruments, Travel and Science:
Itineraries of precision from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, eds. Marie-Noëlle
Bourguett, Christian Licoppe, and H. Otto Sibum (New York: Routledge Press, 2002), 96.
86
Bourguett, “Landscape with Numbers,” 116, 120; and Felix Driver, Geography Militant:
Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 35.

57
empirical, project, dependent upon reason and deduction in lieu of experience and exploration.”
87

This approach to geographical representation harkened back to Plato’s theory of ideal forms,
where one knows abstract forms by way of the mind’s reasoning and not through sensory
examination. In this formula, the senses, including visual perception and practices of direct
observation, could only muddle and deceive the rational soul.
88
Humboldt did not entirely fit into
this category of rationalism for three reasons; one, he engaged in direct measurements and
experiments in natural history, two, he did survey and explore a small portion of what he
mapped, and three, he was not beyond using his senses as forms of measurements. Nevertheless,
Emory, raised on the tenants of empiricism, conceived the central observer as one who engages
in direct experiments and measurements to master space through sight.
89
To Emory, Humboldt’s
hypothetical geography had to make way for a new, more qualified and highly trained observer.
Humboldt, however, did not create the ill-fated map used to designate the parameters of
the boundary line in the Treaty of Guadalupe; that map belonged to New York publisher, John T.
Disturnell. However, in creating the error ridden map, Disturnell complied information from
early nineteenth century explorers, like Pedro Walker, Zebulon Pike, William Darby, and of
course Alexander von Humboldt.
90
The inaccurate map caused a series of headaches not only for
the state but for Emory as well. It misplaced the city of El Paso del Norte approximately 30 miles

87
Raymond Craib examines Antonio García Cubas’ 1858 national map of Mexico as a
compilation of collected maps that centralized Mexico by “minimiz[ing] variation” and
“project[ing] unity,” of a nation-state. However, Craib does note how García Cubas did receive
critique from Mexico City’s opposition press for not engaging in direct observation. Raymond B.
Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004), 32.
88
Wade and Swanston, Visual Perception, 79.
89
Enlightenment empiricism is not entirely divorced from Plato’s or Descartes’ understanding of
reason and the senses. In Enlightenment thought, vision is guided by reason. See Edney,
Mapping an Empire, 49-51; Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4-7.
90
Rebert, La Gran Línea, 6.

58
north of its actual location, resulting in what U.S. state officials saw as an unpopular compromise
between the two nation’s head commissioners. The U.S. disfavor over the Bartlett-García Conde
compromised point of latitude (32˚ 22’ north) culminated in the 1854 Gadsden Treaty, an
agreement in which the U.S. paid Mexico $10 million in exchange for the Mesilla Valley
territory, presently the southern portions of Arizona and New Mexico. Due to the inaccuracies
from Disturnell’s compiled map, U.S. and Mexico boundary commissioners, William Emory and
Francisco Jiménez, along with their team of scientists had to re-enter the field and survey the
new portion of the boundary line, effectively replacing a segment of a line that took four
tumultuous years to complete.
Rather than direct his criticism at John Disturnell, a writer of travel books and not a
cartographer, or Zebulon Pike, a fellow military officer, Emory stood more to gain from
questioning an exceedingly well-known savant. In Emory’s final report on the boundary
commission he wrote:
The system of borrowing…has tended very much to obscure and distort the history of the
explorations and surveys of the western portion of the American continent, and has led
Baron Humboldt into grave errors, and to commit personal injustice, when, in his Aspects
of Nature, he attempts to present the progress of discovery in this region.
91

Humboldt fell far short in meeting Emory’s quantitative standards, so much so, that he described
Humboldt’s surveys as an unjust act, a violation of his authority as a scientist. Even Humboldt’s
“attempt” at documenting the natural history of the “American continent” failed beyond
reproach.
92
As a devout empiricist, Emory held distaste for Humboldt’s practice of compiling

91
Emory, Report on the United States and Mexico Survey, 1:xiv.
92
In addition to his “system of borrowing,” perhaps further troubling Emory was the naturalist-
traveler’s refusal to entirely abandon the practice of combining his perceptions and emotions
with his observations. At times, Humboldt was not beyond using “corporeal techniques for
measuring,” but, as historian Kapil Raj points out, Humboldt did acknowledge that these
“techniques were valid…only to the naturalist because of his need for a much lesser degree of

59
geographic information over direct observation, especially when it came to claims of authority
and “inaccurately” documenting and disseminating information on what was to become the U.S-
Mexico borderlands.
If Humboldt and other mapmakers’ “system of borrowing” were found lacking, what then
was the proper procedure for seeing a bounded nation?
93
Emory declared that the time had come
for the days of “hypothetical geography” to be behind them, especially when officers from the
Corps of Topographical Engineers were involved in the various surveys and explorations across
the West. So instead he offered in his report on the boundary commission maps with “actual
information, derived from instrumental survey,” computed by either him or his team of assistants
through astronomical observation for exact latitude and longitude positions.
94
Direct observation,
exact measurement and precision instruments were essential to the project of locating and
mapping the boundary line, but so was a contingent of competent practitioners who had the
trained skills for accuracy. Emory better valued his systems of procedures as exact and grounded
in expertise over those of Humboldt’s compilation. Emory was of a different scientific pedigree;
whose training in astronomy, surveying and civil engineering, he believed, elevated him to
expert status. In particular, astronomy, as a discipline, had set the boundaries of scientific status
and distinction between experts and amateurs, bestowing upon an elite group of individuals the
authoritative right to look.

precision in surveying than the astronomer or geodesist.”

See Kapil Raj, “When human travelers
become instruments: The Indo-British exploration of Central Asia in the nineteenth century,” in
Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of precision from the seventeenth to the twentieth
century, eds. Marie-Noëlle Bourguett, Christian Licoppe, and H. Otto Sibum (New York:
Routledge Press, 2002), 175; and Bourguett, Licoppe, and Sibum, introduction to Instruments,
Travel and Science, 7, 12.
93
Emory, Report on the United States and Mexico Survey, 1:xiii.
94
Ibid., 1:xiii-xiv.

60
For some on the boundary commission, that training came from West Point. The military
academy prepared the topographical engineers who went to the periphery of the nation in seeing,
marking and collecting data on an international boundary line. The institution, through its
coursework, faculty, textbooks and scientific collections codified scientific and observational
standards used in the explorations that accompanied American westward expansion and the
surveying of its national borders. The boundary officers’ training at West Point contributed to
their subject construction as skilled operators endowed with the authority to look and look for.
Their embodied engagement with surveying materials, instruments, theories and visual
techniques required both the discursive and material disciplining of the body in order to see
properly; to see scientifically. West Point informed their claims of authority and competency in
performing scientific vision on the field. Their training bounded the categories of what could be
observable and constructed the landscape and its inhabitants as visually comprehensible.
When Emory and his team of surveyors came upon the borderlands they were armed with
a plethora of gadgets including, but not limited to, sextants, astronomical transits, chronometers,
a four-feet reflecting telescope, an artificial horizon, and magnetic compasses. These
instruments, with their directed vision, helped to transform the landscape into a set of angles and
numbers. It was a multi-dimensional field of vision that overlaid imaginary coordinate planes
across the terrestrial landscape, brining what the astronomers saw as an unruly frontier into
managed and known geography. The boundary commission was, then, in part a conquest of
mechanical scientific sight that remodeled the imagined landscape, as well as, the subjectivities
of both its inhabitants and the encroaching visual agents.
For Emory and his surveyors, their racial and cultural superiority made them predestined
to expand the boundaries of their nation and to bring civilization to the frontier. The process of

61
expansion was the process of creating a modern self and nation. The production of the boundary
line was one important site where narratives of modernity, the nation, and the body were
constructed and contested. Science, technology, and vision played a crucial role in authoritative
claims as to whom held the exclusive “right to look;” to see a border, to mark it, and to collect
data and information about the boundary line. Emory touted the U.S.-Mexico boundary line as
the most accurately placed national border to date. Trained men of science and their use of high
quality precision instruments achieved the delineation of a technologically modern line. Never
mind the environmental, bodily and instrumental limitations that consistently undermined their
claims. In effect, the surveyors of the boundary commission constructed a field of visibility along
the border.
95
The marking of the boundary line, they believed, was a modern state project that
required high-precision tools for seeing. Theirs was a project of mechanical scientific statecraft.

95
Rajchman uses the phrases “space of constructed visibility” to describe Foucault’s study on
“hospitals, poorhouses, museums, public baths, schools, homes, asylums.” Jon Rajchman,
“Foucault’s Art of Seeing,” October 44 (1988): 103.

62

Chapter Two
Seeing Nature: Building a Temporal Southwest Borderland
In August of 1850, San Antonio’s Western Texas fervently informed their local readers
about the ambitious and far-reaching government-funded project that the Commissioner of the
U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission, John Russell Bartlett, was piloting deep into the west, far
beyond the confines of their humble frontier town. It was to be a “complete and scientific
examination of an unknown region,” which would not only benefit the nation, but also bring to
light Texas’ most valuable resources. Resources they hoped would increase and promote future
settlement of the state. The reporter confidently asserted that “the searching sons of science
connected with the expedition [would] draw from nature’s arena truths to benefit their race,”
further insisting that the naturalists associated with the commission would likewise have the rare
opportunity of “seeing nature in her wilds, unmarred by man, and undisturbed by his presence.”
1

The report conveniently overlooked the various indigenous groups that had passed through and
interacted with and upon the environment for millennia before as well as the many trade routes
and emigrant trails that served as the connective sinews between San Antonio and the Pacific
since the Spanish conquest. Instead the Western Texas painted a desolate picture of a pristine
desert where the book of nature would reveal itself to the enterprising naturalist, who with proper
training would be able to decipher its divinely written pages for the prosperity of the Anglo-
Saxon race.
Closely following the San Antonio article, the United States Congress printed extracts
from Lieutenant Amiel Weeks Whipple’s boundary commission journal, which revealed a

1
Western Texas, San Antonio, 1850, Bartlett Papers: The Mexican Boundary Commission
papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-1853, MSS MFilm 00647, reel 8, Official Journal,
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

63

contrasting image to that of an untouched landscape.
2
Whipple’s convoy traveled in the opposite
flow of traffic, west to east. For the convoy, encountering emigrant trains of men, women, and
children heading to California’s gold fields and other western locales was a frequent occurrence.
Whipple recalled emigrant tales of diminished supplies and near starvation as well as expressed
annoyance at their fabricated stories of battles with “hostile Indians.” Far from an undisturbed
environment, emigrant trains left in their wake a multitude of debris—broken and discarded
guns, wagons, and other possessions in addition to the skeletal remains of their transportation,
mules and horses that succumbed to the harsh desert conditions. In cannibalistic fashion, the
boundary expedition even utilized the remains of broken wagons for fuel.
3
Furthermore, the
Yumas and other regional tribes sporadically visited Whipple and the surveying camp at the river
junction.
4
The ground vibrations caused by the throng of people and animals walking in and
around camp stymied surveying to the point that Whipple had to set up his scientific tent for
astronomical determinations of the boundary line miles away from the grounds so as not to
disrupt the results.
5
The boundary convoy was hardly the lone and brave contingent in an
uninhabited frontier. Likewise, the wilds of nature were already littered with the material traces
of western consumption and goods. Stretches of the Sonoran desert were far from untouched.

2
Whipple’s journal covered the portion of the boundary survey from San Diego to the junction
of the Gila and Colorado Rivers. Amiel Weeks Whipple, The Whipple Report: Journal of an
expedition from San Diego, California, to the Rio Colorado, from Sept. 11 to Dec. 11, 1849 (Los
Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1961).
3
John Russell Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico,
California, Sonora, and Chihuahua, connected with the United States and Mexican boundary
commission, during the years 1850, ’51, ’52, and ‘53 (New York: D. Appleton & Company,
1854), 1:105.
4
Whipple, The Whipple Report, 37, 57.
5
Bartlett Papers: The Mexican Boundary Commission papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-
1853, MSS MFilm 00647, reel 9, Official Journal, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

64

The U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission was not the only expedition to traverse the
newly acquired Southwestern region of the United States. Various government-funded
expeditions took to the Southwest to explore the area’s practicality for wagon roads, railroad
routes, mineral extraction, and future settlements.
6
In the process of collecting data for westward
expansion, members of these expeditions were amassing, what Geographer Felix Driver calls,
geographical knowledge, knowledge that was constituted through a range of embodied
practices—traveling, seeing, collecting, recording, mapping and narrating.
7
Driver explains that a
“field is not just ‘there’; it is always in the process of being constructed,” by means of actual
“physical movement-passage” of observers and cultural labor.
8
Through the lens of natural
history and ethnography, I explore how various individuals attached to government expeditions
in the 1850s made meaning out of the borderlands through their embodied practices, particularly
through observation.
While I focus largely on the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission, I extend beyond the
boundary line to consider how scientists in other expeditions marked the larger borderlands
region as a distinct place. For naturalists, the collection of flora and fauna was not limited to the
immediate vicinity of the border, but extended both north and south of the line.
9
If the
geographical distribution of the natural world did not follow arbitrary nation-state demarcations,

6
A. Hunter Dupree estimates that “between 1850 and 1860 about thirty expeditions sent their
[natural history] results to the Smithsonian.” See A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal
Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1957), 93.
7
Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 2001), 12.
8
Felix Driver, Geography Militant, 13.
9
John Russell Bartlett of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission went as far south as Sonora
and as far north as San Francisco to collect natural history and ethnographic data. He is a great
example of zeal in which naturalists collected specimens hundreds of miles away from the
boundary line.

65

then their data collection would need to extend as far as the expeditions resources would permit.
Furthermore, the established international boundary line between the United States and Mexico
was not the only bordered land the expedition encountered. What became the U.S. Southwest
after 1848 was already teeming with numerous native expressions of territorial boundaries.
What, then, did U.S. expressive acts of possession look like in the multiple borderlands of the
Southwest? This chapter moves us from the mathematical creation of an international boundary
line to consider the ways in which the natural history and ethnographic components of these U.S.
exploring expeditions, sometimes without state authority, generated knowledge about the larger
southwestern borderlands and labored to enfold the space into an American narrative of past and
future.
Discordant Empire:
Writing in the 1950s, Historian Edward S. Wallace noted that the acquisition of land
acquired from the U.S.-Mexico War initiated a period of great reconnaissance that continued
until right before the Civil War.
10
The 1850s was a moment when “soldier-scientists” explored
and gathered knowledge about the territory for potential settlement, transportation networks,
exploitable resources, and trade opportunities. For Wallace, the U.S.-Mexico Boundary
Commission ushered in a period of extensive exploration and with it came an implied ordered
and self-evident mission of military observation. Wallace’s contemporary, Anderson Hunter
Dupree, complicated the picture pointing out that natural history explorations attached to military
expeditions were usually ad hoc missions, where any data collected and catalogued in botany,
zoology, and/or geology rested on the surgeons and civilians. And, while he recognized that “the

10
Edward S. Wallace, The Great Reconnaissance: Soldiers, Artists and Scientists on the Frontier
1848-1861 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955); Robert Bruce, The Launching of
Modern American Science, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 204.

66

expeditions varied greatly in organization, mission, and quality of scientific results,” and that the
Smithsonian was in large part responsible for supplying the expeditions with naturalists,
equipment, and small grants, the federal government was still the “foremost information-
collecting instrument.”
11
Taken together, the Smithsonian’s efforts and the federal expeditions
did offer “an impressive picture of the nature and resources of the trans-Mississippi West.”
12

However, if we take into consideration on-the-ground operations, we are presented with a
discordant expression of empire. Through the figure of John Russell Bartlett, U.S.-Mexico
boundary commissioner, I will argue that U.S. westward expansion was not a carefully-planned
and all-encompassing operation, but was characterized with distinctive expressive acts of
possession laid out by on-the-ground state agents.
John R. Bartlett became the boundary commission’s second acting commissioner in June
1850. He was a political appointee with no experience in leading an expedition, yet his scholarly
leanings would come to shape his visual practices in executing the survey in ways divergent to
the commissioners before him. The New York Evening Post conceded that Bartlett was a good
enough botanist with a command in other fields, but to the detriment of the survey he had “no
knowledge of camp life and [could not] properly control such a party as he [had] under him.”
13

Similarly, Mexican Commissioner General Pedro García Conde found Bartlett to be “a clever
fellow, but unqualified for the labors that we must perform.”
14
True, Bartlett lacked the skill in
executing an expedition, the mathematical knowledge for determining astronomical points, or the

11
Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, 91-93.
12
Ibid., 93.
13
No title, The [New York] Evening Post, September (1851), 1, quoted in Gray Sweeney,
“Drawing Borders: Art and the Cultural Politics of the U.S.-Mexico boundary Survey,” in
Drawing the Borderline: Artist-Explorers of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey, ed. Dawn Hall
(Albuquerque Museum, 1996), 26.
14
Joseph Richard Werne, The Imaginary Line: A History of the United States and Mexican
Boundary Survey, 1848-1857 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2007), 54.

67

logistical know-how behind surveying. His limitations in astronomy and topography, in
conjunction with, the political rivalries that plagued his term, caused dissension with his
subordinates; Colonel Graham, Lieutenant Emory and A.B. Gray. But where Bartlett fell short,
he made up for, according to Historian Gray Sweeny, in intellect and artistic ability.
15
Bartlett’s
prolific artistic production of the survey and the Indian tribes they encountered along the way
certainly contributed to the cultural and visual record of the southwest.
16
But, as we will see, so
did his scientific proclivity, which among other reasons underlined his motive to take the
position of boundary commissioner.
17

During his term serving as commissioner for the boundary survey (June 1850-December
1852), John Russell Bartlett pushed the natural history agenda further than what the federal
government demanded. Before even establishing a plan of action for the surveying and
astronomical teams of the commission, Bartlett submitted, eight days after receiving his
appointment, a request for a scientific party to Secretary of Interior Thomas Ewing.
18
At an
estimated annual cost of $19,100, Bartlett’s desired scientific unit would include a
geologist/mineralogist, assistant mineralogist, botanist, zoologist, assistant zoologist, philologist,
ethnologist, historiographer, taxidermist and two artists and draughtsmen. While these positions
would be exclusively dedicated to their scientific fields of interest, what Bartlett considered as
the physical sciences, that is, geography, meteorology and barometry, would on the other hand

15
Joseph Richard Werne, The Imaginary Line, 28.
16
See Gray Sweeney, “Drawing Borders,” 23-78.
17
Bartlett preferred a foreign appointment in Denmark, but when instead offered the position of
boundary commissioner, Bartlett accepted due to his desire to travel, the ability to conduct
ethnographic study on the indigenous populations, and the pay.
18
Bartlett wrote to Colonel J. D. Graham requesting recommendations in carrying out the
operations in running and marking the boundary line, but did not receive Graham’s suggestions
until after June 20, 1850. Bartlett received his appointment June 10th and submitted his request
for a scientific party on June 18.

68

“be attended to by persons connected with the boundary commission.”
19
In Bartlett’s view, the
astronomical and surveying units already associated with the survey would be sufficient enough
to collect data on the physical sciences surrounding region. What was lacking in his aspiring
venture of scientific exploration was a natural history contingent filled with leading specialists in
the field. Bartlett envisioned the boundary commission to be much more than a project to run and
mark a boundary line or to assess the practicality of constructing a rail line. The boundary
commission offered an opportunity for scientific and cultural explorations for not only the nation
but for the advancement of science. For Bartlett’s contemporary, Benjamin Silliman, founder of
the American Journal of Science, nation and scientific discovery were intricately linked. Silliman
indicated that he established the journal to “advance the interests of this rising empire, by
exciting and concentrating original American efforts.”
20
Bartlett similarly associated national
economic development of a “rising empire” with the promotion of science and must have
understood his federally appointed position as fulfilling that goal, or at the very least, as an
attempt to justify his scientific work to the state.
Utilizing federal monies and government offices to collect scientific data was not
necessarily a new idea for Bartlett. A few years earlier, he had encouraged his fellow antiquarian
enthusiast, John Lloyd Stephens, to explore the stone ruins in the Yucatan. With the seat of
United States Minister to the United Provinces of Central America recently vacated, Stephens

19
U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, made in compliance with a
resolution of the Senate calling for information in relation to the commission appointed to run
and move the boundary between the United States and Mexico, 32d Cong., 1st sess., 1852, S.
Exec. Doc. 119, 13.
20
Quoted in Rebecca Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape
Painting, 1825-1875 (Princeton University Press, 2001), 28.

69

secured this government post as a means to facilitate his exploration.
21
With little federal support
for the scientific research, men like Bartlett and Stephens, had to seek out other opportunities in
which to finance their scientific operations. Despite having been characterized as an
“unqualified” civilian whose appointment was secured through political means rather than
experience, Bartlett was not an unfitting choice for commissioner, as he did attempt to go beyond
documenting the physical territory of the southwest to collecting extensive scientific and cultural
knowledge of the region.
22
Bartlett, with his eye toward natural history and ethnology, would
bring another visual perspective to the boundary commission.
Bartlett’s request to the Secretary of Interior Thomas Ewing for a scientific unit devoted
to natural history was not fulfilled. When Bartlett arrived in El Paso with a company of 105 men,
only Theodore F. Mop was designated as a mining engineer and George Thurber held an official
position as botanist, this was far from the list of specialists he thought appropriate for this
mission. Ewing’s reasons behind the dismissal of Bartlett’s proposal could have ranged from,
sympathetic but due to limited funds improbable, to full support, to complete disregard for the
promotion of science. While Ewing’s position on the matter is unclear, Bartlett’s use of the term
“mining engineer” instead of mineralogist or geologist hints at his understanding that the state
desired only practical scientific knowledge, meaning science for the utility of the state. Framing
Mop as a mining engineer rather than a mineralogist distanced Mop from solely the pursuit of
science and aligned him with mineral extraction for commercial purposes. This framing also

21
John Russell Bartlett, Autobiography of John Russell Bartlett, 1805-1886 (Providence: John
Carter Brown Library, 2006); and Werne, The Imaginary Line, 47.
22
David J. Weber and Jane Lenz Elder, eds., Fiasco: George Clinton Gardner’s Correspondence
from the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey 1849-1854 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University
Press, 2010), xxii; Norman J.W. Thrower, “Mapping the United States-Mexico Borderlands: An
Overview” in Exploration and Mapping of the American West: Selected Essays, ed. Donna P.
Koepp (Chicago: Speculum Orbis Press, 1986), 167.

70

suggested a particular type of vision, one aimed at future resource extraction rather than at seeing
geological layers to document the earth’s history or classifying minerals. This semantic lesson,
Bartlett may have ascertained from Ewing’s negative reply to his initial request and considering
the Secretary of Interior operated within a cultural context of government funding for pragmatic
purposes Bartlett adjusted his strategy for a natural history unit.
23

Bartlett learned quickly. While he could not directly appoint a zoologist for the exclusive
purpose of scientific exploration he made sure that members hired onto the commission met his
demand for a scientific team. Upon arrival to El Paso, Bartlett was instructed to reduce the force,
“to the lowest possible limits consistent with the duties to be performed;” duties which did not
include natural history collection. He complied with the state, “invited resignations from those
whose services could be dispensed with,” and gave his botanists official commission approved
titles.
24
On the employee rosters, Dr. Thomas H. Webb served as secretary, John M. Bigelow
served as surgeon, and George Thurber who was first listed as botanist was later given the title of
“acting quarter master and commissary; and botanist.” Despite their titles, these men, with the
exception of Bigelow, served exclusively as botanists.
25
All three men joined Bartlett on a

23
Robert V. Bruce, “The Public Purse,” chapter 12 in The Launching of Modern American
Science.
24
Those who did resign were the men appointed as assistants to the astronomer, who were most
likely the political appointees. John Russell Bartlett, U.S. Boundary Commissioner, to Robert
McClelland, Secretary of Interior, August 1854; Letters received from the third U.S.
Commissioner, 1850-1860, Entry 424; Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and
Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park, MD.
25
While stationed with the commission, John Bigelow did oversee the health of the employees.
In June 1851, before leaving the commission for an extended period of time with Bartlett ,
Bigelow wrote to Bartlett cautioning him on the potential for scurvy and that two cases had
surfaced among the surveying team between Feb. 15th and May 15th, 1851. He noted that a fresh
and succulent diet was necessary to prevent the disease. John Bigelow to John Russell Bartlett,
U.S. Boundary Commissioner, June 19, 1851; Letters received from the third U.S.
Commissioner, 1850-1860, Entry 424; Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and
Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park, MD.

71

fifteen-month scientific and ethnographic excursion into the interior of Mexico and along the
coast of California, collecting botanical and zoological specimens. Traveling hundreds of miles
away from the border for such an extended period, it would be difficult for any of these men to
serve their official posts in supervising the commission, providing medical attention, or
organizing quarters, supplies, food rations, and clothing to the outfit. With little funds and
pressure from the government, Bartlett found a way to retain his botanists, who were simply
indispensible to the boundary commission as he conceived it.
In bringing scientific exploration to the boundary line, Bartlett and the federal
government diverged in opinion. Bartlett, a persistent man of science, turned to Jefferson Davis,
Mississippi Senator and a West Point graduate, whom he believed, unlike other statesman, would
“appreciate the importance of scientific pursuits,” and would be willing to help him locate
competent naturalists in case an appropriation could be made.
26
Bartlett may have also thought
Davis would be able to convince other congressional members to support his request for a small
expenditure. Writing to Davis in late December 1850, Bartlett complained of what little natural
science, except for the few individuals selected by him, there was on the commission. He
lamented that “without more science we shall have little to shew on our return, save some very
fine maps, together with Astronomical & meteorological tables.”
27
For the government and the
astronomical engineers of the commission this may have been sufficient. But for Bartlett the
visual sightline did not end with maps and celestial tables. He stressed the importance of what
this scientific exploration would mean for the field of science but also in making the Smithsonian

26
On Bartlett considering himself a man of science see Bartlett, Personal Narrative of
Explorations and Incidents, ix. On his conversation with Jefferson Davis see Letter from John R.
Bartlett to Jefferson Davis, December 29, 1850 in Lynda Lasswell Crist, ed., Papers of Jefferson
Davis: Volume 4, 1849-1852, (Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 149.
27
Ibid., 149.

72

Institution, and the U.S. in conjunction, a preeminent site for scientific study. He emphasized the
need for natural science specialists and not “amateurs,” “mere fancy collectors of bugs and
shells,” or naturalists selected “on account of their political opinions.” They would need to be
“first rate,” “thorough and experienced,” and knowledgeable in the departments of science.
28

They would need to be trained specialists, who were thorough in their search for specimens.
They would need to know what to look for, how to identify it and how to preserve it. Bartlett
made his case to the Mississippi senator for a scientific sweep of the region, and hopefully the
federal government would soon see his way.
Congress disagreed with Bartlett’s vision, never providing a special appropriation to
support his scientific program in conjunction with the boundary survey. Federal rejection of the
proposal signaled a disconnect between Bartlett’s grand endeavor for scientific exploration and
the federal governments’ own utilitarian designs for determining the region’s commercial and
resource potential.
Constructing Futurity and Value for the Nation
In the late summer of 1850, Commissioner Bartlett and his team of naturalists stepped
onto what they imagined to be virginal landscape ready to transform it into an international
scientific borderscape. He had grand ambitions for the natural history objects they anticipated
and longed to collect. He had faith that the mineralogical, botanical, and zoological specimens
would bolster the nation’s reputation in all matters of science. French naturalist George Louis
Leclerc de Buffon had long before derided the flora and fauna of North America, insisting that
the excessively humid and colder climate led to the degeneration of New World quadrupeds,

28
Ibid., 147-149.

73

making them smaller and less diverse than their Old World forms.
29
Challenging Buffon’s theory
of degeneration, American naturalists like Bartlett labored to collect, catalogue, and publish on
the impressive diversity of natural resources as a way to celebrate the grandeur and display the
future prospects of the budding nation. As natural historians they also desired to be at the
forefront of scientific discovery and create natural history publications on par with their
European counterparts. The boundary commission offered Bartlett a rare opportunity to gather
what he imagined were unique and undiscovered objects. The stakes for prestige, authority and
national honor were high. Natural history was the medium through which Bartlett imagined
himself to be a modern steward of the nation.
However, not everyone saw value in the naturalist’s work. This section outlines the ways
in which Commissioner John Russell Bartlett attempted to make natural history a necessary
objective and component of the boundary commission through conceiving and imagining the
futurity of the borderlands, what it might come to be. Too often in the historiography on U.S.
western exploration is the figure of the “solider-scientist,” referring to West Point military
engineers, used to describe the government’s newfound investment in scientific exploration of its
expanding territories. These “solider-scientists” are celebrated for gathering scientific knowledge
of the interiority and the western fringes of the nation.
30
While federally funded survey reports

29
Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) challenged Buffon’s claims of a
degenerate America by insisting on a vigorous and natural bounty of the state. See Charlotte M.
Potter, The Eagle’s Nest: Natural History and American Ideas, 1812-1842 (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1986), 17.
30
Richard A. Bartlett, Great Surveys of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1962); Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 204; William H. Goetzmann,
Exploration and Empire: the Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West
(New York: Knopf, 1966); W. Turrentine Jackson, Wagon Roads West: A Study of Federal Road
Surveys and Construction in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1846-1869 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1952); and Edward S. Wallace, The Great Reconnaissance: Soldiers, Artists
and Scientists on the Frontier 1848-1861, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955)

74

opened up an opportunity to document the flora and fauna of the nation, there lacked the
“financial wherewithal and political will to fund natural history thoroughly and consistently,”
with “episodic and haphazard” military exploration and especially at the exclusion of civilian
American naturalists.
31
Excluding Dupree, the historiography assumes that the state fully
supported and funded these expeditions as scientific endeavors. However, many members of the
United States Congress could have cared less about the advancement of scientific pursuits, as
theirs was a vision directed at resource exploitation and settlement. Bartlett had to adjust his field
of vision from seeing nature for the sake of scientific knowledge to seeing nature for an
expanding empire. While both visions are interrelated, the federal government at the start of the
commission had little desire to know how many varieties of cacti could be found in the Sonoran
desert or the life histories of borderland fauna, that is “a virtual biography containing every scrap
of available evidence on appearance, reproduction, communication, habitat, life stages and
geographical distribution of a species.”
32
In emphasizing natural history observation as a method
of practical science, rather than a natural history catalogue of “life histories,” Bartlett believed he
stood a better chance of gaining state support for his natural history program on the boundary
line.
The dedication by which the naturalists sought after and catalogued natural objects was
unmatched, but the value accorded to the objects collected was not so easily or immediately
apparent to all. This was the predicament of Dr. Thomas H. Webb, Secretary to the U.S-Mexico
Boundary Commission, who staggered into San Diego on February 11th, 1852 famished,
fatigued and sunburned. Webb, along with twelve other men employed by the boundary

31
Andrew J. Lewis, A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 130; and Margaret Welch, The Book of Nature: Natural
History in the United States, 1825-1875 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 6.
32
Welch, The Book of Nature, 5.

75

commission, had traversed the expansive Sonoran desert, travelling over 700 miles in slightly
less than two months, to join the surveyors and engineers who were recently stationed at the
coastal city. Back in September of 1851, Webb had initially accompanied the U.S.
Commissioner, John Russell Bartlett, to Ures, the state capital of Sonora in northern Mexico, in
order to seek food, mules, and supplies for the seventy men who were engaged in locating and
marking the U.S.-Mexico boundary line along the Gila River in southern New Mexico. Six
months later, Thomas H. Webb strolled into San Diego without a single one of those items minus
what he could save of his colleague’s flora collection. How did the Secretary of the expedition
come to be so far removed from the official work of the boundary for such an extensive period of
time and with no provisions to account for? It was not simply the minimal resources available in
northern Mexico to replenish the commission or the slow transport of goods that delivered an
empty handed Webb to San Diego. What brought Webb into a temporary state of disrepair, as we
will see, was the devotion to scientifically document the border landscape and its inhabitants
along with the drive to collect the flora and fauna of this “unknown” region by men properly
trained to see and discern what is of value. Webb and the larger circle of American naturalists in
which he operated envisioned this as a mission of national importance, of course to the detriment
of the astronomers and surveyors of the boundary commission who desperately needed supplies
to actually mark the line.
For Commissioner Bartlett, seeking provisions in Ures was secondary to the
accumulation of mineral, geological and botanical specimens as well as ethnographic field
collections particular to the borderlands region. After three months in the Mexican state of
Sonora, Bartlett’s team failed to secure anything more than flour for the surveyors and engineers
who were observing, computing and running the line up north at the Gila River. Yet, their

76

accomplishments in the field of natural history and ethnography were beyond the finest.
Although stricken ill, Bartlett was able to add 200 words of the Yaqui language to his
compilation of native vocabulary. Dr. Webb had acquired an extensive collection of geological
materials, ranging from a diverse set of ores, minerals and rocks. George Thurber successfully
gathered numerous plant specimens. And Henry Pratt had illustrated portraits of Tanori, the head
chief of the Opate tribe, in addition to some drawings of the Yaqui natives. With the
accumulation of these priceless gems and the inability to secure food and supplies in four
different Sonoran cities, the men thought it time to rejoin the surveyors and engineers of the
boundary commission. Leaving the fever ridden Commissioner Bartlett behind to regain his
health, Webb, Thurber, Pratt and their attendants set off for the Gila River on December 15th,
1851 with the newly “discovered” and impressive specimens that would certainly put the United
States on the scientific map.
33

The group finally made it to the Gila River only to find the astronomical and surveying
parties had moved on to San Diego due to the depletion of supplies and funds, provisions
Bartlett’s expedition to Sonora was suppose to provide.
34
The team of naturalists and their
assistants where not prepared for such an extensive overland journey but neither were the pack
animals that bore the brunt of carrying the supplies or the scientists themselves. Webb lumbered
into San Diego with three pack mules having begun the journey with twenty-seven. With fewer
mules to transport their supplies, Webb and the others had to gradually abandon their cooking
utensils and clothing, then their camp stools and furniture, next their bedding and tents. The
members of the boundary commission were left with no shelter or protection from sand storms,

33
Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents, 1:445-446 (Pratt and illustrations),
1:450 (on leaving), 1:443 (on Yaqui language).
34
L. David Norris, James C. Milligan and Odie B. Faulk, William H. Emory Soldier-Scientist,
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 114.

77

torrential rains, or the desert winters’ “scorching heat of the sun” during mid-day and the icy
“cold searching blasts” of the night.
35

Perhaps the most heart wrenching experience, more so than losing the increasingly
emaciated animals, having to walk the last 150 miles on foot, or desperately digging through dry
river beds hoping for a semblance of water to surface, was having to abandon the heavy
geological specimens that Webb had eagerly collected before. The San Diego Herald
encapsulated the intellectual community’s sentiments over the abandonment of these specimens,
reporting that, “after the many dangers encountered to obtain possession of the collection [Webb]
had made, the loss is irreparable. Years may intervene before the same amount of useful
knowledge will again be acquired on this head, in a country about which so little is known.”
36

Webb was transporting more than just specimens; he was carrying knowledge, particularly
scientific knowledge that could amount to real dollars. This was devastating to both the scientist
seeking to understand the geological landscape of North America and the venture capitalist
looking to make a profit from the ores and minerals discovered. The enormous cost, in terms of
finance and protection, to send a contingent of scientists to the borderlands prompted the
journalist to note that it would be years before such findings could be replaced. However, not all
was lost. Even in their struggle for survival, George Thurber, the botanist, was able to save his
flora collection. Leaving behind virtually almost everything in their command, Thurber faithfully
held onto the vegetation that would unlock the mysteries of desert life. With only three pack
mules remaining, it is possible that Thurber himself or, more likely, one of the outfit’s servants,

35
Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents, 2:3.
36
San Diego Herald, San Diego, 1852, Bartlett Papers: The Mexican Boundary Commission
papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-1853, MSS MFilm 00647, reel 8, Official Journal,
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

78

laborers, or arrieros (mule drivers) were forced to carry the numerous pounds of foliage and
seedlings accumulated on their ancillary expedition.
Worse news awaited Bartlett at his return. Some of specimens that were entrusted to the
surveying contingent prior to Bartlett’s trip south of the boundary line had also been abandoned.
Bartlett framed any loss of the specimens on the inability of the commission’s non-naturalists to
see the immense value of those scouted and collected items to the scientific world. He lamented
the careless abandonment of a “rich” collection of reptiles that were unfortunately “thrown away
on the desert.” He did not extend the same feeling of anguish to the pack mules, which carried
his prized specimens and perished under such heavy loads. Rather, Bartlett assured his readers,
Gladly would I and the others who collected [the reptilian specimens] have lugged them
on our backs rather than lose them; but we were not with the party which had them in
their charge, and they doubtless thought such hideous creatures as serpents, lizards,
horned frogs, centipedes, scorpions, tarantulas, &c., might better be dispensed with than
some other articles.
37

In Bartlett’s estimation, had he and his naturalists been in similar circumstances they would have
played the role of savant martyrs, offering their own brute force to deliver the preserved reptiles
from this “unknown” land to the scientific community. For Bartlett, the other members simply
lacked the training understand the significance of what they could only comprehend to be
“hideous creatures.” Nor did they engage in the actual labor of pursuing and collecting the
animals, for if they had, they might have better understood the naturalists’ concentrated efforts.
The specimens were not simply serpents and lizards but the key to exploring a species’
geographical distribution or its morphological variance between regions. An unknown species
could also lead to self-prescribed naming rights that would bestow a certain honor preserved long
after the naturalists’ deaths. If the surveyors, engineers, and staff of the commission knew all

37
Bartlett Papers: The Mexican Boundary Commission papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-
1853, MSS MFilm 00647, reel 8, Official Journal, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

79

this, Bartlett implies, they may have thought twice about dispensing with such precious
materials.
The fervor for which Bartlett’s naturalists documented the borderland’s flora and fauna
and the flagrant disregard for Bartlett’s specimens by other members in the commission points to
the divergent modes knowledge production on a newfangled international boundary line. When it
came to funding, state officials at various points throughout the life of the commission leveled
the question: what did botany and taxonomy have anything to do with establishing the boundary
between two nations? But for the naturalists of the boundary commission, these tasks were
inseparable and the value of their work had to be packaged and sold for commercial profit in
order to dip into the state’s coffers.
Boundary naturalists’ efforts to legitimate their work to a skeptical state were nothing
new. As historian Andrew Lewis demonstrates, the field of natural history in the late eighteenth
century was repackaged from a cosmopolitan elite practice to one filled with self-named expert
savants focused on the utilitarian uses of botanical collection. Natural knowledge, practitioners
argued, would advance the nation by identifying the useful foods for manufacture and medicine
or mapping the geological terrain for resource extraction. In order to garner authority for funding
their projects, naturalists tied the identification of plants and minerals to national prosperity.
38

Boundary naturalists continued in this tradition.
John R. Bartlett was the driving force that turned the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission
into a natural historical object-finding mission. The federal government, for the most part,
desired only to mark the boundary line. It was Article VI of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

38
Andrew J. Lewis, “Natural history and the Market Economy: The Profitability of Plants and
Rocks,” chapter 2 in A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic,
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

80

that Bartlett reinterpreted for his own scientific pursuits. Article VI stipulated that only if by
chance, and time permitting, boundary officials were encouraged to make examinations
concerning the practicality of placing a transportation route along the Gila River. Outside of
fixing the line and assessing the possibility of a road, canal or railway along the boundary line,
the treaty did not explicitly call for the collection of natural history objects, and most certainly
not for the purpose of scientific advancements in the field. Bartlett took the initiative to establish
a corps of naturalists on his own. As presented in the sectioned above, Bartlett was familiar to
the world of politicking for funds as a means to support natural history endeavors.
On December 3rd, 1850, during negotiation proceedings over the line, Bartlett informed
Mexico’s Boundary Commissioner, General Pedro Garcia Conde, that the United States had also
attached to it a Corps of Naturalists. He continued,
The Botany of those sections is almost entirely, if not quite, unknown; and it will prove
of great interest to the scientific world, and of much importance to the present inhabitants
of the vicinity, and to the future population of the regions referred to, to have the history,
properties, and uses of the plants, trees, &c., indigenous thereto, made know. The same
remarks will hold true, in great measure respecting the Geology, Mineralogy, Zoology,
&c. of those regions. The design therefore is to collect every description of scientific
information possible, that will tend to develop their internal resources.
39

There was no official Corps of Naturalists as designated by the Secretary of the Interior. Bartlett
cunningly created this contingent after Secretary of Interior, Thomas Ewing, denied his request
for a scientific unit devoted solely to natural history.
40
Bartlett, in turn, selected naturalists to fill
administrative positions of the commission, like secretary, quartermaster, and surgeon, as well as
used titles such as “mining engineer,” rather than mineralogist or geologist, to legitimate the post

39
Proceeding, 1850-57, Entry 396; Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and
Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park, MD, 1:4-5.
40
U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, made in compliance with a
resolution of the Senate calling for information in relation to the commission appointed to run
and move the boundary between the United States and Mexico, 32d Cong., 1st sess., 1852, S.
Exec. Doc. 119, 13.

81

as a utility for the state—meaning surveying for future mineral extraction. In his conversation
with Commissioner Garcia Conde, Bartlett proceeded to frame the significance of his illegitimate
Corps of Naturalists and natural history collection by highlighting its significance to not only its
present residents but also the future populations that would be able to draw on its “internal
resources.” Natural history, Bartlett insisted, could be “designed” as a utility for both present and
future state development.
Bartlett created value for his natural history program through claims of resource
exploitation. Although Bartlett was not allotted his specialized natural history unit, he was
successful in convincing the state of the importance of this type of endeavor. Determining the
national border was still the state’s primary concern, but taking into account the commission’s
“passage through unexplored regions of Texas, New Mexico and California,” it made financial
sense to “acquire information as to their geographically natural history, etc,” while concurrently
establishing the boundary line.
41
Bartlett was then given permission to send out exploring parties
for the purpose of collecting data on the natural history of the region, but only when the survey
of the line was in hiatus. Congress was less invested in the kind of natural history that Bartlett
thought, “would prove great interest to the scientific world,” which included “the properties, and
uses of the plants, trees, &c., indigenous.”
42
Rather what the state found “desirable” was
“information relative to the precious metals, quicksilver, and the various minerals, ores, and
other substances, useful in the arts,” as well as the “existence and localities” of abandoned

41
John Russell Bartlett, U.S. Boundary Commissioner, to Alex H. H. Stuart, Secretary of the
Interior, Washington, D.C., February 14, 1853; Letters received from the third U.S.
Commissioner 1850-60, Entry 424; Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and
Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park, MD.
42
Proceeding, 1850-57, Entry 396; Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and
Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park, MD, 1:4.

82

mines.
43
Here “the arts” does not refer to the visual arts, but to the mechanical arts of industry
and engineering; what would essentially be commercially profitable to the nation. The demands
of the state would attempt to orient Bartlett’s field of vision to one with an economic agenda.
It was a vision directed toward resource expropriation and underlying that process was an
epistemology of time, future time, which would be used to conceive the newly established
boundary line. Historian Giselle Byrnes’ study on the relationship between land surveying and
the colonization of New Zealand can help elucidate the concept of a temporal Southwest
borderlands. Viewing the land with an eye toward its potential for commercial transformation,
development and settlement is what Byrnes refers to as a “survey of the future,” where surveyors
“saw land as landscape, not as it was but as it might be.”
44
New Zealand land surveyors’
commercial gaze—visions of resources extraction, travel routes, trading outposts, and potential
for settlement—can be extended to naturalists on the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission. To
even begin to see the potential for travel routes, trading outposts and settlement required the
exploration of available natural resources surrounding the boundary line to support such
infrastructures. Bartlett proposed natural history collection as a strategy to make seeable the
boundary region’s future “landscape,” its borderscape.
As such, land surveyors were not the only ones assessing what the landscape might be.
Bartlett envisioned the boundary survey to be much more than a project to run and mark a
boundary line or to assess the practically of constructing a rail line. The boundary commission
offered an opportunity for scientific and cultural explorations for not only the nation but for the
advancement of science. His original request to Secretary of Interior Ewing for a natural history

43
Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents, 2:590.
44
Giselle Byrnes, Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and the Colonization of New Zealand
(Wellington, N.Z.: Bridget Williams Books, 2001), 20, 29, 39. Emphasis in the original.

83

unit included a geologist/mineralogist, assistant mineralogist, botanist, zoologist, assistant
zoologist, philologist, ethnologist, historiographer, taxidermist, two artists and draughtsmen at an
estimated annual cost of $19,100.
45
Bartlett attempted to link national economic development of
the nation with the promotion of science and must have understood his federally appointed
position as fulfilling that goal, or at the very least, as an attempt to justify his scientific work to
the state. Congress thought differently and did not allocate a separate appropriation. Natural
knowledge of mineral deposits like ore, silver, and gold was easily digestible to an expanding
empire, but the habits of the coyote or the distinction between the gray wolf and the buffalo wolf
would require further justification beyond simple studies for the advancement of science.
Although given the go ahead to make natural history explorations if it did not impede the
marking of the line, the Department of the Interior and Congress put limits on Bartlett’s
ambitions for natural history collection. The Department of the Interior consistently reminded
Bartlett to cut back on personnel and the first to go were those linked to natural history. Upon
arrival to El Paso, Bartlett was instructed to reduce the force, “to the lowest possible limits
consistent with the duties to be performed;” duties which did not include natural history.
46
Later
on in the commission Bartlett was reminded that there were to be only two scientific units, the
surveying and astronomical parties and that “All other scientific departments, not directly
connected with the surveys of the boundary line,” were to be dismissed. Those on the chopping

45
U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, made in compliance with a
resolution of the Senate calling for information in relation to the commission appointed to run
and move the boundary between the United States and Mexico, 32d Cong., 1st sess., 1852, S.
Exec. Doc. 119, 13.
46
John Russell Bartlett, U.S. Boundary Commissioner, to Robert McClelland, Secretary of
Interior, August 1854; Letters received from the third U.S. Commissioner 1850-60, Entry 424;
Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitration, Record Group 76; National
Archives at College Park, MD.

84

block were to be “persons devoted to the pursuit of science.”
47
Bartlett struggled to translate the
value of natural history and ethnographic research to a future orientated state.
Even if he worked beyond state designs, Bartlett was still a representative of the state,
even if he saw the utility of natural history through a different lens than that of the federal
government. It is significant that Bartlett, and not Congress, was the state agent that the various
indigenous, Mexican, and Anglo inhabitants of the region encountered. Regardless of the
Department of Interior’s orders to reduce the employees of the boundary commission, at times
with specific reference to those engaged in natural history, Bartlett chose to continue his
scientific research and collection. Recall when Bartlett and his team of naturalists left the
surveying and astronomical parties to travel through the northern borderlands of Mexico to
collect natural history objects and gather ethnographic data. This was done without Senate
approval and of course under the guise of procuring supplies for the commission’s surveyors.
“Outside the Bounds of Civilization”: The Ethnographer and the Temporal Southwest
The Western Texas article that began this chapter was quick to empty the mid-nineteenth
century border region of “civilized man.” According to the writer, border nature was pristine, it
was untouched and undisturbed by man. Paradoxically, in the same breathe, the author
acknowledged the indigenous inhabitants of the region, but disqualified their presence in
constructing the borderscape as he wrote,
The great part of the country over which the Boundary commission will pass…is to
civilization an unknown land; over the greater portion of it the foot of civilized man has
never trod; the eye of man, save the passing glance of the roaming savage, has never

47
Department of the Interior to John Russell Bartlett, U.S. Boundary Commissioner,
Washington, D.C., October, 1851; Senate Resolutions and Executive Orders, Entry 403; Records
of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at
College Park, MD.

85

rested on its wild and rugged features; it is in truth an untrodden field for the curious and
enterprising to enter on.
48

Following a settler colonial perspective of frontier space, those celebrating the boundary project
constituted a temporal landscape that was predicated on the dichotomy between modern and
primitive bodies. The idea that the boundary line, as part of the American West, existed “outside
the bounds of civilization,” was a common literary and imaginative trope.
49
Such a belief
bestowed upon naturalists the power to make known to civilization this otherwise “unknown
land.” Boundary naturalists derived their power of knowing from first-hand observation, from
“the eye of man,” a perceptual ability and vision denied to the native groups of the surrounding
region. For the Western Texas, the area’s indigenous populations lacked the capacity or spirit to
see the significance and potential of the border landscape for a modern country or its usefulness
for the field of science. The “roaming savage” had but only a “passing glance,” that could not
rest on, or in other words, view or study with intense, regimented and lengthy scrutiny the
objects of an “untrodden field.” The naturalist, in opposition to the native population, became the
modern subject, who with the “eye of man” could enter and invent meaning for the border
region.
John R. Bartlett’s experience in natural history was not the only attribute that, for some,
made him a qualified candidate for commissioner of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission.
50

48
Western Texas, San Antonio, 1850, Bartlett Papers: The Mexican Boundary Commission
papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-1853, MSS MFilm 00647, reel 8, Official Journal,
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
49
Washington, June 29, 1850. Bartlett Papers: The Mexican Boundary Commission papers of
John Russell Bartlett, 1850-1853, MSS MFilm 00647, reel 8, Official Journal, Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.
50

Some lauded Bartlett for his bodily and perceptual discipline. Reviewers of Bartlett’s
published narrative on his experiences with the Boundary Commission commented on his
aptitude to observe. The Literary Intelligence noted that Bartlett’s account “is a conscientious,
full, accurate narrative of personal experience, patient and extensive observation, duly recorded.”
Another reviewer asserted that Bartlett’s “extensive acquirements, and literary ability, enabled

86

His knowledge of and participation in the field of ethnography may have also lent him a tinge of
credibility to fill the position of commissioner. At a young age, Bartlett expressed an interest in
natural history and the American Indian, and became a member of Rhode Island’s Franklin
Society (an organization for the study of natural sciences), the Rhode Island Historical Society,
and one of the founding members of the Providence Athenaeum.
51
Most importantly, in 1842 he
co-founded the American Ethnological Society with eminent ethnologist Albert Gallatin.
Members of the society included: anthropologists Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Ephraim George
Squier, John Lloyd Stephens, and artist-explore John Mix Stanley. Two years before joining the
boundary commission, Bartlett published “On the Progress of Ethnology,” in the Transactions of
the American Ethnological Society, which detailed the state of ethnological study around the
globe.
52
Albert Gallatin’s “On the Ancient Semi-Civilization of New Mexico and the Great
Colorado of the West” accompanied Bartlett’s paper in Transactions.
53
Bartlett’s inner circle was
full of prominent scholars of the American Indian and he took that knowledge with him to the
Southwest borderlands.

him to observe intelligently and describe graphically.” Bartlett possessed the bodily discipline to
“patient[ly],” “duly,” “extensive[ly],” and intelligently observe his surroundings. These
superlatives point to active sight, turning Bartlett into an agent of sight who skillfully and
accurately translated his vision into graphic description. So often derided by the Boundary
Commission’s Corps of Topographical Engineer personnel as an incompetent leader, literary
critics lauded Bartlett for his bodily discipline. Performing the embodied operator required the
skillful execution of technical competency and training. See Literary Intelligence, Bartlett
Papers: The Mexican Boundary Commission papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-1853, MSS
MFilm 00647, reel 8, Official Journal, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
51
Bartlett, Autobiography of John Russell Bartlett; Werne, The Imaginary Line, 47.
52
John Russell Bartlett, “On the Progress of Ethnology,” in Transactions of the American
Ethnological Society, v. 2 (New York: Bartlett & Welford, 1848), appendix.

53
Albert Gallatin, “On the Ancient Semi-Civilization of New Mexico and the Great Colorado of
the West,” in Transactions of the American Ethnological Society, v. 2 (New York: Bartlett &
Welford, 1848), liii-xcviii .

87

But even before John R. Bartlett, or the other government-funded expeditions found
themselves documenting the American West, interest in the region’s ruins and antiquities began
much earlier. In the sixteenth century, Spanish expeditions marched into northern New Spain in
search for the “Province of Cíbola (Seven Cities of Gold),” a fabled city of gold and treasure. In
his search for the “Province of Cíbola,” Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led an expedition that
instead brought them to a Zuni pueblo, Hawikuh. Having found no gold or a great city of wealth,
Corondao and his men eventually returned to Mexico.
54
Over a century later, in 1694, Father
Eusebio Francisco Kino visited and wrote the first description of the “Casa Grande” ruin, a
compound constructed in the fourteenth century by ancient Sonoran Desert people located in
what is now southern Arizona. Between 1806 and 1846, Anglo accounts of New Mexican
inhabitants and ruins began to circulate in American magazines, newspapers, popular books and
travel narratives such as Zebulon Pike’s The Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike (1810),
William H. Prescotts’ History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), Josiah Gregg’s Commerce of
the Prairies (1844), and George Augusts Fredrick Ruxton’s Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky
Mountains (1848).
55
Yet, while these men explored the region, excluding Prescott, their accounts
of the ruins and native peoples were “based on casual observation and hearsay,” and it was not
until the Corps of Topographical Engineers, who entered the Southwest in 1846, that direct

54
Before returning to Mexico, Coronado and his expedition would travel to the High Plains, near
central Kansas, in search of more “rumored wealth [in] the Province of Quivira.” Don D. Fowler,
A Laboratory for Anthropology: Science and Romanticism in the American Southwest, 1846-
1930 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 9.

55

James Snead draws on David Weber’s Taos Trappers to note that “William Becknell’s
mention of relics encountered in southwest Colorado in the winter of 1824 is one of the first
Anglo-American references to southwestern antiquities from that region.” James E. Snead, Ruins
and Rivals: The Making of Southwest Archaeology (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001),
170n3. See also Fowler, A Laboratory for Anthropology, 2, 34-37.

88

observation of the ruins took place.
56
In fact, Albert Gallatin in “On the Ancient Semi-
Civilization of New Mexico,” drew his information from a variety of Spanish accounts, but also
William H. Emory’s report on his military reconnaissance with Stephen Watts Kearny’s Army of
the West in 1846.
57
The most significant reports of Southwestern ruins included: Lt. William H.
Emory (1848, 1851), Lt. James H. Simpson (1850), John Russell Bartlett (1854), and Lt.
Whipple (1855).
When it came to the archeological analysis of these southwestern ruins, Historian James
E. Snead, poignantly notes that the military expeditions in the 1850s only “recorded ruins as they
documented routes of travel, sources of water, and related aspects of the southwestern
landscape.”
58
Site excavation was not substantially sustained beyond cursory description.
Likewise, it is not until the turn of the twentieth century that regional archaeological societies
like Los Angeles’ Southwest Society or the Santa Fe Archaeological Society “classicize[d] the
native American past and use[d] it to construct a regional heritage, in essence [developing] an
‘invented tradition,’ [that] was widely successful among local Anglo-Americans alienated from
their cultural roots and insecure about their place in the Union.”
59
Considering the low number of
Anglo-American residents in the area during mid-century, the 1850s exploration of southwestern
ruins would not have initiated a call for regional identity.
60
What other forms of representation

56

Fowler, A Laboratory for Anthropology, 35, 38-49.

57

Albert Gallatin, “On the Ancient Semi-Civilization of New Mexico and the Great Colorado of
the West,” in Transactions of the American Ethnological Society, v. 2 (New York: Bartlett &
Welford, 1848), xci.

58
Snead also writes that the while the Smithsonian Institution published archeological papers, it
did not directly sponsor archeological research. James E. Snead, Ruins and Rivals: The Making
of Southwest Archaeology (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001), 5-6.
59

Snead, Ruins and Rivals, xxv.

60
There was little to no market for Southwestern antiquities before the 1880s. See Chip Colwell-
Chanthaphonh, Living Histories: Native American Issues and Southwestern Archaeology
(Lanham, M.D: AltaMira, 2010), 52; Snead, Ruins and Rivals, 12-13.

89

might Indian antiquities and native bodies have had for the nation at mid-century? I will argue,
that although the data collected on indigenous subjects and antiquities during government-funded
expeditions of the 1850s differed from the systematic study made by professional anthropologists
of the 1900s, people like Simpson, Bartlett, and Whipple, through their encounters with and
documentation of native peoples and ruins, helped to imprint a narrative of past and future onto
the nation’s new southwestern periphery.
The study of American Indians and their antiquities was nothing new by the 1850s. For
centuries before, Europeans contemplated the origins of the American Indian to the “New
World.” How did they come to arrive and populate the Western Hemisphere, and, for that matter
how did American Indians compare to Europeans? Monogenists and Polygenists hotly debated as
to whether native peoples belonged to the same or were a distinct species, respectively.
61

Importantly, the study of the American Indian’s origins was also a study of time. How ancient
were the first peoples and their artifacts?
62
Such questions became of increased interest as
EuroAmericans began populating the Ohio and Mississippi valleys in the late eighteenth century.
As they settled this frontier region, they encountered ceremonial centers and burial mounds filled
with artifacts left by American Indians centuries before, who were referred to as Mound
Builders.
63
It was not until after the War of 1812 that systematic investigation of the mounds

61
John P. Jackson and Nadine M. Weidman, Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and
Interaction (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005).
62
On mound builders see J. Conor Burns, “Negotiating the Agricultural Frontier in Nineteenth-
Century Southern Ohio Archaeology,” in Knowing Global Environments: New Historical
Perspectives on the Field Sciences, ed. Jeremy Vetter (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 2011); Fowler, A Laboratory for Anthropology, 20; and Curtis M. Hinsley, The
Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in Victorian America
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1981), 68.
63
Fowler, A Laboratory for Anthropology, 25.

90

began and renewed questions about the peopling of the New World.
64
Again, debates arose as to
whether the historical inhabitants who built the mounds were of the same or distinct race of the
contemporary Indians of the region, and if the same, did they degenerate into a lower state of
civilization.
65
Craniologist Samuel Morton believed American Indians belonged to one race, but
two different families. He argued that the Mound Builders were part of the “Barbarous family”
of American Indians and that the mound builders, rather, belonged to the “Toltecan family,” who
were responsible for the semi-civilizations of Central America.
66
Morton, essentially, denied the
North American Indian the ability to have once achieved what he and others deemed semi-
civilization. By the time military expeditions enter the U.S. southwest, men of science were
already contemplating “the significance of native Americans to White historical identity and
national destiny.”
67

Like the natural history collection of the boundary commission, ethnological data was
ancillary to the military expeditions that entered the U.S. Southwest between 1846 and 1859.
Preparing for his 1846 reconnaissance during the U.S.-Mexico War, William H. Emory, wrote to
his superior Col. J. J. Abert, chief of the crops of topographical engineers, reviewed his
instructions that “in all cases where it did not interfere with other and more immediate military
demands of the service, the attention of [him]self, and the officers assigned to duty with [him],

64

Hinsley, The Smithsonian and the American Indian, 23.

65
Henry Schoolcraft believed that the historical Indians of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys were
related to the contemporary native inhabitants, but that over time they degenerated from higher
states of civilization. Hinsley writes that “despite disagreements over the identity of the mound-
builders, most archaeological investigators agreed that the ancient inhabitants of American had
originated elsewhere; and that ‘physical, moral, and traditionary evidence’ pointed to Asia, (23).
Hinsley, The Smithsonian and the American Indian, 25.
66

Hinsley. The Smithsonian and the American Indian, 26.

67

Ibid., 22.

91

should be employed in collecting data which would give the government some idea of the
regions traversed.”
68
The type of data collected, seemly, was left up to Emory to decide.
The Pacific Railroad Surveys included four separate commissioners who distinctively
approached and reported on the indigenous peoples of the American West. Amiel W. Whipple’s
Report Upon the Indian Tribes and James H. Simpson’s Exploration pinned their subjects of
study to the southwest borderlands. While there reports maintained the common binary between
civilization and savagery, their discussion of ruins and indigenous history, including the
migration of pre-contact peoples in the southwest, placed Native peoples into multiple temporal
registers. Across the western surveys, Indians were a present threat, with a mysterious historical
past, and were in danger of fast diminishing. Whipple and Simpson did commonly use the
civilization and savagery binary to place the region within linear stages of progress and
development. However, the linear stage of development was complicated by another racialized
trope, that of degeneration and regression. The New Mexican ruins suggested to some that a once
“semi-civilized tribe” could retrograde back into a primitive state. Others who did not wish to
disrupt the linear stage model argued that the ancient peoples who built the ruins of New Mexico
were not the ancestors of the current Indian population. Instead those ancient peoples
disappeared because of natural forces like flood, drought, or earthquakes. Furthermore, the
American public incorporated the western survey’s ethnographic reports in their own
imagination of what constituted the boundaries of the nation. Some used the ruins found in New
Mexico, as evidence to either justify or oppose annexation of the territory. For one writer, the
ruins proved that the Indian population was capable of reaching a higher form of civilization and

68
William H. Emory, Notes of a military reconnaissance, from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri,
San Diego, in California, including part of the Arkansas, Del Norte, and Gila Rivers
(Washington: Wendell and Van Benthuysen, 1848), 7.

92

so should be incorporated into the nation. Even before the transcontinental railroad, time and
space were imprinted on the southwestern borderlands and the bodies that inhabited that region
through the ethnographic research of individuals assigned to government expeditions.
Conclusion
Making meaning out of place was not simply the work of diligent surveyors with their
clean data for the service of the nation. It also entailed individual agendas that, often times,
exceeded the state. The natural history and ethnographic collection in both the Boundary Survey
and Amiel Weeks Whipple’s Pacific Railroad Survey reveals that expressive acts of empire in
the American Southwest varied according to individual state agents. John Russell Bartlett, U.S.
Boundary Survey commissioner, in his quest to map the flora and fauna of the borderlands
region, both north and south of the newly determined boundary line, met with inconsistent
support from state authorities. Despite congressional reluctance to Bartlett’s natural history
mapping, Bartlett followed through with his plans without state support. Amiel Weeks Whipple’s
interest in ethnography mirrored that of Bartlett’s national history collection. Whipple’s
extensive report on Indians differed from all the other Pacific Railroad Surveys, which offered
minimal to lengthier individual reports of the native peoples surrounding their respective
potential rail lines. The figures of Bartlett and Whipple complicate provide a window into the
complex underpinnings of westward expansion. Individual agents expressions of empire, at
times, had more to do with regional understandings of place than did the nation-state.

93
Chapter Three
Seeing you, Seeing me: Challenges to Boundary Optics

Ranging across the north is Avi Mil-li-ket, its highest peak called by the Americans “Chimney
Peak,” and by the old Jesuits “San Pablo.” The Indian name is in honor of a learned and wise
chief who became a deity after his death. He occupies a large cavern in the mountains, the
entrance to which is guarded by a raccoon, a pet during his stay upon earth; the path which
leads from the cave to the river bank is said to be distinctly marked by his foot-prints. He seems
to enjoy long intervals of sleep, and when aroused from his slumbers by the wickedness of his
worshippers, he is believed to change his position, and the act of rolling over causes the
rumbling earthquakes which are frequently felt throughout this section of the country…The
Indians, considering it a part of their religious duty, make regular visits to the spot, like
Mahomedans to the shrine of Mahomet.
- Nathanial Michler, Lieutenant Corps of Topographical Engineers
Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1857
1

In his report to William H. Emory, U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commissioner, Lieutenant
Nathaniel Michler recited the legend of Avi Mil-li-ket, a story he collected from an unidentified
indigenous informant while on an expedition to scientifically locate the latitudinal and
longitudinal coordinates of the U.S.-Mexico boundary line on the Gila and Colorado River
junction, near present day California and Arizona state borders. This account may have appeared
to Michler as an engaging anecdote of native folklore, or a way to establish difference between
what he saw as his scientific program and indigenous “antiquated” understandings of seismic
activity. Yet, stories do much more than recount fanciful tales, they “are a central means by
which people organize their physical surroundings.”
2
Lore and rituals serve to demarcate

1

William H. Emory, Report on the United States and Mexico Survey, Made under the Direction
of the Secretary of the Interior, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1857, S. Exec. Doc. 108, 1:104.
2
Kent C. Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place
(Iowa: Iowa City Press, 1993), 56.

94
physical and cultural boundaries. Avi Mil-li-ket was a narrative that tied the local tribe to the
landscape; it was a verbal expression of territorial domain that manifested itself physically
through pilgrimage. Michler was in the business of affixing a border, but he did so atop an
already bordered land.
Michler and others were not ignorant to the fact that the boundary line cut across a
multitude of Indian polities that enacted power over geographic space in various ways. In his
report to Emory, Michler described the territorial domains of the Quechan, the Cocopas, the
Maricopas, and the Pimos.
3
While Michler sat on a hilltop admiring the “rich cultivated fields”
of Cola Azul’s village, “an old grey-headed Pimo took great pleasure in pointing out [to him] the
extent of their domains.” Michler recalled, “They were anxious to know if their rights and titles
to lands would be respected by our government, upon learning that their country had become part
of the United States.” The Pimo’s question does not suggest submission to an inevitable U.S.
take over, but an inquiry as to whether the U.S. will respect “their rights and titles to lands.” The
Pimos do not occupy land “in-between” inter-imperial struggle, nor is conflict reducible to U.S.
“state” and indigenous “non-state” distinctions.
4
When the boundary commission traversed the

3

Emory, Report on the United States and Mexico Survey, 1:106.

4
This chapter aims to complicate Adelman and Aron’s definition of borderlands, “contested
boundaries between colonial domains,” were Indians “take advantage of occupying the lands ‘in
between,’” by playing off imperial rivalries (816). Native Americans expressed and understood
their territorial domain in ways that did not simply sandwich them “in between” empires.
According to Adelman and Aron, the region becomes a bordered land when empire shifts to a
nation-state where “property rights, citizenship and population movements [become] the purview
of state authorities” (817). However, a bordered land cannot be solely reducible to a distinction
between “state” and “non-state” societies. Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman instead call on
scholars to “redefine [early America’s] space and borders, ridding the historical landscape of
imperial cores, Native peripheries, and modern national borders that ‘obfuscate the colonization
and dispossession of native peoples’ as part of the ‘ideological work performed by national
history in a settler state,” (24). See Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to
Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,” The
American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 814-841, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2650990;

95
southwest, abandoned villages dotted the landscape; Plains Indians impacted the region with
raiding warfare for decades before. So much so, that Boundary Commissioner William H. Emory
noticed, “whole sections of country [had] been depopulated, and the stock driven off and killed;
and in entire States the ranches [had] been deserted and the people driven into the towns.”
Historian Brian DeLay cautions against analyzing the raids as resistance narratives where “native
people resorted to collective violence against their dangerous neighbors only to resist
dispossession.”
5
Instead, DeLay proposes a politics of vengeance, waging war for personal
prestige, that shaped the inter-relations with Mexicans and Americans, who had to resist, cope,
and adjust to indigenous expressions of power across territorial space.
This chapter seeks to demonstrate, that despite ceaseless assertions made by boundary
officials that the southern line mostly sat in a barren and desolate frontier, the region was both
energetic and bordered. Delineations of territorial domain varied with different political
economies such as hunter-gatherer, sedentary, and raiding. Boundaries could be expressed by
claims to resources, violence, war, vengeance, missions, natural landscapes, rock cartography,
and oral traditions.
6
Thus, cartographic visions did not operate singularly in the southwest
borderlands. Surveying practices collided and/or cooperated with other established ways of

Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman, “Introduction. Maps and Spaces,
Paths to Connect, and
Lines to Divide,” in Contested Spaces of Early America, eds. Juliana Barr and Edward
Countryman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 1-28.
5
Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 138.
6
For a discussion on the politics of vengeance see Brian DeLay, “The Politics of Vengeance,”
chap. 4 in War of a Thousand Deserts. On the role of violence and belonging in the production of
borderlands see, Brian DeLay, “Blood Talk: Violence and Belonging in the Navajo-new
Mexican Borderland,” in Contested Spaces of Early America, eds. Juliana Barr and Edward
Countryman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 229-256. On Indigenous
North American empires see Pekka Hämäläinen, Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2008). On Native American landscapes inscriptions, indigenous maps, rock art
cartography see, Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman, “Introduction. Maps and Spaces, Paths to
Connect, and Lines to Divide,” 1-28.

96
seeing, but so did the environment. The terrain, its rivers, forests, canyons, and deserts, was an
active force that challenged the tenants of boundary making. Contemporary ethnographers, like
U.S. Boundary Commissioner John Russell Bartlett, often placed Indians within their studies of
zoology, essentially categorizing Indians as non-human and belonging only to the natural world.
In exploring both environmental and indigenous challenges to boundary making, it is not my
intention to reproduce nineteenth-century ethnography’s classifications of Indians as non-people
nor romanticize indigenous connections to the landscape. Rather, both landscapes, as their own
entity, and indigenous bodies and their knowledges of those landscapes were rarely as
manageable as the boundary commission had anticipated or imagined.
I will begin this chapter, with a discussion of how the environment hindered the visual
process of marking an accurate line across a vibrant geographic space. The re-landscaping of the
American Southwest would prove to be a time-consuming obstacle for the elite West Point
trained U.S. surveyors of the boundary commission. Next, I will explore how indigenous and
non-indigenous locals commanded the terms of exchange with the boundary commission,
whether that trade was for goods or to serve as guides. How they undermined the boundary
commission’s “right to look” by inhibiting the border making process, misguiding the
commission, obstructing their scientific sightlines, and/or raiding their supplies.
Environments Defy Boundaries
While Native Americans, according to William H. Emory, proved to be an obstacle to
geographic re-landscaping, the environment also served as an impediment to boundary making.
The southwest heat often produced the optical illusion of a mirage, turning the desert landscape
into a sea of water. Heat from the ground causes light travelling downwards from the sky to take
a curved, rather than direct, path to the observer’s eye, producing an inverted image of the sky on

97
the ground. Ironically, this optical phenomenon caused headaches for the surveyors of the
commission. When at Fort Yuma, Emory complained,
Even in winter the sun is so hot, and the direct as well as reflected light upon the san-
plains so dazzling, that, excepting a couple of hours after daybreak and an hour before
sunset, it is only possible to see objects through the best instrumental telescopes in the
most distorted shapes—a thin white pole appearing as a tall column of the whitest fleece.
7

Emory describes a towering effect caused by atmospheric refraction, where objects along the
horizon are exponentially elongated. This could, in effect, displace terrestrial objects from their
geographic locations making theodolite work, pointing a telescope at a target object to measure
vertical and horizontal angles, difficult to complete. In addition to mirages, smoke from man-
made prairie fires caused visual obstruction. Lt. Whipple complained that his joint work with the
Mexican astronomer was delayed, noting that, “the practical advantages of
[triangulation]…would have been made except for a dense smoke occasionally by burning of the
prairies by Indians.”
8
Native Americans burned prairies to encourage the growth of young grass
for grazing. However, on his travels along the 35th parallel, Balduin Möllhausen suspected that
“hostile Indians” set the prairie fire to impede the expedition’s progress westward, as he
considered it too early in the summer season to burn grass for rejuvenation.
9
Whether
Möllhausen was correct in or overstated his assessment concerning the cause of the fires,
Whipple’s main worry was the smoke’s effect on surveying an accurate boundary line.
Mountains, rivers, and arid deserts further obstructed the commission’s program.
Stretching 1,900 miles, the delineation of the southern U.S. boundary line took a vastly different

7
Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1:106.
8
Bartlett Papers: The Mexican Boundary Commission papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-
1853, MSS MFilm 00647, reel 9, Official Journal, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
9
Balduin Möllhausen, Diary of a journey from the Mississippi to the coasts of the Pacific with a
United States government expedition (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts,
1858), 108, 110. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

98
shape than its predecessors.
10
With fewer transportation networks and navigable rivers, as
compared to the Northeast, William H. Emory, the chief astronomer and surveyor of the
commission, desired to secure the most high-tech and portable astronomical and surveying
instruments on the market. Instruments that could be assembled in parts, that could withstand the
harsh terrain and the excessively dry climate, would require, according to Emory, “the skill of
the best instrument makers”.
11
Also, because segments of the region were “destitute of trees to
[make] stands for the instruments,” Emory ordered durable portable stands to be specially made.
The steep summits of the sierras made it difficult for surveyors to find a location large enough to
place an instrument. Surveyors that visited these stations had to “[sit] up all night after their work
was done, as there was not sufficient space to stretch themselves out.”
12
Chronometers, used to
locate longitude by keeping local time, were altered by the rocky terrain and would either run too
fast or too slow.
13
While segments of the line lacked trees, other regions were abundant with
timber. The thick growth of trees along riverbeds could require a twenty-five to thirty mile
detour in order to move the surveying work a few hundred feet. With the trees stretching two

10
Over a fifty-year period, through the Louisiana Purchase, the Oregon Treaty, and the U.S.-
Mexico War, the United States grew to 3 million square miles. Although the Louisiana Purchase
of 1803 gave the United States a sizeable amount of the North American continent, it was not
until the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty that the southern border was officially established. Although
called for in the Treaty, that boundary line was never surveyed. The Northeast boundary between
the United States and Canada was the first surveyed from 1816-1822 and then again in the
1840s. So while the U.S.-Mexico border was not the first, it was the most massive endeavor to
mark an international border in the United States.
11
William H. Emory, Chief Astronomer and Surveyor, to James Buchanan, Secretary of State,
New York, February 4, 1849; Emory Correspondence, 1849-1851, Entry 425; Records of
Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at
College Park, MD.
12

Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1:124.

13

William H. Emory to the Secretary of the Interior, July 29, 1856; Records Concerning the
Southern Boundary, Entry 486; Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitration,
Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park, MD.

99
miles in width, teamsters had to cut through a forest wall to clear a line of sight for the
theodolite, invariably delaying the border-making process.
14

Reshaping physical territorial boundaries by erecting monuments was largely
unsuccessful. The scarcity of trees along portions of the border made things difficult for marking
the line. Whereas teamsters of the northeast boundary commission (1816-1822 and 1840s)
marked the border with monuments carved out of nearby trees, teamsters of the southwest
commission had to use whatever plant life and rock forms were available. Their monuments
were embedded into the landscape. Some took the form of an animal skull balancing a lengthy
twig, a rag serving as a flag, a mound of stones, or, a complete surrender to the environment,
simply a piece of cloth tied to the thorny branch of a desert plant. Person, animal, or environment
could easily demolish such organic matter. Even more sturdy monuments suffered demolition,
like when Native Americans broke, “into a thousand pieces,” an iron border monument along the
Colorado River.
15
Emory, without a daguerreotype, decided to make illustrations of the boundary
markers to document their locations “in the event of the Indians removing the monuments
erected on the ground,” and, secondary, to give an idea of “the topography of the country.”
16
He
had Austrian scientist and engineer, John E. Weyss, sketch the placement of these boundary
markers from where the boundary line leaves the Rio Bravo to where it reaches the 111th
meridian, in the event of their destruction. Emory and his team built boundary markers that they
were uncertain would withstand the region.
The environment rarely acquiesced to the astronomers and surveyors needs; heavy rains,
snow, sand storms, and fog often disrupted their lines of sight. On describing a sandstorm Emory

14

Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1:78, 113.

15

Ibid., 1:104.

16
Ibid., 1:96.

100
informed his readers, “the winds blow up quickly and violently, and it is useless to attempt to
work with nice instruments. These dust-storms were our great drawbacks, as it was impossible to
see many feet distant, and then only at the risk of being blinded.”
17
Fog in California kept
Whipple from determining longitude by obscuring the flashes of gunpowder used to compare
time between two mountain ranges.
18
Rain and snow forced the commission to set up camp and
wait out the storms. On days when they could travel under such conditions the “rain and sleet
rendered it impossible to read the compass” and “chaining became exceedingly arduous.”
19

During the season, the constant fear of a deluge of rain worried Commissioner Bartlett.
20
River
overflows flooded the commission’s camps and the observatory, causing a few days delay in
astronomical work.
21
And when the Rio Grande overflowed, it took with it the stone markers
delineating the boundary line. Powerful river currents also took the lives of five boundary
commission members. Emory’s astronomical assistant Thomas Walter Jones’ small boat was
overtaken by the Rio Bravo when he was returning to camp after conducting a full day of
fieldwork.
22
And early on in the commission, the canoes carrying Captain Thorn, Private Beste,
and two unnamed Mexicans capsized and drown all four men.
23
Even though boundary members
were vocal about their fear of indigenous attacks, the only fatalities were on the part of the

17
Ibid., 1:106.
18
Weber and Elder, Fiasco, 50, 68.
19
Camp at Initial Point New Mexico, April 25th 1851, Bartlett Papers: The Mexican Boundary
Commission papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-1853, MSS MFilm 00647, reel 4,
Correspondence, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
20
John Russell Bartlett, Journal of the advanced party of the Mexican Boundary Commission,
1850, HM 23160, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 29.
21

Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1:113.

22
William H. Emory to the Secretary of the Interior, July 29, 1856; Records Concerning the
Southern Boundary, Entry 486; Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitration,
Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park, MD.
23
Whipple, The Whipple Report, 71-72; Couts, From San Diego to the Colorado in 1849, 46.

101
environment or committed by other members on the commission.
24
Volatile weather and an
adverse environment lengthened the commission’s plan to determine a national border.
Native Thoroughfares
Although journalist accounts and government reports of the period describe an uncharted
southwestern territory, interior native homelands were already overlaid with extensive Indian
thoroughfares and access was dependent on indigenous authorities. The boundary commission
documented and experienced these indigenous territorial boundaries and highways. Journeying
through a dense ravine, searching for a site to build an observatory at the junction of the Gila and
Colorado Rivers, Whipple managed to accidently separate himself from the military escort and
became the solitary explorer so common in travelogue literatures. He quickly located a “well
trodden path… [and] pushed on for an Indian guide.” Whipple was aware that to reunite with his
party meant locating and following established pathways that would lead him to a native
authority. One “winding path” finally brought him to a Quechan village, where he was
“imprudent in thus throwing [himself] into the power of these savages.” Whipple intended to
elicit suspense by establishing difference between his modernity and the inhabitants’ savageness.
However, his “imprudence” underscores both Whipple’s and the boundary commission’s
reliance on the Quechans to succeed in their boundary-making expedition. Whipple becomes the

24
A series of murders occurred on the commission. David Weber and Jane Lenz Elder list them
as including “the shooting of a local citizen by a teamster as the commission made its way form
Indianola to San Antonio, the killing of one teamster by another while the party was in San
Antonio, and the shooting of a wagon master on the road to El Paso by Capt. S. D. Dobbins, a
member of Col. John McClellan’s party. Dobbins then killed himself. After the commission
arrived in El Paso, another round of violence commenced, precipitated by a group of recently
discharged teamsters. This time the casualties included a barkeep, a civilian, and Edward Clarke,
the son of Bartlett’s political sponsor, Senator John Clarke of Rhode Island (Goetzmann, 1991,
170-173).” Weber, David J. and Jane Lenz Elder, eds. Fiasco: George Clinton Gardner’s
Correspondence from the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey 1849-1854 (Dallas: Southern Methodist
University Press, 2010), 197, and footnote 51.

102
sagacious frontiersman’s antipode, devoid of keen practical sense and caution, his mobility rude
and discordant with the landscape, disoriented and “lost in the maze of paths.”
25

After some difficulty in communicating his predicament, the Quechans “consented to
guide” him to the mouth of the Rio Gila. With musket and lariat, the Quechan Chief, Anton, and
escort, Mal Anton, directed Whipple through the territory and asked of him, “Tiene v. u. bon
corazon?” Whipple responded to the inquiry by assuring them “protection as long as Americans
were treated well by them.”
26
In this incident, geography and power intersect. Whipple assures
the men protection, while he is being escorted out of their territory, under their knowledge of the
geography, on their maintained and organized highways, and on their consent. Whipple offered
protection in a space where he had little himself. Yet, Quechans understood imperial ambitions
and governance; well known were the disease, coerced labor, poverty, and war that accompanied
Spanish and Mexican sovereignties and is perhaps what prompted Mal Anton’s questioning.
Guiding Whipple to the outside limits of the Quechan village with musket and lariat and Mal
Anton’s query are boundary-affirming practices. Like the previous Spanish expeditions who
faced obstacles entering the Hasiani domain of the Tejas nation, members of the boundary
commission knew their passage was regulated and monitored by an authority other than their
own.

25
Prior to becoming lost, Whipple commented on the use of Indian “foot-paths” to move along
the bank of the Colorado, “which wound around every tree that time had thrown across its
ancient track, doubling the true distance.” Amiel Weeks Whipple, The Whipple Report: Journal
of an expedition from San Diego, California, to the Rio Colorado, from Sept. 11 to Dec. 11, 1849
(Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1961), 54. Emory makes similar statements in his final report
of well-traveled Indian thoroughfares. He writes, “Comanche Pass, on the Rio Bravo, the most
celebrated and frequently used crossing place of the Indians, was found to be just below this
Bofecillos range; here broad, well-beaten trails lead to the river from both sides.” Emory, Report
on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey,1:81.
26
Whipple, The Whipple Report, 56.

103
Returning the Gaze: The Vigilance of Being Seen
As members of the boundary commission ventured further east from San Diego to the
rivers of the Gila and Colorado to the deserts of El Paso and south to the Gulf of Mexico, those
new to the region became increasingly aware that the region they traversed was largely out of
their administrative control and beyond their geographic mastery. Uncertain how to move from
one location to another with a large contingent and proper access to water and food sources, the
commission relied heavily on indigenous and local guides to get them through one native
borderland to the next. Fear of what lay beyond their sightlines, principally Indian attacks, put
the members of the commission on visual guard. George Clinton Garner, surveyor and later clerk
for the commission, wrote to his sister that after conducting a reconnaissance of Lake Guzmán he
“returned without seeing a single Indian altho’ they were watching us and if I had not have keep
my party so close we would have had a little trouble.”
27
Garner, so certain of being surveilled,
restricted the mobility of those on his reconnaissance team. Because of a belief in the potential
for Indian raiding and attack, a military escort accompanied the boundary commission for the
majority of the enterprise. Lieutenant Cave Johnson Couts, with his infantry of twelve men,
escorted Whipple’s astronomical team from San Diego to the Colorado River. As a result of
surveyors late-night astronomical observations, guards were ordered to make their own. Couts
detailed their visual obligations: “I am forced to remarkable vigilance. Duty is very heavy on my
men, the call for men on the hill in the Scientific Department being so strong, that they are

27
Letter from George Clinton Gardner to Alida Gardner, sister, Frontera Texas, May 8, 1852 in
Weber, David J. and Jane Lenz Elder, eds. Fiasco: George Clinton Gardner’s Correspondence
from the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey 1849-1854 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University
Press, 2010), 190.

104
frequently on guard two nights in succession.”
28
Distress of the unseen and its potential threat
required visual caution to the point of overwork and exhaustion for members of the escort. The
fear of attack also impacted the scientific program. Emory would have desired to obtain the
longitude of primary observatories along the line through triangulation, a process he describe as
“beautiful and accurate,” “but in a country in a country without settlements, and traversed by
bands of savages who kill at sight, it was impossible to do so, as every party that went out had to
be escorted by ten or fifteen armed men.”
29
The disquietude of being watched regulated
behavior, disciplining how and when the boundary team made their own reconnaissance and
observations, keeping bodies close and staying on visual guard.
30

The need for “remarkable vigilance” against possible Indian raiding was reflected in
personal accounts on the boundary commission. In his published personal narrative, boundary
commissioner, John Russell Bartlett, ordered a party to locate and recover four presumed lost
mules. The men returned and hypothesized that a band of Indians had been trailing their caravan
unseen for miles and had “stolen” the animals. The men arrived at this conclusion based on the

28
Cave Johnson Couts, From San Diego to the Colorado in 1849: The Journal and Maps of
Cave J. Couts, ed. William McPherson (Los Angeles, California: A.M. Ellis, 1932), 34.
29
William H. Emory to the Secretary of the Interior, July 29, 1856; Records Concerning the
Southern Boundary, Entry 486; Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitration,
Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park, MD.
30
The trope of being watched was present in many narratives on the boundary commission.
While the trope’s rhetorical purpose was to create suspense for the reader, it does, however, also
highlight the commission’s lack of geographic knowledge and their understanding of native
territoriality. In his report on the first leg of the boundary commission, Whipple notes that “not
an Indian had we seen since leaving the village of Santiago; but Tomaso, with some alarm,
pointed out fresh foot-prints in the path we followed.” For Whipple, it took someone familiar
with the landscape to know they were being watched. Whipple, The Whipple Report, 54. When
Bartlett reached the base of the Coco-Maricopa villages and set up camp, he commented that by
the “afternoon [his] camp was filled with the Coco-Maricopa Indians, who had discovered
[them] from some of their look-outs.” John Russell Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations
and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua, connected with the
United States and Mexican boundary Commission, during the years 1850, ’51, ’52, and ’53
(New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1854), 2: 213.

105
Indian’s residual yet “unmistakable” visual evidence. Bartlett was again later informed of “fresh
Indian signs,” and ordered his party to “keep a diligent look-out.” Such an account was intended
to build suspense for the reader, making the journey appear more harrowing, the explorers more
courageous, and their labors more significant for the nation-state.
31
Yet, despite the extravagant
narrative, Bartlett’s storyline underscores significant power dynamics operating in the
borderlands. While Bartlett and other members of the commission were certainly engaged in
ethnographic work that intrusively examined native peoples, in this instance, the traditionally
observed directed their gaze at the observers, in effect, unsettling the commission’s imagined
authority to look at and demarcate that space. Who could observe was not solely at the discretion
of the boundary commission. The fear of attack placed the commission on tight watch; members
scanned the landscape to catch a glimpse of the unseen looking back at them.
32

Of the land: Masculine Perceptions
Furthermore, to be on visual guard, according to members of the commission, required a
localized sensory aptitude that was at the same time international in scope. Bartlett further
educated his readers that, “It is not necessary that the savage should be seen, to judge of his
presence. He always leaves marks behind him, which are soon understood by the sagacious
travelers of the prairie, and are as unmistakable as his own red skin.”
33
For Bartlett, those gifted
with acute sensory perception included “experienced hunters and frontier men,” as well as, the

31
The purpose of the travelogue or the personal narrative was to highlight “perilous situations,”
which were more than likely exaggerations of the events in question. Johannes
Fabian, Out of

Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000), 87. Also see Johannes Fabian, “Presence and Representation,” chapter
10 in Out of Our Minds.
32
The practice of the observed directing their gaze at the observers appears in other colonial
literature. In Johannes Fabian’s study of exploration in Central Africa, the return gaze of
observed was understood as an “invasion of the [explorers] privacy” and was approached with
“resignation.” Fabian, Out of Our Minds, 186.
33
Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents, 1:72.

106
multitude of native tribes in the region. In his conversations and interactions with locals he
learned the basics of “Indian sign;” that shelter and camp equipment, fashion, food, feces, and
footprints discarded or imprinted onto the landscape could reveal “whether Indians, Mexicans, or
Americans,” had recently or previously traversed the region. To see a body no longer present,
one had to have an extensive repertoire on cultural materials used and discarded by different
international bodies moving through this global frontier and assume no cultural interchange
between them. Some claimed the ability to discern between native nations. Bartlett admitted he
knew little about the technique when he commented that “I know not the precise form of the
Comanche and Lipan moccasins; but the Apaches assured me they could tell the footprints of the
Comanches, the Mescaleros, the Yutas, the Coyoteros, or the Navahoes, and pointed out the
distinctive marks of several.”
34
Non-indigenous guides like Antoine Leroux and famous Indian
fighter, Texas Ranger, and surveyor general of California, Jack Coffee Hays, were acclaimed and
romanticized for their “sagacious” abilities. As mountain men, their primitive masculinity—
scouting, hunting, bareback riding—was extolled; to pursue an Indian, required to see like one.
35

Bartlett delightfully accepted the services of the “celebrated” Leroux and his team to guide him
to New Mexico, but of course not without “moderate compensation;” such valued services came
at a price.
36
For the boundary commission to traverse the Southwest borderlands a localized yet
international visual regime was a vital supplement to astronomical, natural history, and

34

Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents, 1:106.
35
Leroux was born in St. Louis to French Canadian parents. On masculinity and frontiersman
see Grant Foreman, “Antoine Leroux, New Mexico Guide,” New Mexico Historical Review 16,
no. 4 (1941): 367-379; Susan Hazen-Hammond, “Antoine Leroux: The frontier guide history
forgot,” Arizona Highways 69, no. 7 (1993): 34. The term primitive masculinity comes from Gail
Bederman’s study on turn-of-the-century manhood, where masculinity was restored from the
clutches of modernization and industrialization of the late nineteenth-century through the
embodiment of frontier savagery. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A cultural history
of gender and race in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

36

Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents, 2: 85.

107
ethnographic scientific sightlines.
To acquire frontier capital, Lieutenant Couts, boundary commission military escort,
positioned himself as an expert frontiersman in relation to his scientific counterpart, Lieutenant
Amiel Weeks Whipple. According to Couts, Whipple was the epitome of a “Washington City
dand[y] with white kid gloves, etc., [who didn’t] like roughing it.” Couts conveniently forgot
about his own privileges, as he, like Whipple, was a West Point graduate, having received his
appointment through his uncle, Cave Johnson, Secretary of Treasury under the Polk
administration. Others also admonished the commission’s “young men, well educated, and
accustomed to the refinements of civilized life,” who, when presented with “hard work and hard
fare, long marches, sleeping on the bare ground, exposure, difficulty and danger,” became
“disgusted and wearied” of the expedition.
37
Statements like these constituted the borderlands as
a gendered space of masculine vigor and unwelcome to the civility of the capital.
38
Couts, upset
with Whipple for ordering him to clear an access road through dense brush for astronomical
observations, criticized that if one were to “Take [Whipple] away from his books…he is not
worth a tinker’s d—n.” And when hit with a desert storm on their trek to the Colorado River, it
was Whipple, ambulance, and company wagon that got lost in the severe hail and rainstorm that
spread across the desert. Couts informed his readers that, although difficult, he found his way as
if he “knew every chaparral bush on the route.” A book on optics was no match for the
capricious landscape. For Couts, survival in the borderlands required more than scientific
expertise; it necessitated an intimate knowledge of the environment, knowledge that was often

37
Providence Journal, May 6, 1851, Bartlett Papers: The Mexican Boundary Commission
papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-1853, MSS MFilm 00647, reel 10, Official Dispatches,
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
38
On masculinity and westward expansion see Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the
Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

108
appropriated from indigenous guides.
However, there were limits to performing primitive masculinity. To turn fully native was
unfavorable. In the same article that chided the extravagance of younger commission members,
the author also cautioned against an excessive masculinity destitute of honor or a moral code. In
addition to the exceedingly refined gentlemen on the commission, “Another class is composed of
wild Texas frontiersmen, whom, from the nature of the service, it was absolutely necessary to
employ, but who are the most unmanageable of all semi-civilized races. At home, under the
shadow of civilized authority, their whole lives are one scene of violence and recklessness,
frequently leading to bloodshed.”
39
Wild was a favored superlative of travelogue writers,
government reporters and ethnographic commentators to describe southwest indigenous
characteristics and stages of development. To conjoin the terms wild and semi-civilized with
Texas frontiersman created a vivid association between white settlers and their native
counterparts for the American reader east of the Mississippi. Settler colonial outposts in Texas
were imagined as facades of “civilized authority,” where inhabitants instead followed the rules
and regulations of indigenous raiding warfare, vengeance, and what historian Brian DeLay has
termed blood talk, warfare used to settle grievances and establish forms of belonging.
40
“Going
native,” was a common concern for imperial polities. In her study on the Dutch East Indies of the
19th and early 20th century, Ann Stoler finds that sexual virtue, and racial purity established
hierarchical distinctions between the colonizers and the colonial Other. Proper morality—good
breeding, rearing, and hygiene—and the ability to control one’s moral virtue, affirmed European

39
Providence Journal, May 6, 1851, Bartlett Papers: The Mexican Boundary Commission
papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-1853, MSS MFilm 00647, reel 10, Official Dispatches,
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
40
DeLay, “Blood Talk,” 230-231.

109
whiteness in colonial spaces.
41
In the American Southwest, the distinction between native and
white pioneer required similar affirmation, a moral code of masculinity that rose above the
violent savagery racially attributed to the Apaches and Comanches. Performing primitive
masculinity required a delicate balance, an embrace of the noble, “large, muscular, and well-
formed” figure of the Indian warrior without the reckless rascality of “common Indian
treachery.”
42
A balance, according to some, that Texas frontiersman failed to accomplish.
Although the article denounced frontiersmen’s unsavory behaviors, the author recognized
that they were “absolutely necessary to employ,” possibly at the very least, for their local
knowledge; to help feed and guide the commission from one astronomical point to the next. And,
buried underneath Bartlett’s romanticized and minimal proficiency in “Indian sign,” was the
heavy reality that the boundary commission traversed an unfamiliar area. Without military
training or local knowledge, Bartlett himself lacked the visual acuity to effectively read the
traces left on the land. He relied, instead, on non-indigenous locals and native guides hired by the
commission to scan the landscape for the inconspicuous.
43
Without the linguistic and geographic
knowledge of local informants the boundary commission would have perished. Commissioner
Bartlett, Chief Astronomer Emory, and First Assistant Whipple, had to rely extensively upon
indigenous, Mexican, and European immigrant assistants and guides. Their survey, as we will
see, became an exercise in negotiation, mediation, and contestation between the surveyors and
their native/local contacts.
44

41
Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the
Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

42
For “large, muscular, and well-formed” see Whipple, The Whipple Report, 50. For “Indian
treachery” see Couts, From San Diego to the Colorado in 1849, 39.
43
Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents, 1:105.
44
Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India,
1765-1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 26.

110
Extracting Local Knowledges
San Antonio was not without knowledgeable and experienced non-indigenous guides.
Two years before joining the boundary commission in 1850, Lieutenant W. F. Smith worked as
an assistant topographical engineer on explorations for the department of Texas. Smith served
under General Whiting’s project for locating and opening a road between San Antonio and El
Paso. It was there that Smith worked with twenty-year-old Jose Policarpo Rodriguez, born in
Zaragoza, Mexico, thirty-five miles west of Eagle Pass, Texas, and who at the age of twelve
joined a surveying team where his duties were to hunt, locate water, and carry chain. Carrying
chain was a laborious and technical task. A typical surveyors’ chain was sixty-six feet long with
one hundred links that had to be frequently calibrated to retain its precise length. Chain bearers
like Rodriguez laid it upon the ground to measure distance between two points. Rodriquez and a
colleague, at one point, a young German male, worked together in this endeavor.
45
As the fore
chainman tightly stretches the chain, the hind chainman sticks a pin between each link while
making sure the chain is level with the ground. Once the chainman counts ten links, the pins are
reset to start again. Chaining slopes required special techniques, and chainmen used tricks like
collecting a small rock every ten links as a way to keep accurate count. In the case of the U.S.-
Mexico boundary commission, burdensome terrain and inclement weather made chaining
“exceeding arduous” in Texas. While attempting to connect the geographic points between
Indianola and San Antonio by chain and compass, Whipple’s team experienced extreme heat and

45
Rodriguez worked with the German youth when he was hired by a Mr. Montell to plot land for
a German colony off a branch of the Llano River. See “The Old Guide,” Irving Webb Texas
Surveyors Collection, Brisco center, Dolph Briscoe Cener for American History, The University
of Texas at Austin, Box 3P331.

111
rain and snow storms that made reading the compass and laying chain “impossible.”
46
It was not
until the boundary commission’s machinist and carpenter constructed a viameter, an odometer
attached to a carriage that measured distance by the revolutions of the wagon wheel, that the
surveying party could discontinue chaining. The commission had failed in their attempts to
purchase a viameter in New Orleans or borrow one in San Antonio, making chainmen like
Rodriguez essential to their team. Rodriguez’s knowledge and experience in chaining would be
particularly valuable to surveying expeditions in the Southwest, especially where viameters were
difficult to acquire.
Rodriguez’s labor, and that of other Mexicans not attached to the Mexican boundary
commission’s astronomical and surveying units, sat within a racialized economy. Because of
Rodriguez’s growing experience, and his service as a translator, he was highly sought after by
state and federal expeditions. General Whiting enthusiastically noted, “This boy Policarpo is one
of the most valuable members of my party—a patient and untiring hunter, an unerring trailer,
with all the instinct and woodcraft of the Indian combined with the practical part of surveying
which he has learned from Dick Howard; moreover, a capital hand with the mules.”
47
General
Whiting placed value on Rodriguez’s outdoor skills in relation to his racial understanding of
indigenous bodies. At the same time, in the General’s estimation, Rodriguez did have the mental
capability to learn practical surveying techniques from Dick Howard, a former West Point
student. Rodriguez certainly benefited from his expedition employment making more than his

46
Camp at Initial Point, New Mexico, April 25, 1851, Bartlett Papers: The Mexican Boundary
Commission papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-1853, MSS MFilm 00647, reel 4,
Correspondence, Huntington Library, San Marino, California

47
According to the article, “The Old Guide,” Dick Howard attended West Point but was expelled
and relocated to the Republic of Texas shortly after. See “The Old Guide,” Irving Webb Texas
Surveyors Collection, Brisco center, Dolph Briscoe Cener for American History, The University
of Texas at Austin, Box 3P331.

112
father and brother, yet was paid $1 less a day than Howard for surveying and providing other
essential labors. Others who lacked training in practical surveying were not as fortunate as
Rodriguez. The other men under General Whiting’s command were discharged once the project
was complete, including a Mexican mule packer, Francisco Fuentes, and a Delaware Indian, Jack
Hunter.
48
The boundary commission was less likely to offer favorable positions and wages to
Mexican employees. Couts advised Emory to “fill the position of chainmen and instrument
carriers with ‘Americans’ and give the more menial positions to ‘Mexicans.’”
49
And in 1849,
before reaching California, servants were arranged to be paid thirty dollars per month while the
“Mexican boy” was allotted twelve monthly.
50
While non-white labor, like Rodriguez, were
expected to offer expeditions multiple skills at a low rate, tradesmen employed in Washington
for the boundary commission resented and refused to do labor outside their regular trades, such
as surveying or repairing the commissioners quarters.
51
Commission tradesmen may have

48
The Old Guide,” Irving Webb Texas Surveyors Collection, Brisco center, Dolph Briscoe
Cener for American History, The University of Texas at Austin, Box 3P331.
49
David J. Weber and Jane Lenz Elder, eds. Fiasco: George Clinton Gardner’s Correspondence
from the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey 1849-1854 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University
Press, 2010), 212.
50
The racial make-up of hired servants is unknown. Their names William Miller, George Crow,
and Louis Rzouzeuski suggest perhaps a mixed labor force. Also, employee monthly wages
increased to $30 for servants and $20 for the “Mexican boy” due to competition with the
California gold mines. Boundary Commissioner Weller informed the Secretary of State that it
was necessary to increase wages “in consequence of the extraordinary prices paid for labor in
this country.” Boundary Commission labor, at the very least, were promised competitive wages.
Furthermore, it is unclear whether Weller uses the descriptor, “boy,” to indicate age or as a
means to racially infantilize the laborer. In British imperial explorations of Africa, young
children were often employed as servants and interpreters for scientific explorations. It would not
be implausible that the boundary commission hired a young child as interpreter, guide and/or
servant. John M. Clayton, Secretary of State, to John B. Weller, U.S. Boundary Commissioner,
June 28, 1849; Letters sent by the fourth U.S. Commissioner, 1849-58, Entry 399; Records of
Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at
College Park, MD. On British imperial explorations see Fabian, Out of Our Minds, 30-31.
51
John Russell Bartlett, U.S. Boundary Commissioner, to the quartermaster, New Mexico, May
10, 1851; Letters received from the third U.S. Commissioner, 1850-1860, Entry 424; Records of

113
recognized and rejected their positioning in an exploitable racialized labor economy. While local
laborers, often made up of non-white guides, hunters and mule hands, were central to boundary
commission success they were disproportionately paid a lower wage.
Despite the importance of extracting local knowledge, at times boundary commission
members arrogantly dismissed guides advice or unabashedly forgot their interlocutors’ names.
Desiring water to bathe, grass to feed their pack animals, and shade to break from the intense
heat, Bartlett and his party packed up and set off for the Gila regardless of Coco-Maricopa
advice to remain camped near their village. On arrival, Bartlett and his team found a dry riverbed
with no grass, just as their informants had warned. The Coco-Maricopas were aware of the
river’s water level because they diverted it to irrigate their crops, information Bartlett learned
after the esteemed explorer and frontiersman, Leroux, traversed the arid channel for about three
hours searching for water. Disappointed with the reality of a dry riverbed, the team returned to
their original camp near the Coco-Maricopa village. On their return, Bartlett began his
ethnographic fieldwork, extracting knowledge on the “manners and customs” of the Coco-
Maricopas from an Indian who “spoke Spanish well,” but whose name he could not remember.
Standard methodological procedures in Ethnology were barely in development, however, to
neglect noting an interlocutor’s name from a man who cofounded the American Ethnological
Society and in 1847 published Progress of Ethnology is incongruous.
The (mis)naming of guides and local inhabitants, in a vein similar to natural history
collection, points to a colonial project of subject formation. Historian Nicole Guidotti-Hernández
analyzes the 1850s lynching case of Josefa/Juanita as an example of a subject who having “no
names and many names” within multiple historical accounts exemplifies the “time-honored

Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at
College Park, MD.

114
Anglo tradition of misnaming, renaming, and forgetting names of the racialized bodies attached
to them, but also to a Chicana/o project of reclaiming them.”
52
Captain or General Old Tomás
Chichu/Don Tomas/Tomás/Tomaso served as Whipple’s guide and Indian interpreter for the
boundary commission, leading the team over 170 miles east from the San Diego mission to the
Rio Gila.
53
The interchangeability of his name, not just between historical accounts but also
within the same historical document, demonstrates native guides’ location within a region of
intersecting multiple colonial regimes affixing racialized subjects with “several names at once.”
Despite the distance these men traveled in company, Whipple could not recall if Tomaso was the
chief of the Leégeenos or Diegeenos, or if their tribe’s name was original or bestowed upon them
by the Franciscans.
54
Both Couts and Emory recognized Tomás/Tomaso as belonging to the
Santa Isabela Pueblos of the Diegueños/Diegeño tribe. The inconsistency in spelling, of both
name and tribe, does not simply reflect an elementary understanding of Spanish on the part of the
colonizers, but a fragmented subject called into interpellation by being given a name. To be
granted a title, such as Captain/General/Don, was not a recognition of Tomás/Tomaso’s
authority—since he was mainly referred to only by first name and without title—but, rather,
made the Other recognizable within a language of colonial power and hierarchies. No one knew
for sure what his title was nor did they make the effort to get his name correct. And, while
Emory, Whipple, Bartlett and other boundary commission officials referred to each other by last
name in their reports and personal accounts, Tomás/Tomaso was given that courtesy only once.

52
Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National
Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 43.
53
I follow the lead of Nicole Guidotti-Hernández and include some of the appellations of
Tomás/Tomaso that appear in the records of Amiel Weeks Whipple, William H. Emory, and
Cave Couts. From hereafter, for the sake of brevity, I use the appellation Tomás/Tomaso, as
those two versions appear most frequent in the texts.
54
Whipple, The Whipple Report, 23.

115
My calling attention to Tomás/Tomaso’s last name, or lack thereof, is not an effort to recuperate
a full name and, therefore, reclaim a whole subject, but to highlight how the power and status
afforded in a last name is denied to Tomás/Tomaso. Tomás/Tomaso’s Spanish first name
accompanied by a last name sits within a missionary colonial legacy of baptismal naming
practices.
55
Thus, to be given a name and then be rendered nameless becomes a double affront.
Naming was a symbolic and linguistic tool of possession, not only apparent in the renaming of
flora and fauna in natural history collection, but present in the renaming and misnaming of
borderland residents.
To be rendered nameless marked borderland bodies as inconsequential to the expanding
American empire despite the boundary commission’s relied dependence on and negotiations with
the calculatedly unnamed. Indigenous male guides like Tomás/Tomaso were not the only ones to
be denied appellations. In regards to labor on the boundary commission, Weller’s roster listed
employees by name except for the “Mexican boy.” Slave labor on the boundary commission also
comprised the nameless. In his final report, Emory commended “Francis Holley, Frank Stone,
and my servant Robert, a slave,” for not abandoning the commission to secure more lucrative
work in San Diego.
56
Whereas civil employees Holley and Stone are acknowledge by full name,
Robert has no last name due to his marked condition as unfree labor. Similar to slaveholders’

55
Historian Lisbeth Haas describes how baptisms, as “meaning laden naming practice[s],” at the
Mission San Juan Capistrano used to “convey Christian mythology, history, and worldview.” For
example, Missionaries changed children’s indigenous names to religious figures like Juan
Baptista or Juan Capistrano. Lisbeth Hass, Conquests and Historical Identities in California,
1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 20.
56

When the boundary commission arrived in San Diego in 1849 it was already out of money.
Commissioner Weller’s account was frozen and a new appropriation would not be made until
Weller was replaced. Civil employees of the commission had not yet received their pay, and due
to competition with San Diego’s high wages because of the Gold Rush, many chose to leave for
more lucrative work. See Weber and Elder, Fiasco, 52; and Emory, Report on the United States
and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1:6.

116
ledgers, Emory recorded Robert without a surname.
57
Robert’s very presence signals the
boundary commission’s utilization of slave labor to help establish the southern boundary line.
Emory praised Robert for remaining with the commission while disregarding the limited
mobility and options possibly informing his decision to stay with the caravan. Unlike the others
who chose to abandon the commission, Robert’s departure would have labeled him a fugitive
slave. Or perhaps Emory did acknowledge the potential for self-liberation, making Robert’s
“fidelity,” even more “deserv[ing] to be remembered.”
58
Either way, Emory’s praise for Robert
was superseded by his namelessness within the institution of slavery. In the boundary
commission archive, indigenous women, Mexican labor and the enslaved surface as fragmented
historical subjects, often times nameless.
Emory praised his three companions for their assumed fidelity; yet, the perceived
unfaithfulness or overreaching of guides, interpreters, and local inhabitants was a source of
irritation for the boundary commission. Contrary to presumptions held by some commission
members, local assistants were world-wise due to their long history of trade with other imperial
powers and were well traveled; experiences they used to their advantage. For example, Francisco
Dukey, a chief of and interpreter for the Coco-Maricopas, exasperated Commissioner Bartlett
with his shows of power and imprudence. Initially, Francisco’s command of Spanish, his travels
to California and Mexico, his “civilized” table manners, his American style of dress—
pantaloons, shirt and hat—his “intelligence and shrewdness,” along with his “expressed desire to

57
In the slaveholding South, naming could be a contentious practice with slaveholders assigning
names and the few bondsmen that had surnames were “often…[that] of the slave owning
family.” See Sue Kozel, “Naming,” in Enslaved Women in America: An Encyclopedia, eds Daina
Ramey Berry and Deleso A. Alford (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2012), 224.
58
Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1:6.

117
serve [them]” impressed Bartlett.
59
Bartlett seemed to even be moved by Francisco’s lament that
Americans failed to compensate the Maricopas when provided essential provisions and
assistance from the tribe. Bartlett promised to pay the Maricopas for their services and distribute
gifts if the Maricopas continued to provide wood, water, and food to American emigrants. In this
scenario, Bartlett controls the conditions for exchange. The “intelligence and shrewdness” that
Bartlett so admired soon wore thin when Francisco helped himself and his “friends” to the
“choicest” meat at the dinner table and left none for Bartlett’s cook and servant. Bartlett was
further annoyed that despite the “valuable presents” given him, Francisco was ungrateful,
consistently asked for more, and increased the price of their corn when trading goods.
60
The
Pimos used this tactic as well, raising the price of corn from one to four dollars per one hundred
ears of corn.
61
As much as Bartlett desired to romanticize the exchange between the boundary
commission and various native groups along the border, Francisco and the Pimos were shrewd
traders who commanded the terms of exchange.
Guides and interpreters offered their services when it was conducive to their needs.
Tomás/Tomaso kept the boundary commission’s military escort at Santa Isabel, California by
refusing to sell them green corn. This action induced the escort to stay one more day on the
condition Tomás/Tomaso bring them corn to feed the pack animals. It is unclear why
Tomás/Tomaso was “very anxious” for the escort to remain an additional day, however, he used

59
Bartlett refers to Francisco Dukey by his first name rather than his surname throughout the
text. I use Bartlett’s terminology simply to retain clarity. Bartlett’s decision to refer to the
Maricopa chief and interpreter by first name can be construed as an effort to delegitimize his
authority. Regardless of which one I use, both first name and surname occupy a vexed place in
colonial power structures. By using his first name I do not intend to perpetuate Bartlett’s efforts
to strip Francisco’s authority. Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents, 2: 219.
60
Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents, 2: 220. Italics in the original.
61
Ibid., 2: 259.

118
his access to food as a means to negotiate the military escort’s duration of stay.
62
In 1853,
topographer and draftsman, Balduin Möllhausen accompanied Lt. Whipple, who had served on
the boundary commission, on a government expedition to explore the 35th latitudinal parallel
west of the Mississippi for the purposes of assessing its promise for a transcontinental railway.
The 35th parallel crosses through the southwest, including the northern parts of Texas, New
Mexico and Arizona. On their journey through the Sans Bois Mountains in Arkansas, they
secured the services of Fraser, an Indian metal smith and farmer, to guide them as far as he was
willing to take them—an eight days hike to the Gaines Creek—for a negotiated price. Next they
hired Johnson, a Shawnee scout, who agreed to take them to Old Fort Arbuckle, an abandoned
garrison that the U.S. government gave to Delaware chief, Si-ki-to-ma-ker (the Black Beaver).
63

At the Fort, the expedition tried to convince the “renowned guides,” Si-ki-to-ma-ker and another
Delaware Indian, John Bushman, to lead the expedition to the Pacific. Both declined the
generous monetary offer. Si-ki-to-ma-ker explained to Möllhausen,
Seven times have I seen the Pacific Ocean at various points; I have accompanied the
Americans in three wars…I should like to see the salt water for the eighth time; but I am
sick—you offer me more money than has even been offered to me before—but I am
sick—I am not likely to want, for my negro can attend to the barter trade, and my
relations will help him, but if I die, I should like to be buried by my own people.
64

Si-ki-to-ma-ker rejected the expedition’s request due to his concern over his declining health, his
established wealth, and his desire to remain with his community. John Bushman, likewise,

62
Not all native peoples along the proposed border had equal access to food. The Lipan Apaches
in Texas suffered a drought between 1850 and 1851 limiting their access to resources outside of
raiding. Historian Nancy McGown Minor suggests that starvation induced Lipan chiefs to sign
the San Saba Treaty, placing the tribe under the governance of the U.S. Indian Agency. Nancy
McGown Minor, Turning Adversity to Advantage: A History of the Lipan Apaches of Texas and
Northern Mexico, 1700-1900 (New York: University Press of America, 2009), 163.
63
According to Balduin Möllhausen, Si-ki-to-ma-ker was given the abandoned garrison after the
U.S.-Mexico war in exchange for his services as hunter and guide for the U.S. Balduin
Möllhausen, Diary of a journey from the Mississippi, 90.
64
Möllhausen, Diary of a journey from the Mississippi, 93.

119
refused because of his want to stay home. They settled for Vicente, a fourteen year-old Mexican
youth, whose Creek “master,” Shiasem, allowed him to accompany Whipple’s caravan as
interpreter. Vicente’s knowledge of the Comanche and Kaddos language afforded him the
opportunity to return to Mexico with an escort and the possibility to seek revenge against the
Comanche. This last point did, however, worry Möllhausen, fearing that Vicente would abandon
them to exact retaliation.
65
Guides and interpreters pragmatically joined and declined
government expeditions for a variety of reasons and took them as far as they wanted or as far as
they could without infringing on another’s territory. Native peoples’ geographic knowledge and
proficiency in multiple languages made them essential to government expeditions’ success and
survival, a known fact derived from centuries of negotiating with imperial and nation-state
polities. The many guides and interpreters encountered and hired by U.S. government
expeditions assessed and calculated the advantages to providing their services.
Interpreters, specifically, had the power to manage information. In a global space like the
southwest, native peoples were multi-lingual. Si-ki-to-ma-ker spoke English, French, Spanish,
and eight other Indian languages. In Whipple’s Report on the Indian Tribes, Jesse Chisholm, a
Cherokee who spoke English and Spanish, served as primary interpreter at various councils.
66

Translators were not simply servants to the boundary commission or other government
expeditions, a reality that state officials found irksome. Whipple and Möllhausen noticed that
Vicente disliked “translating every word they said, and because he was ordered to do so, he

65
Ibid., 93-98.
66
Whipple noted that Chisholm translated for a council meeting between Comanches, Kaiowas,
Huécos, Kichais, Cadoes, and Witchitas. Amiel Weeks Whipple, Thomas Ewbank, and William
W. Turner, “Report Upon the Indian Tribes,” in Reports of Explorations and Surveys, to
ascertain the most practicable and economical route for a railroad from the Mississippi river to
the Pacific Ocean, made under the direction of the Secretary of War (Washington, DC: A.O.P.
Nicholson, Printer, 1855), 35.

120
found [it] exceedingly disagreeable, and did not at all hesitate to express himself to that effect.”
67

Tomás/Tomaso was less explicit about his conservations regarding translations, yet controlled
the flow of information. When Whipple was visited by Anton, a Quechan orator, “Tomaso
pretended that he did not understand the cuchan language, and would not translate [Anton’s
thirty minute speech].”
68
Tomás/Tomaso did speak Quechan since he had translated for the head
chief of the Quechans, Pablo Coclum, a few days earlier.
69
In feigning ignorance,
Tomás/Tomaso chose to withhold information from state agents like Whipple and keep Anton’s
speech private.
Others recognized the power dynamics undergirding multi-language acquisition. Like
Tomás/Tomaso, Pablo Coclum also feigned linguistic ignorance, but according to Whipple, for
the purpose of keeping his stateliness intact. Tomás/Tomaso served as their interpreter,
translating Whipple’s Spanish into Quechan for Pablo and vice versa. Once the formalities ended
and the council celebrated with brandy, Whipple observed that Pablo’s “dignity was overcome,
and he no longer needed an interpreter; Pablo spoke Spanish better, by far, than [Whipple]
could.” In this instance, Pablo controls the format of the meeting, reserving state affairs to
Quechan, forcing the boundary commission to dialogue on their grounds. In a separate account,
Lieutenant Couts described Pablo as the most “shrewd and intelligent man…and unquestionably
the biggest rascal.” Perhaps it was the above antics that provoked Couts to recognize Pablo’s
astuteness, his utilization of language to domineer and antagonize the commission, which Couts

67
Whipple, Ewbank, and Turner, “Report Upon the Indian Tribes,” 115.
68
Whipple, The Whipple Report, 58.
69
Pablo Coclum is referred to only by first name in both Whipple and Couts’ accounts. Historian
Jack Forbes identifies his surname, or second name, as Coclum. See Jack D. Forbes, Warriors of
the Colorado: The Yumas of the Quechan nation and their Neighbors (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1965), 310.

121
understood to be unscrupulous.
70
While boundary officials imagined bringing order to the
frontier by charting it’s landscape, local and regional leaders took advantage of what little the
boundary commission actually knew about their newly acquired territory. They were essential to
the scientific project of establishing astronomical points on the ground and supply routes by
accompanying the escort, guiding them through mountains and serving as intermediaries.
71
The
numerous interpreters that the commission encountered and hired on their travels had more
power than officials were willing to explicitly admit in their diaries and accounts.
Non-indigenous locals also took advantage of the boundary commission’s rudimentary
geographical knowledge. A German guide from Fredericksburg, Texas was hired because he
claimed to know the road but who “proved himself entirely ignorant of every locality or useful
information.” The unnamed boundary member who reported the account to the Herald took this
opportunity to deploy a common literary trope of the fearless explorer, commenting that
Commissioner Bartlett, “in consequence, …provided himself with the best maps and charts
obtainable, launched boldly on to the desert ocean, with a firm reliance on God, his maps and
compass.”
72
Tinged with a touch of manifest destiny, this boundary commission member

70
The Quechans, soon after, deposed Coclum from power as he had been appointed chief by
Mexico before the war. See Whipple, The Whipple Report, 4; and Couts, From San Diego to the
Colorado in 1849, 34.
71
William H. Emory, Chief Astronomer and Surveyor, to the quartermaster, Camp near Fort
Duncan, Texas, November 7, 1852; Letters sent by the fourth U.S. Commissioner, 1849-58,
Entry 399; Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitration, Record Group 76;
National Archives at College Park, MD. Bartlett acknowledge that maintaining friendly relations
with various indigenous tribes was of “great importance to the success of the Commission,”
because their “wagons with stores, went unprotected to and from the Surveyors, and their
attendants, who were scattered in small parties for fifty miles along the line.” Bartlett, Personal
Narrative of Explorations and Incidents, 1: 322.

72
Correspondence of the Herald in El Paso del Norte, November 19, 1850, Bartlett Papers: The
Mexican Boundary Commission papers of John Russell Bartlett, 1850-1853, MSS MFilm 00647,
reel 8, Official Journal, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

122
eliminated their reliance on local knowledge and replaced it with science and the divine. But
inaccurate maps plagued the commission and underscored the necessity for visual guidance
through the “desert ocean.” When available, a guide was procured, even if their geographic
knowledge was just as elementary. In his unpublished journal, Bartlett complains that they “left
the Pecos [River] with the hope that [they] should not see it again. In fact our pretended guide
said we should not. A drive of six miles, however brought us to the stream again much to our
disappointment.” Locals may have exaggerated their qualifications and acquaintance with the
route for monetary compensation or perhaps as a way to travel with a large escort. For whatever
reason, they assessed their need and used the boundary commission to accomplish that goal.
Others benefitted from the boundary commission’s hefty supply of mules. When Emory
passed through the lower Rio Bravo his contingent contained 150 animals. Six mules were
required to pull the heaviest wagon “containing all the astronomical and other instruments of the
boundary commission.” Others pulled the numerous wagons carrying food and supplies for the
commission and cattle and sheep would provide sustenance.
73
Lieutenant Couts voiced his
annoyance with American migrants traveling west for the gold mines, who recounted story after
story of their animals being stolen by Native Americans, but then “almost under [his] own eyes,
steal [the military escort’s] mules,” by offering to guard them and when the mules go missing
“accuse the Indians of stealing them.”
74
Livestock was sporadically stolen from the commission,
and in August of 1851 it did occurred in a series of raids. Bartlett initially blamed the
disappearance of eight to ten mules, taken from astronomical observatory at Frontera near El
Paso, on the Mexican herder. He writes, “This robber, I am strongly inclined to believe is the

73
Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 57. While stationed at the
Copper Mines, the commission had twenty-five beef cattle and 150 sheep. Bartlett, Personal
Narrative of Explorations and Incidents, 1:354.
74
Couts, From San Diego to the Colorado in 1849, 23-24.

123
work of the people of New Mexico, who gain their livelihood by buying mules off the Indians,
and when they cannot obtain them in this manner, run them off themselves.”
75
Ten days later
fifty mules belonging to the boundary commission were driven off. Chief Delgadito was named
the culprit, a Navajo who had visited Bartlett’s camp earlier and who had been “fed by [them]
and had received every kindness.”
76
During this “siege” the military escort’s own supply of
mules were also taken. Frustrated that the animals had been stolen “almost within sight of the
fort,” Bartlett criticized “the utter uselessness and inefficiency of [the] infantry escort for such a
service,” which at the time amounted to less than forty men. In plain sight, the boundary
commission remained vulnerable to possible incursions from local inhabitants and emigrants,
inhibiting the act of boundary marking.
77

However, by the time the U.S.-Mexico boundary commission made its way across the
southwest to astronomically determine a line on paper, Apaches and Comanches already knew
what it meant to step across an unmarked 32° latitudinal parallel or traverse a rushing Rio
Grande. In 1836, predating Emory’s commission by sixteen years, the Rio Grande served as a
contested boundary and site for constant attacks between Mexico and the Republic of Texas.
Native groups were already familiar with intrusive national border production as when General
José Manuel Rafael Simeón de Mier y Terán led the Comisión de Límites (1828-1829) across

75
John Russell Bartlett, U.S. Boundary Commissioner, to headquarters, Santa Rita, August 13,
1851; Letters received from the third U.S. Commissioner, 1850-1860, Entry 424; Records of
Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitration, Record Group 76; National Archives at
College Park, MD.
76
Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents, 1: 353.

77
Others also tried to escape with boundary commission goods. One of the commission’s cooks
took a horse, Colt revolver, and clothing. He was found two days later, the horse and pistol
recovered, and left in the desert “to find his way to the settlements as he could.” Bartlett,
Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents, 1: 330.

124
Texas to delineate the boundary between the newly independent Mexico and the United States.
78

Having experienced Spanish, Mexican, Texan and United States attempts at geopolitical
restructuring over a thirty-year period, Native peoples were conversant in turbulent foreign
sovereign claims to the land. In his Final Report, Emory complained that “The Indians have had
entire possession of the country, and now they make continual forays, crossing and recrossing
the river to elude pursuit, at some of the many fords which occur in the [Rio Grande.]”
79
Emory
begrudgingly acknowledged indigenous control of the region and their utilization of U.S. foreign
policy to buttress raiding campaigns. Much to Emory’s dismay, Comanche and Apaches
benefited from the absence of a formal extradition treaty, an agreement to deliver an alleged
criminal to state authorities of the country where the offence was committed, between Mexico
and the United States. He pressed his government that “unless extradition laws with Mexico are
passed, this fertile tract will never have its capacities developed.”
80
By simply crossing a river,
Comanche and Apaches knew they could “elude pursuit,” continue their livestock raiding
expeditions, and control “possession of the country.”
81
Native Americans strategized when to
recognize a national border not of their own making and when to exercise their authority and
claim territory through raiding despite that imaginary line.

78
General Manuel de Mier y Terán was sent to mark the boundary between the Sabine and Red
Rivers in east Texas according to the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty, which delineated the limits
between the Spanish empire and the United States. See Lean Louis Berlandier, Indians of Texas
in 1830, ed. John C. Ewers, trans. Patricia Reading Leclerq (Washington: Smithsonian, 1969).
79
Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1:67.
80
Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1:61.
81
According to Emory, when eluding pursuit, Comanche and Apache pitted both nations against
each other. Emory commented, “the boundary between the United States and Mexico is here
only an imaginary line running down the centre of the river, and an offence can be committed on
either side with impunity. A few minutes served to place the offender over the line when the
jealousies of the law on either side step in to protect him; and where national prejudices are
involved, the criminal is not unfrequently extolled for his exploits.” Emory, Report on the United
States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1:61.

125
The movement of livestock across the territory did more to challenge the “capacities” of
American economic development in the region; it disrupted the visual program of boundary
making itself. With the sun fallen, the celestial night ablaze, and his astronomical equipment in
tow, Emory took to the field to record latitude and longitude in Roma, Texas, just north of
Ringgold Barracks. Included in his arsenal of instruments was an artificial horizon, a rectangular
metal trough containing mercury used to determine the altitude of a sun or star. The mercury
served as a reflective surface mirroring the night sky. Using a sextant, the observer determined
the angle between the reflection and the actual object. To ensure that the mercury remained level
in the trough, undisturbed by wind, two inclined glass panes enclosed the solution. This,
however, did not safeguard the instrument from otherwise undetectable terrestrial vibrations.
After several attempts to “ascertain” the cause of the “tremulous” mercury in his artificial
horizon, “notwithstanding the calmness of the night,” Emory decided to pack up and return to his
lodgings having failed to take the desired astronomical readings. On his way back, he
“encountered a long train of mules, heavily laden, directed towards the Mexican side of the river.
The motion of the animals caused the disturbance of the mercury, and their rich burden of
contraband goods, intended for the Mexican market, explained the commercial prosperity of the
town.” The vibrations clouded his vision by making the reflected image of the stars on the
mercurial surface indiscernible. The transport of smuggled goods across national territories
prevented Emory from visual statecraft, that is, plotting the geographical position of a natural
border, the Rio Grande. These disturbances were nothing new for Emory. In his military
reconnaissance of the Southwest during the U.S.-Mexico war, Emory lamented that when “news
got about of [his] dealings with the stars” and the opportunity for trade, the camp was “crowded”
with “restless Maricopas,” making the “constant galloping of horses…difficult for [him] to take

126
satisfactory observations.”
82
The curiosity of and trade with the Maricopas, in addition to, the
movement in illicit goods, made state agent’s work of determining geographic location difficult.
In the case of boundary making, mobility arrested its development.
The border movement of contraband was not quite what Emory had in mind for the
economic prosperity of the region. In his estimation, most towns on the American side owed
their existence and success “chiefly to the contraband trade with Mexico.” By avoiding custom
duties, a multitude of borderland inhabitants profited from a decreed yet unenforced boundary
line. For Emory, the solution, irrespective of the diverse group engaged in illicit trade, was
dependent upon extermination of the region’s indigenous population.
83
Only then could the
grazing and “rearing of cattle…be followed with advantage,” and the “adjacent mines shall
receive their full development.”
84
The boundary commissioner’s final assessment placed the
region largely under the purview and control of native groups, an obstacle requiring not removal
or incorporation, but eradication to bring American reordering of the landscape.
Conclusion
In creating a cartographic and numeric representation of the U.S. southwest borderland,
William H. Emory, chief engineer and commissioner for the U.S.-Mexico boundary commission,
peeled off the layers of indigenous presence and historical past from the landscape and replaced
it with blank spaces on the map.
85
Topographical maps of the boundary commission show a neat

82
William H. Emory, Notes of a military reconnaissance, from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri,
San Diego, in California, including part of the Arkansas, Del Norte, and Gila Rivers
(Washington: Wendell and Van Benthuysen, 1848), 87.
83
On the suggestion of exterminating Indians for full development of the region see Emory,
Report on the United States and Mexican boundary survey, 1:49, 61, 64, 70.

84
On grape cultivation, “rearing and grazing,” and “mines,” see William H. Emory, Report on
the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1: 49, 64, 70.
85
Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman note that “the reduction of bounded Indian polities and
nations into a single “Indian Country” began to appear on English maps in 1700, along with the

127
authoritative line, backed by mathematic accuracy, surrounded with elevation contour lines.
Visually absent but nevertheless haunting these clean state representations are the multiple
boundaries of Indian polities governing the borderlands; natural and man-made boundaries that
negotiated and coexisted with, or had little regard for an international boundary between the
United States and Mexico. Emory’s astronomical tables, barometric readings, cartographic maps
were an assertion of power through a narration of scientific knowledge yet these ordered
numbers and drawn lines served more as a symbolic illusion to territorial domination of the
nation’s new periphery.

first reservations in North America. Anglo-Americans ‘delineated both material and imagined

borders for the nation, and they placed Indian people on the outside.” It would only be in late
nineteenth century that Indians make a significant reappearance on United States maps.” Juliana
Barr and Edward Countryman, “Maps and Spaces, Paths to Connect, and Lines to Divide,” in
Contested Spaces of Early America, eds. Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 20.

128
Chapter Four
Staging Crossings: Policing and Performing Difference at the U.S.-Mexico Border
In the early decades of the twentieth-century, the U.S.-Mexico boundary line transforms
from a technical border, one of ocular embodiment and instrumental technologies, to a
bureaucratic border, one with technological infrastructure. Over a fifty-year period, telegraph
wires, railroads, bridges, boundary markers, and a dozen or so entry points that mediate the
borderscape. And, with the Mexican Revolution, increased visualization covers the landscape. In
postcards and films Americans are watching and consuming the border. To give some historical
context, Mexican Revolution pushed hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens into the United
States due to the turmoil of war and economic instability. The social revolution left many women
widowed to seek work as domestics or laundresses in Mexico and the United States. As
racialized low-wage labor, Mexican female migrants were subject to vulnerable exploitation by
U.S. labor markets. Additionally, the progressive era and its social control over sexuality,
respectable domesticity, and appropriate racial relations during a moment of urbanization and
industrialization also informed the context in which these Mexican female border crossers were
constituted.

Borderland knowledges of the mid-nineteenth-century, however, still proved useful
a little more than half a century later when border patrol officials monitored for immorality of
Mexican female border crossers.
On March 14, 1917, Soledad Guerrero, a twenty-seven year-old Mexican citizen, was on
her way to join her husband in El Paso, Texas when she was stopped for questioning by
immigrant official Leon Brody. Inspector Brody permitted Guerrero to cross on the condition
that she leave her baggage at the guard house and return the next morning for a full interrogation.
Guerrero returned unaccompanied by her husband. When asked about his absence, she told

129
Brody that she had lied: her husband died two years earlier. When asked why she lied, Guerrero
replied “that she had been advised by certain people in Juarez to say that she was going to join
her husband in El Paso or otherwise she would not be permitted to pass.”
1
Informed that the
figure of a single female, unattached to male labor, signaled economic vulnerability and
disruption to normative gendered relations of power, Guerrero had adjusted her narrative to read
as dutiful wife. Consequently, as she had anticipated, Guerrero was detained and her case was
held before a board of special inquiry where she was excluded on the grounds that, sooner or
later, she would become a public charge.
Guerrero was one of many foreign women in the early twentieth century who were either
barred from entering the United States as “likely to be a public charge,” (LPC) or arrested for
prostitution, adultery and/or miscegenation and then deported. Historian Deirdre Moloney has
found that from 1882 to 1920, an average of 131 immigrant women were excluded annually, and
another 200 were deported for prostitution.
2
While these numbers fall far below the 10,263
immigrant men and women who, in 1916 alone, were excluded as “likely to become a public
charge,”
3
the vagueness of the term itself could encompass a variety of moral justifications for
exclusion. Charges of LPC could include immorality, pregnancy, or having children outside of
marriage, which according to immigrant officials would lead to constrained economic self-
support and make the immigrant a future charge of the state. Significantly, because of the
clause’s ambiguity, immigration officials out in the field could decide on the parameters of LPC
provisions based on their own understanding of the law. Charges of prostitution coupled with the

1

Soledad Guerrero; 54192/45; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.
2
Derider M. Moloney, “Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency in Early U.S.
Deportation Policy,” Journal of Women’s History 18, no. 2 (2006): 98.
3
Moloney, “Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency” 98.

130
legal vagueness of LPC informed and structured the encounters between immigrant officials and
Mexican women along the Texas-Mexico border in the first two decades of the twentieth
century.
Immigration historians, Chicano/a Studies and Borderlands scholars have described the
U.S.-Mexico border region before the 1920s as porous, and its inspection policies as “soft,” for
Mexican male migrants and their families.
4
Beginning in the 1900s, railroad companies, mining
industries and, later, agribusinesses heavily invested in the recruitment of inexpensive Mexican
male labor.
5
Mexican women migrated primarily in the context of family units. As George J.
Sánchez has argued, few single women, except for nuns and students, made their way into the
United States.
6
And, because 58.2 percent of Mexican railroad workers’ wives lived in the labor
camps or boxcars with their husbands between 1907 and 1909, historian Vicki Ruiz rightfully
speaks to Mexican women’s experience as wives and daughters during this period.
8
Mexican
women “nurtured families, worked for wages, built fictive kin networks, and participated in
formal and informal community associations,” as a means to negotiate the economic, racial and

4
See Mario T. García, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880-1920 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1981), 35; George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity,
Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993), 51; Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 64; Kelly Lytle Hernández, La Migra! A
History of U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 25-26; Alexandra
Minna Stern, “Nationalism on the Line: Masculinity, Race, and the Creation of the U.S. Border
Patrol, 1910-1940,” in Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History,
eds. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 302-303; Deirder
Moloney, “Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency” 105; Anna Pegler-Gordon, In
Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2009), 183.
5
García, Desert Immigrants, 39.
6
Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 41.
8
Percentage of wives living in labor camps found in García, Desert Immigrants, 38; Vicki Ruiz,
From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998).

131
patriarchal constraints on the U.S. side of the border.
9
Thus, the Texas-Mexico border was
largely open to Mexican male migrants and their accompanying wives and families.
But what about women like Soledad Guerrero whose solitary crossings marked them as
suspect females? How does the narrative of a porous border buckle under the presence of
apprehended and deported Mexican women? These exclusions and deportations were central to
the racial, gendered and sexual visuality of the borderlands and its inhabitants. This paper, then,
examines thirty-seven board of special inquiry cases between 1908 and 1917, which feature
Mexican women who were detained, barred, or deported along the Texas-Mexico border, for
being single or pregnant, mothers or prostitutes, women in sexual relationships outside of
marriage, and/or women involved in an interracial union. A board of special inquiry was a three-
member panel that decided on whether to admit or exclude a deportable immigrant. A case file
includes an inspector’s interview with the apprehended women, and can also contain letters and
telegrams sent to the national office in Washington, D.C., testimony from friends or relatives,
and copies of the warrant of arrest.
10
The interview transcripts are rich with exchanges between
Texan immigrant officials and unescorted Mexican female border crossers and reveal more than
just “officials’ attitudes toward female immigrants who immigrated independently from their
families.”
11
The transcribed encounter highlights a process of subject formation, where both

9
Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows, 7.
10
Scholars Deirdre Moloney, Martha Gardner, and Margot Canaday have also noted that the
National Archive case files are incomplete with missing files and lack a systemic index by name,
subject, or date. Because of this, a sampling approach to board of special inquiry cases before
1924 is not achievable. See Deirder Moloney, “Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic
Dependency”; Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-
Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Martha Gardner,
Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870-1965 (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2005).
11
Moloney, “Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency,” 99.

132
parties were engaged in discursive strategies: officials made efforts to mark Mexican women as
excludable and detainees made efforts to be categorized as admissible.
How, then, did racial, gender and sexual regulation operate along the Texas-Mexico
border, especially in light of open-ended immigration provisos like “likely to become a public
charge?” And, in a space largely mediated by local government officials, how did Mexican
female border crossers respond to their construction as non-normative women? With the passage
of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, federal immigration law bureaucratically
hardened the distinction between legal and illegal immigration, from the top down.
Criminalization of unauthorized entry and amplified border mechanisms for deportation became
increasingly codified across all ports of entry, including the “porous” U.S.-Mexico border.
12

However, before the standardization of immigration surveillance and regulation with the
National Origins Act of 1924, the U.S. southern border was supervised by local officials on the
ground—who executed federal immigration law according to regional racial hierarchies inflected
with racial, gendered and sexual assumptions about the immigrant “Other.” Likewise, in their
encounters with immigrant officials, detained Mexican women were not without voice and acted
against their interpellation as hyper-sexualized “Others.” By claiming sexual and marital
respectability, apprehended Mexican women engaged in performances that served to reify
officials’ understanding of proper American womanhood. These were palliative tactics used
temporarily as a means to endure border crossing.
This paper first provides the historical context of immigration policy and procedures and
the nature of border surveillance along the Texas-Mexico border prior to the National Origins
Act of 1924. Next, I turn to how the board of special inquiry, as an institution, guided and

12
Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 3, 60.

133
demarcated performative gender acts. Through their questioning, officials constructed the sexual
and gender identities of Mexican female border subjects. However, for female border crossers,
the board of special inquiry served as a site for performative interventions, temporarily upsetting
inspectors’ authorial power. I follow with demonstrating how the enactments of gendered and
sexual subjectivity of Mexican female immigrants were intimately woven with the regional racial
position of Mexican immigrants in the southwest, which conditioned the forms of enforcement
and implementation of U.S. immigration policy along the southern border. And lastly, I
demonstrate how local labor needs and vice reform influenced border surveillance of non-
normative bodies during this period.
Immigration Surveillance and Regulation Moves Inland
As nineteenth century Victorian sexual ideology—framed by female purity, marital
reproduction and sexual restraint—wavered under early twentieth century commercial forces of
entertainment and consumption,
13
middle-class reformers like Marcus Braun, Bureau of
Immigration official, turned to regulate morality through immigration law and policy.
14
Under
this context, federal legislation on immigration reprised the 1875 Page Law, which prohibited the
entry of Chinese women for the purposes of prostitution, to generally exclude all women and
girls entering the United States for prostitution or “for any other immoral purpose,” in
consecutive Immigration Acts of 1903, 1907, 1910 and 1917. Each act affirmed existing
legislation with some changes: the 1903 Act added prostitution to the excludable list, the 1907
Act added “for any other immoral purpose” and expanded the scope of deportation for violation
of the act’s statutes to three years, the 1910 Act extended the potential for deportation to five

13
See Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century
New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).
14
Moloney, “Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency,” 102.

134
years and the 1917 Act denied aliens defined as prostitutes citizenship by marriage to a U.S.
citizen.
15
Over time enforcement of immigration acts and surveillance for sexual immorality not
only included direct line watch but also entailed monitoring the interior spaces of United States.
A significant change in immigrant procedures occurred in 1905, with the Bureau of
Immigration’s new judicial power to make executive decisions over the exclusion and
deportation of aliens. Prior to this, immigrants could and did go directly to the federal courts to
challenge administrative officials’ decisions of exclusion through habeas corpus, due process and
evidentiary rules. With the Bureau of Immigration taking over the federal court’s role, the
admission process was accelerated and immigrant officials quickly sustained exclusions.
16
This
new procedure had considerable impact on the national border, especially after the passing of the
1907 immigration law, which allowed inspectors to investigate alien women practicing
prostitution in the U.S. due to a new three-year statutory restriction.
17
Immigration officials
working locally now had the power to define the law and extend that power well into the interior
of the nation.
After 1905, the board of special inquiry became an essential institution that deliberated
over the admission of excludable immigrants. It consisted of three members who in most cases
were local immigrant inspectors and included one or more of the following: a stenographer,
interpreter, and/or medical examiner. A case would come under board of special inquiry when an
immigrant inspector harbored uncertainty over whether to admit or exclude the immigrant, but

15
Immigration Act of 1903, Pub. L. No. 57-162, 32 Stat.1213 (1903); Immigration Act of 1907,
Pub. L. No. 59-96, 34 Stat. 898 (1907); and Immigration Act of February 5, 1917, Pub. L. No.
64-436, 39 Stat. 874 (1917).
16
Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern
Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 145.
17
Gardner, Qualities of a Citizen, 76.

135
who was nonetheless classified as deportable.
18
The board’s responsibilities were to interview
the immigrant in question and to report on and make recommendations on reviewed cases. If the
applicant appealed the board’s final decision, the case was sent to the commissioner general of
immigration in Washington, D.C. Because of the subjective quality in the “likely to become a
public charge” provision and the migrant’s press for legitimacy, an appeal required regional ports
to defer to the national office for interpretation of the law. Most of the time the national office
sustained the decisions of the board and directed exclusion or deportation. Of the twenty out of
thirty-seven cases reviewed here involving appeals to the national office, only two, were
sustained. Very few cases nationally and none from my sample reached beyond the
commissioner of immigration general’s executive ruling. The expense of litigation and the
reluctance of the courts to overrule administrative interpretations deterred immigrants from
petitioning for a writ of habeas corpus.
19
In the end, the variation and vague use of terms like
“likely to become a public charge” made for a less than complete law that allowed for
immigration officials and board of special inquiry members out in the field to act within a quasi-
legislative authority.
How did El Paso and Laredo inspectors use this on-the-ground discretion to monitor for
immorality and public charges on the border? Women traveling alone or with young children
signaled to immigration officials an unlawful entry. Inspector Brody initially questioned Soledad
Guerrero because she crossed unescorted and with luggage: suggesting a prolonged stay.
Margarita Moreno was debarred as “likely to become a public charge” while crossing on foot

18
William Van Vleck, The Administrative Control of Aliens: A Study in Administrative Law and
Procedure (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1932).
19
Jane Perry Clark Carey, Deportation of Aliens From the United States and Europe (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1931), 313.

136
with her three children.
20
Maria Ronquillo’s pregnancy caught the eye of inspector Gerome F.
Cassiano, which led to her subsequent exclusion as a single mother.
21
For immigrant inspectors
these women violated American normative family structures and gendered divisions of labor.
Proper womanhood was grounded in notions of respectability and sexual purity, which also
entailed domestic household labor and childcare.
21
Understanding women to be dependent on
male income, these officials saw single women as vulnerable to future dependence on public
assistance and moved to exclude them. The female “condition,” as George Sánchez points out,
provided “grounds alone for suspicion.”
22

Not all enforcement of “likely to become a public charge” or “coming for immoral
purposes,” was enacted at the port of entry. In the cases reviewed, all women deported for
prostitution (twenty-four cases) were arrested once inside Texas. Detection after entry was
conditioned by a variety of factors. First, some women initially crossed the border legally, and
then later turned to prostitution for economic reasons, and were apprehended in brothel raids.
Second, unless some outward circumstance marked a woman as suspect, it was difficult for
border officials to accuse her of entering for “immoral purposes.” And third, once the Bureau of
Immigration had a case file for an excludable woman, she learned to evade officials patrolling
the footbridge connecting Juarez to El Paso. In an effort to regulate morality, immigrant officials
had to extend their range of view north of the Texas-Juarez boundary line.

20
Margarita Moreno; 51775/97; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building,
Washington, DC.
21

Maria Ronquillo; 51775/27; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

21
Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 7.
22
Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 58.

137
Monitoring Gender and Sexuality
After a preliminary inspection at the border or after arrest in Texas, solitary Mexican
female border crossers were briefly detained and then faced an interview with a panel of three
immigrant inspectors who convened for the purposes of deciding on the fate of the immigrant
subject. The women detained ranged from fifteen to thirty-five years of age and faced varied
experiences with detention depending on their circumstances. Some were detained for only a few
hours and deported by footbridge back to Juarez. For those who applied for an appeal, which
could take anywhere from two weeks to three months, excluded border crossers waited in Juarez
until they received notice about their case from U.S. immigration officials. During the
interrogation held at the El Paso immigration station the chairman of the board would ask the
detained immigrant a series of questions depending on the charge and gender of the border
crosser. Another board member acted as the stenographer and another as the interpreter. An
immigrant official could act in any one of these positions. For example, Thomas E. Edwards
acted as a chairman in one case and an interpreter in another case. The transcripts that arose from
the board of special inquiry expose the immigrant inspectors’ verbal justifications for exclusions
and the immigrant women’s responses. Here I examine the various gendered, sexual and class
identities deployed by detained Mexican women in a struggle to secure passage or maintain their
residence north of the border. In this scene, immigration restriction sustained by the board of
special inquiry produced the conditions for performances of representation.
Women with some knowledge of exclusionary policy shifted identities multiple times
when the previous ones failed to convince the board of their proper domesticity. Soledad
Guerrero’s social network in Juarez had warned her in advance of the meanings that would be
assigned to her gendered and sexualized body. Members of that network had given her a

138
heteronormative script to enact. But when the required male performer failed to arrive, Guerrero
had to switch tactics. She chose to craft her identity as a worker. When asked how she
“maintained herself” without the support of a husband or friends and relatives, Guerrero
responded that she worked for Maria Purdy in a hair-dressing parlor in El Paso. But after Purdy
denied the statement, Guerrero explained that her late husband’s friend, Miguel Ahumada, had
offered to help her find work; and that in the meantime she was to stay with a married female
friend, Refugio Alvarez. Guerrero’s acquaintances reflected her middle-class status: Ahumada
was employed at a hardware store, rather than on the railroads or in the mines, and Alvarez was
married to the owner of the El Paso Spanish newspaper, Los Susesos. Guerrero’s schooling as a
stenographer at the age of twenty-three further indicates her elite social position, since few
Mexicans had the means to go beyond primary school education. Guerrero turned to the
economic stability of her social circle as she adjusted to the inspector’s line of questioning.
Nevertheless, Guerrero, with only $2 dollars in her possession, was debarred as “likely to
become a public charge.”
23
In the thirty-five minute interrogation, Guerrero performed three
versions of herself: one as a proper wife, another as migrant laborer, and one more as a middle-
class woman. At the same time that Inspector Brody and Board of Special Inquiry Chairman
Thomas E. Edwards engaged in representational maneuvers to mark Guerrero outside of proper
gender and sexual norms, Guerrero recast her subjectivity in accordance with her knowledge of
state regulation policies.
Regardless of Guerrero’s three performances, the board justified her exclusion based on
her presumed potential for immorality. Guerrero appealed her case, which was then sent to the
Washington, D.C. commissioner general of immigration for review. The appeal file contained

23
Soledad Guerrero; 54192/45; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

139
Guerrero’s board of special inquiry transcripts and a letter explaining the board’s decision
written by supervising inspector, F. W. Berkshire. His request for exclusion concentrated heavily
on Guerrero’s presumed sexual immorality. Berkshire directed the commissioner general of
immigration to the board’s series of intimate questions regarding her sexual activities: how many
men had she lived with since her husband’s death and whether she intended to cohabitate with
Miguel Ahumada. Although Guerrero repudiated the allegations of living with men outside of
marriage and denied living with Ahumada, Berkshire was not easily convinced. He wrote that
her contradicting statements “taken in conjunction with the fact, as notoriously known here, that
it is the custom of Mexican women, particularly of the lower class—but not strictly confined to
them—to live out of marriage with men, was sufficient to justify a suspicion as to the applicant’s
intent.” Guerrero’s performances of respectability and middle-class status were thwarted by the
materiality of her racialized body. For Brody, the board, Berkshire and the commissioner
general, being a Mexican woman was “sufficient” evidence to unmask her true sexual character.
Perhaps because of Guerrero’s social circle, Berkshire went even further to demonstrate to
Washington the likelihood of her questionable character and lack of proper American moral
standards. To do so, Berkshire used his position as a regional federal officer to claim his
authority on Mexican cultural customs. Berkshire exploited El Paso’s reputation as a city of vice
to suggest that these Mexican women were “notorious” for their sexual transgressions. At the El
Paso border port, immigration officials constructed and regulated sexual bodies through their
“knowledge” of Mexican cultural custom.
Additionally, Maria Escudera tailored her identity to conform to gender norms as she
structured her appeal as reformed mother. On the morning of January 20, 1908, Escudera was
excluded as “likely to become a public charge,” for insufficient funds and inability to provide her

140
sister’s address to the immigration officer. That same day she crossed again with a woman who
had taken Escudera immediately to a house of prostitution where they stayed for five hours until
Escudera left for another location. While it is possible that Escudera knew the woman intended
to take her to a “house of ill fame,” Escudera maintained that she herself was a respectable
woman and had no idea that was where they were headed. Unable to prove prostitution, Board of
Special Inquiry Chairman, Wesley O. Staver then asked her how she made a living in Mexico.
Dissatisfied with her reply, that she was a theater actress, he asked, “Anything else?” She then
admitted that she had lived with two men, one the father of her child who currently resided with
her mother in Mexico. Staver further questioned, “where you married to either of these men?” to
which her reply was no. Now with Escudera’s questionable character affirmed, Staver asked her
“what occupation [she] intended to follow in the United States?” To recoup her mistake of
revealing her cohabitation with men and having a child out-of-wedlock, Maria emphasized her
education, stating that she would get a job as a seamstress or private tutor as she “was highly
educated and could instruct to read and write.” For clarification Staver asked once more if it was
her intention to live with men outside of marriage in the United States. Escudera responded no,
that she would follow a legitimate means of livelihood “in behalf of her daughter.”
24
Escudera
suggested that only in the United States, through lawful labor and proper sexual purity, could she
provide the moral guidance to her young daughter. Under these interrogation circumstances
Escudera cast herself as exhibiting proper American womanhood.
Escudera’s case reflects the calculated exchanges between interviewee and interviewer,
each trying to substantiate claims of either immorality or respectability. Staver’s questions were
aimed at marking Escudera as morally suspect; Escudera’s responses were framed to highlight

24
Maria Escudera; 51775/21; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

141
her value as an educated worker and a devoted mother. Framing Escudera’s replies as
performances does not necessarily discredit her statements as complete fabrications: that she was
a really prostitute, uneducated and did not care for her daughter. Rather in the interrogation
room, immigrant officials served to interpret immigration policy and did not allow for other
narratives to surface. Maria could not articulate in this space that for a single Mexican mother
there were few options but to seek higher wages in the United States. Immigrant inspector
Staver’s line of questioning did not allow for such statements. Instead she had to appeal to proper
definitions of motherhood; she had to reify normative gendered behaviors of child rearing while
simultaneously transgressing them in the midst of her transnational family. In the end, Escudera
was a theatre actress who brought to her board of special inquiry investigation her skills as a
performer.
Women charged with prostitution confronted a different battle for respectability with the
board of special inquiry. Because these women received pay for sex they transgressed proper
sexual boundaries. Once apprehended for prostitution few women could successfully deploy
alternative narratives of respectability—as wife to a non-U.S. citizen, member of the middle-
class, or mother—to pass as a proper woman. One-third of those held for prostitution attempted
to claim U.S. citizenship through marriage. Francisca Robles in 1908 openly told the board that
if she were to be deported for practicing prostitution she would seek marriage in Juarez with a
Mr. Richardson and then return for admission.
25
Fearing that a pregnant Maria Ronquillo might
have secured U.S. citizenship, the board made sure to inquire if she had been married since her

25
Francisco Robles; 51775/89; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

142
last unauthorized entry in January 1908.
26
Immigration officials were aware of these strategies
and did what they could to stop or declare null American marriages to Mexican prostitutes.
Thirty-five year old Concha Gonzales, who entered without inspection and was found at a house
of prostitution, informed her board of special inquiry that she intended to marry Abran Juarez, an
American citizen. Armed with this information, inspector W.B. Green testified that he “found the
boy and had a talk with him a few minutes and he did not want to marry her [anymore].”
27

Officials went so far as to locate the prospective husband and dissuade him from marrying the
detained woman. Both apprehended women and immigration officials were well aware that U.S.
citizenship meant deportation protections before the law of these border crossers.
Of the twenty-four prostitution cases, three Mexican women in the second half of the
1910s married soldiers as a tactic to avoid deportation. With the outbreak of revolution in
Mexico, the U.S. government in 1914 began to send infantry regiments to Fort Bliss, just outside
El Paso, to prepare for a possible attack. By 1916, over 50,000 members of the U.S. National
Guard were sent to El Paso. With an influx of soldiers, Mexican immigrant women increased
their chances to secure marriage with an American citizen. Virginia Vasquez was one of those
women. Vasquez had a history with the Bureau of Immigration: she was deported on January 29,
1916 for prostitution, and then again on July 19, 1916 for entry without inspection and for
affliction of “insanity, hystero-epilepsy and syphilis.”
30
On her third entry Vasquez married 34th
U.S. Infantry soldier, David M. Burger on September 11, 1916. After a little over three weeks
Burger deserted Vasquez who, for an unidentified reason, was held once again before a board of

26
Maria Ronquillo; 51775/27; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

27
Concha Gonzales; 51775/93; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

30
Virginia Vasquez; 54134/25; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

143
special inquiry in late September where her marriage was investigated. F. W. Berkshire wrote to
the commissioner-general:
It is to be regretted that as a result of this marriage citizenship has been conferred upon a
very undesirable alien. The matter has been presented to the Military authorities, in the
hope that they may be able to take some action in this case which may have a deterrent
effect on other soldiers who may be willing to contract marriage with aliens of this
class.
31

Vasquez’s marriage was now beyond Berkshire’s authority, but he hoped to further regulate the
morality of future U.S. citizens by requesting that Burger receive ample punishment from the
military as a means to deter other soldiers from engaging with “undesirable” aliens. An
investigation then found that Burger already had a wife and child in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania;
his marriage to Vasquez was thus null and void.
In her final interrogation in late December Vasquez presented herself to Chairman
Thomas E. Edwards as a reformed woman. In her testimony she highlighted her work as a
waitress in a Chinese restaurant in Juarez and as a clerk for a grocer stand in the Texas. Her
emphasis on legitimate labor distanced herself from her sexual past and she denied any return to
immorality. Furthermore, Vasquez testified that she had married Burger because she loved him,
he had asked her to marry him, and she wanted to live an honest life. According to Vasquez,
Burger had promised to take care of and support her. Vasquez discursively positioned herself as
victim to Burger’s false promises, which worked to deflect accusations that she tricked him into
marriage when she noted that he had in fact asked for her hand in matrimony. She then recounted
her reformation and her desire to lead an “honest life.” Among the board of special inquiry,
Vasquez performed the role of reformed wife and highlighted her commitment to an honorable
life.

31
Virginia Vasquez; 54134/25; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

144
Not all accused prostitutes’ claims to marriage had such a dismal outcome as that of
Virginia Vasquez. Deported prostitute Maria Villanueva’s marriage to William D. Jones was
upheld during the same month and year that Vasquez’s was denied.
33
Francisca Uvalle’s
marriage case consisted of three witnesses including the purported husband Lloyd P. Wilson who
attested to Uvalle’s exceptional character and legitimate marriage.
34
Even if marriages were
tinged with local corruption Washington officials were willing to recognize the marriage
between prostitutes and American citizens. On April 21, 1917, Francisca Cordova applied for
admission into the United States as the wife of soldier Jack Farning. In her testimony to the
board she admitted marrying Farning to avoid deportation. Her friend Lorenza informed her that
if she married an American citizen they could not send her back to Mexico.
35
And now as a legal
citizen and perhaps unfamiliar with the regulatory powers of the Bureau of Immigration, Uvalle
openly admitted to the fraudulent marriage and gambled with potential deportation. Other
immigrant women during this period such as Chinese wives and Japanese picture brides did not
have the ability to make such a frank statement. Because Cardova did not belong to an
excludable Asian class and was eligible for naturalization as “white,” so the circumstances
behind her marriage differed from those who had to meticulously perform as respectable wives.
Upon further questioning, Jack Farning stated that he had married Cardova, not only
because “he liked her,” but also at the request of El Paso policeman, Jacobo Salazar. According
to Farning, Salazar had approached him at madam Susie Churchill’s house of prostitution where

33
Maria Villanueva; 54181/29; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.
34
Francisca Uvalle; 54134/25; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.
35
Francisca Cardova; 54192/87; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building,
Washington, DC.

145
he repeatedly asked Farning to marry Cardova for unknown reasons. After Farning finally
consented, Salazar made the wedding arrangements. With the testimony in place, Berkshire sent
a letter to the commissioner-general, similar to the one he sent in regards to Virginia Vasquez.
He noted that the Inspector in Charge at Laredo was investigating the potential conspiracy of
Cordova’s case but lamented that:
these are extremely difficult cases to successfully prosecute, and it must be confessed that
but little hope is entertained of a successful issue. The Inspector in charge at Laredo is
being instructed…to present the facts to the proper military authorities at Laredo to the
end that Farning may be properly dealt with by them.
36

Failing to interpret and fit the law onto Francisca Cardova, Berkshire redirected sexual and moral
regulation to the military. The difficulty to prosecute cases like Cardova’s suggests that marriage
to an American citizen was an extremely powerful tactic under the right circumstances. Even the
commissioner-general wished to avoid an appeal going beyond the local courts. The
commissioner-general instructed Berkshire to “let bygones be bygones” and decided to sustain
Cardova’s appeal.
37
Whereas Virginia Vasquez appealed to the board as a newly honorable
woman, Cardova made no such claims. Perhaps armed with a valid marriage, even if had been
married out of convenience, Cardova shifted her performance to that of an American citizen with
rights.

36
Francisca Cardova; 54192/87; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building,
Washington, DC.
37
The Assistant Secretary filed an extensive investigation into whether the newly passed
Immigration Act of 1917 applied to the Cardova case. Section 19 of the Act passed in February
stipulated that marriages between American citizens to “female[s] of the sexually immoral
classes” will not be recognized and citizenship will not be granted to the alien female. However,
the act was not to go into effect until after May 1, 1917 and the office had to determine how to
interpret the law in Cardova’s case, which was filed in April. The Secretary decided to start
enforcing when the new law came into effect. See Francisca Cardova; 54192/87; Francisca
Cardova; 54192/87; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

146
Passing as a respectable woman in these boards of special inquiry met against significant
limitations. Among women excluded for “likely to become a moral charge” or “coming for
immoral purposes,” only two cases sustained appeal: and even those were upheld by the
extension of citizenship rights from her American husband. Despite apprehended women’s
efforts to cast themselves as respectable wives, commendable mothers or honorable women,
these Mexican female migrants still faced exclusion. Some repeat offenders quickly learned how
to formulate interactions with the board of special inquiry for a speedier hearing. In June 1908,
the immigration officials in Tucson, Arizona detained Octaviana Sonoqui for twelve days, for
both entering the United States without inspection and engaging in prostitution. Sonoqui was a
seasoned border crosser who had been detained and deported thrice in 1906 and 1907 and again
in 1910 on the same counts. When interrogated in 1908 by Inspector George W. Webb, Sonoqui
replied, when she could, with single word answers. To inspector Webb’s questions about her
being a prostitute, her failing to make an application for admission to an immigration officer and
her having been deported twice before, Sonoqui replied each time with a simple “yes.” In his
report and recommendation for deportation, George W. Webb wrote that Sonoqui’s was a “clear
case” due to her “frankness” in admission to her illegal acts and her lack of resistance to
deportation.
38
Sonoqui, then, did not defend herself against accusations of immorality through a
performance as moral woman, laborer or domestic mother. Sonoqui’s refusal to use these tactics
does not imply a truer form of resistance or agency, nor did her refusal to perform womanhood
for the board of special inquiry suggest an assertion of authentic identity. Rather, Sonoqui played
the role that immigrant inspector Webb desired to see: one of a sexual deviant flagrantly

38
Octaviana Sonoqui; 51775/96; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building,
Washington, DC.

147
infringing upon U.S. immigration law. She reaffirmed for Webb his categorization of border
crossing women as morally suspect for faster deportation. The quicker she could get processed
the quicker she could cross the border again to make a livable wage. The stage of the
interrogation room would only allow for a strategic agency that reinforced the regulation of
patriarchal domesticity along the Texas-Mexico border.
Mexican women apprehended for transgressing proper gender roles used the interrogation
room to enact a slew of admissible gendered, sexual and class identities in an effort to secure
passage or maintain their residence north of the border. These performances varied in
sophistication depending on the immigrant’s knowledge of exclusionary statutes and the
experience of the interviewers and interviewees. Seen in this way the board of special inquiry
interrogation room takes the form of a theatre of performativity. Within the board of special
inquiry theatre, multiple narratives and performances complemented or contradicted the
formation of subjects. As a theatre of performativity, the board of special inquiry through its
regulation of gendered and sexed bodies brought the subject into being. Immigration officials
used their position of authority to perform a rational gendered self in opposition to the
excludable immigrants. Female Mexican border crossers, on the other hand, had to perform in a
space that constituted them as ‘Other.’ In this space they attempted to temporarily break the
production of themselves as sexually suspect through the deployment of culturally normative
enactments.
Detained Mexican women used these calculated performances to attempt to circumvent
their racial, gendered and sexual classification as immoral and therefore illegal. They were
passing women, who moved from a vast range of sexual and gender experiences in their daily
lives, to claiming a singular heteronormative female identity as a tactic to cross the border. The

148
term “passing women” does not imply that border crossers shifted from an original authentic
understanding of their own gender identities to one of masquerade. Even before their passing, in
both literal and metaphorical ways, these border crossers were already constituted by the cultural
meanings and historical conventions surrounding the materiality of their bodies.
39
For Mexican
women detained and interrogated at the border, “passing” was less a form of resistant counter
narrative or expressive agency than a way to negotiate conditions for migration.
40
The act of
passing as a respectable wife to gain entrance into the U.S. was more a practice of survival, a
performance “forged by the pressures of everyday life.”
41
This strategy was not without costs:
“passing woman” served to reinforce and uphold notions of patriarchal power ensuring that the
structure of regulation still remained the same.
Regional Racial Lexicons in Texas-Mexico Border Surveillance:
The gendered and sexual regulation of solitary Mexican women was closely tied to the
racial positing of Mexican immigrants in the southwest. Mexican female border crossers sat
within a deeper history of a contested and ambiguous racial status for Mexicans in the American
southwest. Along with the U.S. acquisition of northern Mexican lands, the 1848 Treaty of

39
See Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology
and Feminist Theory,” in Feminist Theory Reader, eds. Carole R. McCann and Kim Seung-
Kyung (New York: Routledge, 2003), 415-427. Here I drawn on Judith Butler’s use of feminist
theorists’ Simone de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty to describe how “the body is understood to be
an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities,” (416).
40
Mexican women’s border-crossing subjectivity was induced by capitalism, the Mexican
Revolution, and American Progressive reform. Beginning in 1910 the Mexican revolution
pushed hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens into the United States due to the turmoil of
war and economic catastrophe. The social revolution left many women widowed to seek work as
domestics or laundresses in Mexico and the U.S. As racialized low-wage labor, Mexican female
migrants were subject to vulnerable exploitation by U.S. capitalist labor markets. And lastly, the
Progressive era and its social control over “sexuality, respectable domesticity, and appropriate
racial relations” during a moment of urbanization and industrialization also informed the context
in which these Mexican female border crossers were constituted.
41
José Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and Performance of Politics (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 37.

149
Guadalupe Hidalgo granted Mexicans residing on the newly annexed territory American
citizenship and, by extension, classified them as “white.” Historian Raúl A. Ramos notes that
even with the treaty’s ratification, Mexican’s legal racial designation as “white” was already
fraught when new Anglo leaders had to consider “the transference of rights to Mexican
indigenous peoples.”
42
Similarly, Anthony Mora describes the late nineteenth century U.S.
borderlands as a region where questions concerning Mexicans’ racial or national identity
surfaced.
43
Assertions of Mexicans as racially inferior, morally unfit and diseased began to
surface in response to increased immigration of Mexican immigrants at the turn of the twentieth-
century. Natalia Molina has shown how public health institutions in the first decades of the
twentieth century worked to “demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define” newly arrived
and long-term Mexican residents as a distinctly racial group.
44
State officials, whether health or
immigrant inspectors, were continuously in the process of framing Mexican’s racial identities.
Ideological intersections of race, gender and sexuality in border policing influenced the
forms of enforcement and implementation of U.S. immigration policy along the southern border.
The regional racial landscape of Texas in the first two decades of the twentieth-century framed
the charges against and the performances of accused Mexican female prostitutes. During this

42
Raúl A. Ramos, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821-1861
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 205. Anthony Mora shows that in a
revision of the original Article IX in the Treaty of Guadalupe, framers changed the language of
explicit guaranteed of rights to one that offered only “vague assurances that Mexicans living in
the acquired territories would gain the rights attached to full U.S. citizenship…the new article
created a paternalistic relationship between Euro-Americans and Mexicans.” The revised Article
IX emphasized that Mexicans would be incorporated at the proper time and in the interim they
will be protected by the United States in the “free enjoyment of their liberty and property.”
Anthony Mora, Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848-
1912 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 57.
43
Mora, Border Dilemmas, 5.
44
Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 3.

150
period the concern over “white slavery”—the traffic of both foreign and domestic female
prostitutes—was on the national radar, but was almost entirely absent in Texas board of special
inquiry cases regarding prostitution. Only once did the issue of white slavery arise and it
remained in the periphery where one detained Mexican woman testified against a male procurer
accused of “white slavery.” Another Mexican woman was accused of transporting women from
Juarez to El Paso, however this charge fell under the Immigration Act of 1907 that made
importing women for the purposes of prostitution illegal and the case made no direct reference to
white slavery legislation. In the sampled case files, none, save for one, of the detained women
were ever constructed as white slaves or deported as such.
However, the alarm over “white slavery” was not wholly abstracted from the U.S.-
Mexico border. The traffic of white American women into Tijuana vice districts elicited a wealth
of concern from San Diego and Los Angeles reformers. Catherine Christensen explains that the
California Federation of Women’s Clubs (CFWC) and local southern California newspapers
depicted the influx of white American women into Mexican border towns for the purposes of
prostitution as a narrative of coercion and victimization. In 1919, the CFWC campaigned to close
the international border as a means to protect white women from foreign procurers.
45
In contrast,
San Antonio immigrant inspector, Richard H. Taylor questioned how the “white slavery” laws
would be applied to Mexican prostitutes. In a report sent to the commissioner-general, Taylor
wrote:
In the majority of these cases the women are not such as are termed “White Slaves,” by
any means. They are merely prostitutes who cross the border from Mexico for the

45
Catherine Christensen, “Mujeres Públicas: Euro-American Prostitutes and Reformers at the
California-Mexico Border, 1900-1929” (PhD diss., University of California Irvine, 2009),
ProQuest (3363316).

151
purpose of practicing prostitution in the adjacent cities, and do so of their own volition,
merely for the purpose of increasing their revenues.
46

The campaign led by the CFWC to inhibit “white slavery” south of the border did not translate to
Mexican women in El Paso, where concern over “white slavery” centered mainly on French
prostitution rings.
47
Whereas the CFWC imagined white Americans as innocent, pure girls who
warranted protection from vicious procurers, for inspector Taylor, Mexican women engaged in
prostitution of their own volition and warranted no special safety from “white slavery” laws.
Mexicans’ ambiguous racial status coupled with vague federal immigration clauses like
“coming for an immoral purpose” opened to interpretation the application of immigration law.
Local officials manipulated immigration policy to fit state statutes and regional racial
hierarchies. In 1917, Arizona border agents debarred Maria Haros from entering the U.S. to join
Louis Clark, her African American boyfriend: she was excluded as “coming for an immoral
purpose.” For Board of Special Inquiry Chairman, R.M. Cousar, Haros and Clark were clearly
living in a state of adultery, where instead of understanding their cohabitation outside of
marriage in terms of personal choice Haros was positioned as a prostitute, an accusation that
would justify exclusion. Interviewer Cousar adjusted his questioning to elicit a revealing
response:
Q: What does Louis Clark pay you for having sexual relations with him?
A: He earns $18 a month in the army and gives me half of it; he pays the house rent and
the water rent; he supplies the provisions.
Q: Then this $9 he pays you each month is for sexual relations he has with you is it not?
A: That is for my clothes I would need.
Q: With how many other men have you had sexual intercourse for hire?

46
Immigrant Inspector Richard H. Taylor, “Report on Inspection of San Antonio District,”
casefile 52541/44, 11-12 (1909); RINS, SCK, MI, reel 2, quoted in Gardner, Qualities of a
Citizen, 66.
47
Jessica Rae Pliley, “Any Other Immoral Purpose: The Mann Act, Policing Women, and the
American State, 1900-1941” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2010), 284, ProQuest (3435032).

152
A: Only with him and my husband. (In 1914 Haros was married to and later abandoned
by her African American husband, Thomas Whortenburg)
48

Chairman Cousar’s questions were not only leading but also depended on the imprecision
of translation. The very act of translation was already mired in inaccuracy so when interpreter,
George Lockwood, dictated Haros’ responses we see the traces of a failed communication. For
Maria Haros to have understood Cousar’s questions and structure her replies in an ambiguous
fashion so as to evade the allegation of prostitution would have required more practice and
experience with border officials, of which she previously had none. Denying Haros’ entry
because of her interracial relationship was not enough for Cousar to justify debarment; her
exclusion still had to fit one of the excludable federal clauses. By framing Haros as a prostitute,
Cousar could categorize her as coming for an immoral purpose and debar her for illicit sexual
practices. The immigrant officials at the Naco, Arizona border used federal immigration policy
to uphold their state statue on interracial unions.
Indicative of Mexicans’ ‘in-between’ racial status, Maria Haros’ appeal to the national
office in Washington, D.C. raised concerns regarding her racial identity. The commissioner
general more often than not affirmed the board of special inquiry’s decisions for debarment or
deportation of the excludable immigrant class. But Haros was a special case that needed further
inquiry. The commissioner-general wrote the secretary, asking for a full investigation into
whether Haros was a person of the Caucasian race and whether she was a citizen of the U.S. in
light of her first marriage to Thomas Whortenburg, an African American citizen. If Haros was
indeed white and “not Indian or some other race,” then, according to Arizona’s 1913 statute—
which prohibited intermarriage between whites and blacks, Mongolians, or Indians—Haros

48
Maria Haros; 54192/81; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

153
could not claim U.S. citizenship based on her first marriage to Whortenburg.
49
After an
exhaustive five-day examination of Arizona state court reports, the national office “was unable to
find any decision which would throw light on the question as to whether a Mexican is a
Caucasian within the meaning of the Arizona Statues.”
50
In a desperate final attempt, the
commissioner-general telegraphed George Lockwood (the interpreter) to ascertain as to which
race the alien belonged. Lockwood replied that she was of the Spanish race. With this
information the commissioner-general used his authority to racially classify Haros as white based
on popular and political opinion and the sheer population of Mexicans in Arizona. He wrote:
Of course, there is no doubt that, generally speaking, Spaniards are regarded as
Caucasians. In addition to this, as a very large proportion of the population of Arizona is
of Spanish extraction, it seems inconceivable that the Legislature of that State would pass
a law in which the word “Caucasian” was used without intending that it should include
persons of Spanish extraction, or that the courts of that State, when they may be called
upon to construe such law, will exclude persons of Spanish extraction from the term by
construction.
51

The inability to determine Haros’s race points to the unreliability of these race categories and the
tenuous racial position Mexicans inhabited in the Southwest. This elastic racial lexicon
determined the type of enforcement and implementation of U.S. immigration policy along the
southern border. The commissioner general through common racial logic designated Haros as
“white” and therefore not a U.S. citizen by marriage to Thomas Whortenburg because of Arizona
miscegenation statues. Lacking U.S. citizenship, Haros was then susceptible to immigration
policy. As a result, D.C. Cousar’s initial classification of Haros as “coming for an immoral
purpose” was affirmed.

49
The Revised Statues of Arizona, 1913 Civil Code, designated “all marriages of persons of
Caucasian blood, or their descendants, with negroes, Mongolians or Indians, and their
descendants, shall be null and void.”
50
Maria Haros; 54192/81; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.
51
Maria Haros; 54192/81; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

154
Labor and Moral Reform Guiding Immigration Enforcement
In addition to race, gender and sexuality, local labor and moral reform needs structured
the enforcement of immigration surveillance prior to the National Origins Act of 1924 along the
Texas-Mexico border. F.W. Berkshire, supervising inspector for the southwest region, and his
border team, adapted their surveillance of the El Paso and Laredo entry points to the needs of the
region rather than those of the national immigration office. Immigrant officials considered these
needs through the region’s intersecting racial, gendered, and sexual landscapes. And Berkshire,
as George J. Sánchez has shown, was responsive to the labor needs of American employers in
the 1910s. In a report to his superior in Washington, Berkshire acknowledged that while “we can
exclude practically all of the Mexican aliens of the laboring class who apply for admission at this
port as persons likely to become a public charge…at the same time we know that any able-
bodied man who may be admitted can immediately secure transportation to a point on the
railroad where employment will be furnished him.”
52
Berkshire overlooked immigration law to
meet the demands of railroad companies and labor agencies’ clamor for low-wage labor. He did
not however extend these flagrant concessions to Chinese male laborers who were subject to the
Chinese Exclusion Act, or to single Mexican women excluded as “likely to become a public
charge.” The longer history of Chinese exclusion along the border, the severe anti-Asian
sentiment in the West and a numerous supply of Mexican labor could have prevented Berkshire
from considering any leniency on the part of Chinese immigrants. Furthermore, Berkshire could
not be sure that single Mexican women would immediately find employment in such a highly
gendered labor market. For example, El Paso immigrant inspectors justified the exclusion of
Encarnacion Aguayo by claiming a glut of domestic servants and chambermaids, despite the fact

52
Quoted in Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 52.

155
that a chambermaid job awaited her at her cousin’s El Paso hotel.
53
Under the direction of
Berkshire, immigrant inspectors implemented immigration laws according to race, gender, and
U.S. employer’s needs.
Surveillance on the Texas-Mexico border and the deportation of Mexican women over
time was also influenced by successive movements against “vice” in El Paso, and with changing
labor demands from American employers. El Paso’s business investment in commercial sex
tourism began to grow in the 1880s. Owen Payne White, an El Paso author who established his
literary career as an authority on the rugged and lawless West, recounted El Paso’s long and
hitherto uncelebrated history of prostitution and gambling.
54
Though colorful and extravagant,
his accounts traced how local politicians and mayoral campaigns often pushed for regulation
rather than eradication of El Paso’s red-light district. In 1903, after winning his campaign for
mayor as a supporter of El Paso’s elite businessmen, C.R. Morehead briefly closed the dance and
gambling halls to weaken the reform movement through a momentary appearance of propriety.
55

These managed efforts for reform arose again after the passage of the White Slave Traffic
Act/Mann Act of 1910 and once more in 1917 with El Paso’s bid for an army cantonment camp
in preparation for World War I.
56
An article in the El Paso Morning Times praised businessmen’s
and bankers’ call for the eradication of vice in order to qualify for a U.S. army cantonment,

53
Encarnacion Aguayo; 54192/50; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building,
Washington, DC.
54
See Owen P. White, The Autobiography of a Durable Sinner (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons,
1942), 178; and Owen P. White, Out of the Desert: The Historical Romance of El Paso, 2nd ed.
(El Paso: McMath Company, 1923).
55
White, Out of the Desert, 234-238; Ann R. Gabbert, “Defining the Boundaries of Care: Local
Response to Global Concerns in El Paso Public Health Policy, 1881-1941” (PhD diss.,
University of Texas at El Paso, 2006), 278-277, ProQuest (3214012).
56
Gabbert, “Defining the Boundaries of Care”, 279, 297.

156
which required that all disorderly houses and bootlegging be located at least fifty miles from the
proposed camp.
57

The move to eradicate vice mirrored the increased incidence of Mexican female
deportations. The first wave of deportations of Mexican prostitutes in El Paso and Laredo
followed the Immigration Act of 1907 with eleven affirmed cases in 1908. After an eight year
lull, a second wave of deportations began in 1916 and followed through 1917, resulting in the
arrest of thirteen Mexican prostitutes; coinciding with the city’s push for regulation of the vice
district as a means to secure the army training camp. In a 1916 bust of Carmen-Maria Luisa’s
business, immigrant officials took Margarita Ascona and three other Mexican prostitutes into
detention to await a board of special inquiry hearing. At her interrogation, Ascona was left
wondering why other girls were not targeted, and why Chevla, another girl at the restaurant,
escaped arrest.
58
Ascona’s concern points to the discriminatory fashion in which immigration
officials arrested and deported immigrants in El Paso. Rather than making a sincere effort to
uphold immigration law, immigration inspectors conducted vice raids at the request of city
officials who desired a surface-level appearance of moral reform. As prostitution deportation
cases mirrored moves for temporary reform, immigrant officials were indirectly linked to the
commercial interests of El Paso, just as they were to agribusiness and railroad labor needs.
Conclusion:
Despite Mexican female migrants’ informed or skillful performances at the border, the
outcome of their interrogations often resided entirely beyond their control due to unequal power

57
“El Paso Business Men Put Stamp on Approval on Clean-up Campaign,” El Paso Morning
Times, Dec. 27, 1917 (1:2).
58
Margarita Ascona; 54134/25; Subject and Policy Files, 1893-1957; Records of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building,
Washington, DC.

157
relations, the waxing and waning of vice raids, and the vicissitudes of local labor market. Recall
that of the thirty-seven cases, only twenty were appealed and sent to the national office for
review. Of those twenty only two cases were sustained. By the fiscal year of 1930, for those who
petitioned their deportation cases on charges of immorality across the nation, seven were
sustained, twelve were dismissed and three were withdrawn.
59
The board of special inquiry
interrogation remained a powerful of subject formation in the borderlands, despite Mexican
immigrant women’s vocal tactics to disrupt their configuration as gendered non-normative.
The board of special inquiry served the ends to corporeally encode the Mexican female
immigrant as sexually immoral. Posing intimate questions in an endeavor to uncover the sexual
exploits of solitary female border crossers, immigrant officials imbued these mobile bodies with
non-normative gendered and sexual representational messages. Mexican female border crossers,
however, also engaged in their own performative gender acts as respectable wives, mothers or
members of the middle-class. They did so as a means to negotiate the terms of their racialized
bodies. These were not liberating performances but served as palliative tactics to survive the
borderlands. In effect, the board of special inquiry was a system of subject production that
underscored the sexual and gendered regulation of immigration at the Texas-Mexico border.
As many scholars have noted, the intersections of race, gender and sexuality were
integral to the development and implementation of early immigration policy and bureaucracy.
61

These intersections, I argue, took on a regional focus particularly in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands
prior to the standardization of federal immigration law in 1924. The process of race, gender and

59
Carey, Deportation of Aliens, 321.
61
See Canaday, The Straight State; Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During
the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Eithne
Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002); Ngai, Impossible Subjects; and Salyer, Laws Harsh As Tigers.

158
sex differentiation becomes heightened in border regions, where competing nationalisms made
for strong claims and contestations over racial and sexual categorization of immigrant bodies.
Immigration officials at the Texas-Mexico border regulated cross border flows of upon based on
local labor markets and moral reforms in El Paso and Laredo. Mexican prostitutes were easy
targets in public calls for the eradication of El Paso’s vice district. Lacking U.S. citizenship they
were ideal candidates for elimination of the vice district; rather than sending them to a local
jailhouse, Texas officials could deport these non-normative bodies across the international
boundary. Furthermore, immigration officials like, F.W. Berkshire, drew on regional racialized
notions of Mexican women as breaking sexual taboos and cohabitating with men outside of
marriage to justify exclusions and deportations.

159
Conclusion
“Borderland Visualities” explores the production of the U.S. southwest borderlands
across the second-half of the nineteenth-century, particularly through the lens of science,
technology, and vision. I consider how surveying, natural history, ethnography, and border
surveillance made the southwest meaningful to an expanding nation. Southwestern landscapes of
power were played out among a culture of numbers, tables, eye-witnessing, and gendered
performances of crossing. Furthermore, while the scientific spatialization of the nation brought
the management of nature and people under the purview of the state, naturalists and
ethnographers, borderland inhabitants, and border crossers demonstrate the complexities
involved in westward expansion and settler colonialism of the American southwest borderlands
in the nineteenth-century. The operation of American power—the territorizalization and
temporalization of the southwest borderlands—was not always deliberate and comprehensive
during the mid-nineteenth century, especially at a time where limited government withheld direct
support to scholarly endeavors. At a distance, American empire in the southwest borderlands
appears all encompassing, but on-the-ground practices and state agents acting on their own
agendas demonstrate an orderly disorder to the enactments of empire.
Imagining and producing a borderlands entailed technologies of sight. Enclosing the
nation with an international boundary line at mid-century necessitated astronomical
determination. Scholars have documented well the role cartographic maps play in recording and
reorganizing space into the national fold.
1
But underlying the representational reimaging of edge

1
Graham D. Burnett, Masters of all they Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El
Dorado (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Raymond Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A
History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004);
Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire, (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 2001); Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of

160
of empire and its boundary line was the act of seeing. Astronomers and surveyors inflected their
own perceptions and values to marking the U.S.-Mexico border and that was bound to the literal
practice of sight. The surveyors of the Boundary Survey represented themselves as embodied
practitioners of scientific sight. They garnered their authority through their West Point training
on how to see and order space properly. This type of vision occurred at different altitudinal
registers, making conquest a vertical endeavor as well as a horizontal practice. Scientific sight
was instrumental in bounding a nation.
Yet, not all sciences were made equal, or they were, at the very least, inconsistently
supported by the state. Taken together, the various western surveys plotted the flora, fauna, and
human history of the American empire’s fringe. However, a closer look at on-the-ground
operations reveals a messy enterprise and challenges the idea of a uniform colonial power
operating with a deliberate and successful plan for conquest. When Commissioner John Russell
Bartlett’s request for a separate scientific team to study the borderlands region was denied he
took it upon himself to collect the data for his own interests. The naturalists and surveyors of the
boundary commission were not always on the same page when it came to natural history. Also,
ethnology had not yet become a professional discipline, so the amount and quality of data
collected depended on the individual state agent.
The Pacific Railroad Surveys included four separate commissioners who distinctively
approached and reported on the indigenous peoples of the American West. Amiel W. Whipple’s
Report Upon the Indian Tribes and James H. Simpson’s Exploration pinned their subjects of

British India, 1765-1843, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Cole Harris,
“How did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 94, no. 1 (2004): 165-182; Paula Rebert, La Gran Línea:
Mapping the United States-Mexico Boundary, 1849-1857 (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2001).

161
study to the southwest borderlands. While there reports maintained the common binary between
civilization and savagery, their discussion of ruins and indigenous history, including the
migration of pre-contact peoples in the southwest, placed Native peoples into multiple temporal
registers. Across the western surveys, Indians were a present threat, with a mysterious historical
past, and were in danger of fast diminishing. Whipple and Simpson did commonly use the
civilization and savagery binary to place the region within linear stages of progress and
development. However, the linear stage of development was complicated by another racialized
trope, that of degeneration and regression. The New Mexican ruins suggested to some that a once
“semi-civilized tribe” could retrograde back into a primitive state. Others who did not wish to
disrupt the linear stage model argued that the ancient peoples who built the ruins of New Mexico
were not the ancestors of the current Indian population. Instead those ancient peoples
disappeared because of natural forces like flood, drought, or earthquakes. Furthermore, the
American public incorporated the western survey’s ethnographic reports in their own
imagination of what constituted the boundaries of the nation. Some used the ruins found in New
Mexico, as evidence to either justify or oppose annexation of the territory. For one writer, the
ruins proved that the Indian population was capable of reaching a higher form of civilization and
so should be incorporated into the nation. Even before the transcontinental railroad, time and
space were imprinted on the southwestern borderlands and the bodies that inhabited that region.
Complicating the story of U.S. western expansion further are the borderland inhabitants
that troubled the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission’s attempt to mark an international
boundary line across an already bordered land. Again, on-the-ground operations point to a
nuanced understanding of the practices of empire. The Boundary Survey reports and its
cartographic maps, tabled astronomical determinations, and categorized botanical data,

162
transformed the border into ordered space for Anglo-American audiences. William H. Emory’s
report prepared the space for future U.S. governance and, in imperial fashion, attempted to
remove all else from the documentation of place. However, within the traces of their journals and
reports are Indians, Mexicans, and Euro-Americans who destabilize the Boundary Survey’s
attempt to mark the edge of the U.S. nation. The scholarship on the “great western surveys”
typically addresses the final product, but in “Seeing you, Seeing me” I explore what mapping,
numbering, and cataloguing looked like locally.
2
Cartographic visions were met with local
visions and understandings of place. Not only limited to the Boundary Survey, other western
surveys also eerily felt as though they were being watched at all times. The colonial gaze cannot
account for others looking back at the colonizers. Seeing, knowing, and representing place were
not the exclusive domain of the U.S. and Mexican governments. Even the environment pushed
back against state definitions of land ownership, making the conditions for marking the boundary
line almost near impossible.
Fredrick Jackson Turner famously declared in 1893 that the frontier was closed and had
been settled. But what began as an unsettled and unfinished project in the 1850s continued into
the beginning decades of the twentieth-century. I take “Borderland Visualities” from the mid-
nineteenth-century to the first few decades of border management to document and assess the
development and changes to the border landscape. While the historiography of this early period
portrays immigration across the border as relatively unhindered and its inspection policies as
“soft” for Mexican male migrants and their families, I argue the border was not permeable for
all. In “Staging Crossings,” my primary site of investigation is the board of special inquiry

2
For scholarship on the “great western surveys” see: William H. Goetzmann, Army Exploration
in the America West, 1803-1863 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959); Edward S. Wallace,
The Great Reconnaissance: Soldiers, Artists and Scientists on the Frontier 1848-1861 (Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1955)

163
(BSI)—a panel that deliberated over the admission of excludable immigrants, and oversaw
accompanying interrogations. I demonstrate that the BSI’s attempt to regulate intimate cross-
border exchanges was a developing feature of gendered and sexual enforcement along the
southern boundary line. While I contend that the BSI operated to corporeally encode the
Mexican female immigrant as sexually deviant, it simultaneously served as a stage for
immigrants to respond with their own performances of crossing.
In the early decades of the twentieth-century, federal, state, and local agencies were busy
building a U.S.-Mexico border that featured a maturing bureaucratic system with a growing
technological infrastructure made up of telegraph wires, railroads, bridges, boundary markers,
and a dozen or so entry points. Through their questioning, often mediated by an interpreter,
officials attempted to construct the sexual and gendered identities of Mexican female border
subjects as aberrant and improper. However, in “Staging Crossings,” I describe how the BSI
interrogation room functioned as a site for female migrants to enact both performative
interventions and palliative tactics to endure crossings and interrogation. In some cases
apprehended Mexican women claimed sexual and marital respectability, a performance that
served to reify officials’ understandings of proper American womanhood. In other cases
detainees flagrantly acknowledged official’s accusations of sexual promiscuity to secure a
speedier hearing. Reading against the grain of state accounts, my research unearths how Mexican
women were active agents in performing gendered and sexual identities to circumvent state
authorities and, thus, temporarily upsetting inspectors’ authorial power.
“Staging Crossings” offers a window into pre-1917 inspection practices along the U.S.-
Mexico border and how women responded to and navigated their sexual policing. In this interior
space, both parties played roles to define admissibility and excludability, where acts of

164
insubordination and subject formation occurred simultaneously. The flexibility which allowed
immigration inspectors to interpret terms like “immoral purpose,” allowed Mexican female
border crossers to perform a variety of identities—mother, wife, laborer, prostitute—in attempt
to secure their crossing. Overall, my findings contribute to the growing literature on pre-1917
U.S. border enforcement and demonstrate how the BSI set the stage for a slew of institutional
enactments and performances of crossing for Mexican female migrants that uncovered the
(dis)order of a growing U.S. bureaucratic infrastructure based on sexual and gendered regulation.
The process of possession is never complete. United States westward expansion and its
attempts at remaking the southwestern borderlands was not a finalized project, whether during
the 1850s U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey or the early twentieth century boards of special inquiry.
The effort to settle a region and at the same time depopulate that space came with challenges.
Individual state agents like John R. Bartlett and Amiel W. Whipple acted on their own ideas of
understanding and documenting regional space for purposes that extended beyond the state.
Fortunately for the United States, the inconsistent modes of documentation worked in their favor.
Those who lived in the southwest borderlands continued to imagine space in ways that were
conducive to them. Other scholars have pointed to the multiple ways borderland inhabitants
created meaningful places, sometimes in the service of empire and other times that served their
own purposes.
3
The southwest borderlands is constantly being remade, and when it comes to the

3
A few works that explore borderland communities in the southwest include, Anthony Mora,
Border Dilemmas: Racial and national Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848-
1912 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); John Nieto-Phillips, The Language of Blood: The
Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s-1930s (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 2004); Monica Perales, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest
Border Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Samuel Truett,
Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2008); Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush
to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).

165
border, knowing that the landscape is always in production has implications for how we
understand our current border policies and can inform how we move forward with those policies
in the future.

166
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Record Group 76: Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitrations
U.S. National Archives, Washington, DC
Record Group 85: Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service Entry 9

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Creator Menchaca, Celeste R. (author)

Core Title Borderland visualities: technologies of sight and the production of the nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 08/02/2018

Defense Date 08/09/2016

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