Fiasco: George Clinton Gardner's Correspondence from the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey, 1849-1854 (review)

It is all too easy, as this reviewer has done in survey courses, to present the nineteenth-century United States as a leviathan moving inexorably forth under the banner of Manifest Destiny. But as we move from the macro to the micro on the historiographical scale this view is increasingly distorted. Take, as David J. Weber and Jane Lenz Elder did, the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey as experienced by one George Clinton Gardner.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war between the U.S. and Mexico decreed both governments would send representatives to survey and mark the new boundary between the two nations. In February 1849, Gardner, the seventeen-year-old scion of a Washington, D.C., family, received an appointment as the junior assistant to the chief astronomer of the U.S. boundary commission. For the next five years, Gardner worked the line between San Diego and Yuma and then down the Rio Grande from El Paso to the river's end. The whole time Gardner wrote letters, primarily to his family, and these letters make up the bulk of Fiasco with Weber and Elder providing context and additional information.

Gardner candidly discussed the personalities, rivalries, and quarrels of the boundary party. He provided day-to-day details of his life in strange lands, often under harsh conditions, including his social life, showing himself as a man of his time and place. Overall the impression the letters leave is that Gardner was a young man enjoying a grand adventure. But his letters also reveal much about the functioning, or dysfunctioning, of the boundary commission, especially its crippling financial and logistical problems. It took Gardner five months to travel from Washington to San Diego as lack of preparation resulted in a three-month delay in cholera-infested Panama. The commission ran out of money while surveying the line in California, placing Gardner on unpaid leave in San Diego for eight months where he fortunately found employment with a family acquaintance as a clerk and spent his spare time riding, writing, dancing, and socializing with the californios. Even after work resumed in July 1850, the survey was not completed until June 1851.

Gardner then made his way to El Paso after a short home leave in November 1851, but due to further financial and logistical delays, the survey of the El Paso line was not complete until May 1852. Attempts to survey down the Rio Grande were dogged by a lack of funds, to the extent that the entire commission was disbanded at Ringgold Barracks in Texas, opposite Camargo, Mexico, in December 1852. Gardner went home, but Congress finally disbursed the necessary funds and he returned to the Rio Grande in the summer of 1853 to complete the survey. By January 1854, Gardner was heading back to Washington, D.C., to join his father who had just been appointed the surveyor general of Oregon, missing the final survey of the Gadsden Purchase and ending his time in the Southwest.

But was the boundary commission really a fiasco? Or was it just the way the federal government did business in the mid-nineteenth century? An under-explored theme in the history of the West and Southwest is the inability of the federal government to meet the many requirements it assumed or was assigned. Reach often exceeded grasp, sometimes with tragic results. Gardner's experiences may simply have been par for the course. Yet this is only apparent from such a personal, micro, view. With Weber's and Elder's efforts in Fiasco we now have material with which to begin to make such inquiries.