John Russell Bartlett’s Literary Borderlands: Ethnology, War, and the United States Boundary Survey

This article argue that John Russell Bartlett’s Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua—a first-person account of the United States and Mexican Boundary Commission’s efforts to establish the international border following the U.S.-Mexico War—represents a key literary consolidation of the agendas of ethnology and empire along the U.S./Mexico borderlands. Documenting Bartlett’s controversial tenure as Boundary Commissioner in terms of previous acts of scientific collaboration between the American Ethnological Society and the War Department, this article explores the relationship between ethnological research, geographical surveys, and techniques of literary representation. This discussion culminates in two episodes of Indian captivity Bartlett documents in encounters with the Mimbreño Apache near present-day Silver City, New Mexico. In Bartlett’s Personal Narrative, ambiguous literary boundaries between scientific and sentimental styles of representation correspond powerfully to the troubled efforts of the Commission to establish stable boundaries in their survey of the international border.