Cultural Construction of Empire: The U.S. Army in Arizona and New Mexico

Notes

Introduction 1. W. Corbusier, Soldier, xii–xv, 158–60. 2. Throughout the book, I use “white army people” and “white army personnel ” when referring to white officers, their wives, and the white enlisted men as a single group. 3. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, 14–34, esp. 16; Said, Orientalism ; Kennedy, “Imperial History,” 19; Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 23, 27; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge. Usually colonialism is defined as the coercive incorporation of people into an expansionist state and invidious distinction, which involves a systematic ranking of peoples, or as the conquest and control of other peoples’ land and goods—including the appropriation of material resources, exploitation of labor, and interference with political and cultural structures. Empire is an expansionist unit that reproduces differentiation and inequality among people it incorporates. The relationship between colonialism and imperialism is sometimes confusing and often interpenetrating. Imperialism can be seen as a global system, or as something that originates from the metropole, whereas colonialism is the takeover of territory and what happens locally in a colony. See Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2–7, 20; Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 26–28; R. Young, Postcolonialism, 5–6, 15–43; and Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, 2–3. 4. R. Young, White Mythologies. For Young “white mythologies” means “the West’s greatest myth—History” (see page 2). Officers, as well as their wives and the common soldiers, produced colonial knowledge in colonial armies around the world. For example, educated and resourceful British officers generated 254 Notes to pages 5–7 colonial knowledge and certain readings of Indian society through their literary , scientific, and artistic activities. Peers, “Colonial Knowledge.” 5. For communities as imagined, see B. Anderson, Imagined Communities . Throughout, I use either “fort” or “camp” when referring to individual army villages. The official designation of each village varied—some were camps and others forts—while the name of many changed over time. For instance , Fort Bowie, Arizona, was originally called a fort after its establishment in 1862, then designated as camp, and again changed to fort in April 1879. Frazer, Forts of the West, 4. 6. Military history today pursues a broad and sophisticated research agenda. In a recent review essay, “Military Histories Old and New,” historian Robert M. Citino divides military historians into three major groupings: traditional operational historians, war and society scholars, and a new cadre of historians who emphasize culture and the history of memory. 7. This study focuses on white officers, their wives, and enlisted men, and pays less attention to black troops, although some comparisons of the social life and status of black and white soldiers are included when applicable. The choice to focus on the white army experience is logical because there already exists several good social histories of black soldiers and because no black troops served in Arizona until 1885, the very end of the period under investigation here. While New Mexico had some black soldiers, their presence in the territory between 1866 and 1886 was rather irregular: some black infantry units were stationed in New Mexico right after the Civil War and one black cavalry regiment served there from 1876 to 1881. For histories of black soldiers, see Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers; Dobak and Phillips, Black Regulars; Billington, New Mexico’s Buffalo Soldiers; and Leiker, Racial Borders. For an older classic , see Leckie, Buffalo Soldiers. 8. Smith, “Lost Soldiers”; Meeks, Border Citizens; Jaehn, Germans in the Southwest. Smith wrote that the army “offers an especially rich source of materials regarding the everyday life of everyday people” and therefore “is a particularly useful laboratory for testing all kinds of theories and for raising questions about social interactions between people of different classes and ethnic groups” (157). 9. Padget, Indian Country, 29–32. Padget’s one army narrative is Lt. James Simpson’s account of his exploration during a military expedition to the Navajo country in 1849. The account is reprinted in Simpson, Navajo Expedition . Of the many histories of overland migration, see, for example, Faragher, Men and Women, and Unruh, Plains Across. For a recent article on European travelers, see Wrobel, “World in the West.” 10. Truett, Fugitive Landscapes. For the tendency of academic history to Notes to pages 7–8 255 give the army little, if any, space in its discussions, see also, for example, Wrobel , Promised Lands; Truett and Young, Continental Crossroads; and Wilson , Myth of Santa Fe. 11. For instance, historians writing...