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

2. Journey to the “Outside”

The regiment . . . was ordered to Arizona, that dreaded and then unknown land, and the uncertain future was before me. —martha summerhayes, officer’s wife In the summer of 1869 Julia Davis had just returned from a year-long honeymoon in Europe. She hoped that her husband, Murray Davis, a captain in the U.S. Army, would be assigned to a pleasant station somewhere near their Oakland, California, home, where they could raise their infant son in safety and comfort. When the orders arrived, however, they brought unwelcome news. Captain Davis was to take charge of a body of troops and lead it across the desert to Arizona. Julia wrote, “I thought of my husband going down and the dangers of Indian warfare, and being perhaps killed by savages, whilst I was far away, and I could not bear it.” Worried that the journey and life in Arizona would prove too demanding on his wife and child, Captain Davis insisted that they stay in California and left for his new post. Deciding otherwise, Julia packed hastily, gathered their son and a nurse, and caught up to her husband in San Diego. She recalled, “All my friends of course cried out I was mad. I should die of hardship and fatigue, and my husband would have to bury me in the desert .” After some heated arguments with her husband, Julia joined a 34 Journey to the “Outside” detachment of the Eighth Cavalry, numbering twenty-four enlisted men and two officers, for the journey of forty-one days and approximately six hundred miles to Camp McDowell, Arizona.1 The officers and soldiers the army assigned to Arizona and New Mexico faced long journeys with uncertain expectations. On the road army travelers soon discovered that comforts often did not reach preferred standards. These factors negatively impacted the representations penned by officers, wives, and enlisted men. So did the army’s search for colonial authority. While their portrayals express genuine disappointment and shock at both the natural environment and the society they encountered along the route, the army’s written accounts also show how the authors differentiated themselves from the peoples and landscapes that failed to meet their standard of civilization . Army travelers constructed subjective knowledge designed to secure colonial authority and power for the new rule and rulers. In the colonial context, travel was much more than simple movement across space. It was, in fact, a crucial site in the production of colonizer identity and power. In other words, travel and travel writing represent one of the domains where the colonizers established their superiority in relation to the terrain they invaded and the people they colonized. Literary scholar Sara Mills argues, “Travel writing is essentially an instrument within colonial expansion and served to reinforce colonial rule once in place.” Similarly, anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt concludes that travel writing helped produce “Europe ’s differentiated conception of itself in relation to something it became possible to call ‘the rest of the world.’”2 Travelers assigned specific meanings to themselves, the journeying process, and to the landscapes, peoples, and settlements they encountered. They judged the suitability of the travel region for the purposes of the colonial regime and evaluated it against their norms, while simultaneously constructing specific identities for themselves. Transient Conquerors In the Southwest borderlands the army represented a congregation of outsiders. Apart from the indigenous soldiers hired by the army, Journey to the “Outside” 35 all officers, soldiers, and dependents originated from other regions in the Unites States and even other continents. White enlisted men generally came from two sources: the urban working class in the East and groups of immigrants from Europe, especially Germans and Irishmen. After the Civil War approximately 50 percent of enlisted men were immigrants. For example, in 1886 the enlisted ranks had 11,377 native-born and 10,163 foreign-born whites. Of the latter 3,640 were German and 3,518 Irish.3 As a rule, the army did not enlist whites from the small local population in the Southwest, deeming the supply of possible recruits insufficient both in quantity and quality. Most recruiting was instead conducted in the more populous eastern states such as New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania . In the East, Edward Coffman argues, soldiering was viewed as a low-status occupation. Popular beliefs reflected the antiarmy atmosphere of the nation. The public at large regarded...