Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands

by Albert L. Hurtado

  As usual Bolton acknowledged Sidney M. Ehrman for his financial support of both volumes. “I have received a number of very flattering comments on the Georgia books,” Bolton informed his patron, “thus throwing bouquets at both you and me.”4 Bolton's work on Georgia was a sideshow compared to his work on California, Texas, and the Southwest. Perhaps that is why he left so much of the work to Ross, a native Georgian. Perhaps it was Ross who provided the unattributed illustration used as a frontispiece in Arredondo's Historical Proof of Spain's Title to Georgia, “Ruins of Santa Maria Mission, near St. Mary's, Georgia,” which showed a fuzzy photograph of a roofless structure made of tabby, a sort of primitive concrete. Bolton included two maps in Arredondo that located Santa Maria and other supposed missions near extant tabby ruins on the Georgia coast.5 From 1923 to 1930 Ross published articles in the Georgia Historical Quarterly on Spanish settlement in Georgia, including an essay that pled for the restoration of the old Spanish missions.6 In 1934 the New York Times reported that the Mission Santo Domingo would be restored with public funds and that Bolton would “advise the builders.”7

  Some Georgians, however, questioned the Spanish origins of the crumbling tabby walls. The Georgia Society of the Colonial Dames of America, perhaps with a touch of wounded Anglocentric pride, sponsored a careful documentary and archaeological investigation confirming that the old walls were abandoned nineteenth-century sugar mills. Subsequent archaeological investigations have found physical evidence of Spanish settlement, but no actual buildings or ruins have survived from the Spanish mission era.8

  Bolton and Ross did not invent the myth about Spanish mission ruins. Georgia real estate developers had used the misidentified “mission” ruins to boost tourism and property values. As Marmaduke Floyd, the principal author of the Dames’ report, put it, “The extraordinary publicity that California gave to the remains of the Spanish occupation of that state influenced the taste of the nation during the ‘gay nineties’ to mission furniture” and all of its “abominable imitations.” After the Great War “California Spanish mission affectations decorated hot-dog stands and synagogues, filling stations, hotels, and,” Floyd dryly added, “houses of every use.”9

  Ross evidently told Bolton about the “mission ruins,” but that does not excuse him from responsibility for carelessness. He wrote that one set of “Spanish” ruins was “known as ‘The Old Sugar House,’” so he was aware of conflicting views. Bolton's failure to investigate the ruins when he was in Georgia in 1923 contrasts tellingly with his tireless travels in the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico. Instead of visiting the ruins while he was in Georgia, Bolton was content to rely on Ross's opinions about them.10

  The Historic American Building Survey asked for Bolton's opinion about restoring Mission Santo Domingo in Georgia, a state historic park.11 By this time Bolton was receiving newspaper clippings about archaeological investigations of Georgia's ruins. Still, he referred the park service to Ross because he had “more pressing obligations elsewhere.”12 When Georgia's Disputed Ruins issued from the press in 1937, the authors were much harder on Ross than they were on Bolton.13 He continued to promote her work on the Georgia missions to the park service as late as 1939.14 Bolton made no public retraction or correction of the errors in his book. While he did not originate the mission myth, he was certainly the most important scholar to lend it credence. If nothing else, the Georgia mission episode demonstrated that once errors crept into the public's historical consciousness, they were difficult to remove. It also showed that once Bolton took a position, he did not readily change it.

  It was perhaps fortunate that Bolton's error was made in Georgia rather than in California and that he shared the responsibility with Ross. Had he been caught with a misidentification in California, Bolton's embarrassment would have been greater because of the local publicity that would have resulted. Even so, it is likely that word of the Bolton-Ross faux pas got around. Earl Pomeroy, a Berkeley student in the 1930s, was aware of the Georgia flub, though he may have heard about it later.15

  Plenty of people would have relished the prospect of seeing Bolton with a red face. Several of them decided to play a practical joke evidently meant to do just that. The plan was to fabricate a brass plate presumed to have been left by Francis Drake when he visited the Pacific Coast in 1579. The names of the perpetrators of this hoax were not revealed until 2002. In the meantime the joke evolved in unexpected ways. While most of the essential facts are now known, some details remain shrouded in mystery.16

  The prank was the brainchild of George Ezra Dane, a prominent member of E Clampus Vitus, a fraternal organization that flourished in California during the gold rush.17 Known familiarly as ECV, the lodge was, as a historian frankly stated, more of “a joke, a sort of parody of the solemn and mysterious fraternal orders then so popular in the states.” ECV membership dwindled after the gold rush, but was revived in 1931 by several Bay Area writers and professors from the University of California.18 The members elected officers with absurd titles like Grand Clampatriarch, Grand Noble Recorder, and Noble Grand Humbug that parodied the exalted titles given out in other lodges. Assiduous research by learned Clampers, as members were called, showed that the first Clamper was Adam (yes, that Adam), that St. Vitus was their patron saint (also patron saint of coppersmiths, among other groups), and so on and so forth. ECV was devoted to the welfare of widows and orphans, “especially the widows,” who were somehow aided by an instrument called the “staff of relief.” The organization held Clampbanquets, where it was rumored that substantial amounts of alcohol were consumed. Occasional Clamproclamations were made. Sometimes the organization placed commemorative bronze plaques at legitimate historic sites, but the main object of the organization was to cause general hilarity and to poke fun at everything and everyone, especially swells who took themselves too seriously. The Clampers, it seems obvious, were the fun-loving alter ego of the Native Sons of the Golden West.

  Just when the pranksters made the fake Drake plate is not known, but it was probably inspired by the spectacular hoax of Harry Peterson, curator of Sutter's Fort State Historic Park. In 1936 ECV met at the fort, where Peterson told the story of the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt, which established California's short-lived Bear Flag Republic. The assembled Clampers well knew that the original Bear Flag had been destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, but Peterson now revealed that he had saved the hallowed artifact. In the eerie light of a flickering lantern Peterson held up the tattered flag. Even among the impertinent and irreverent Clampers, who by the time the holy flag was hoisted were pretty well lubricated, “there was a moment of silence, for here was something historically stupendous.”19 The flag and story, it was soon revealed to the credulous audience, were both fabricated, but Peterson had demonstrated that a good story with a convincing prop and a little stagecraft could fool otherwise skeptical people.

  The lesson was not lost on Dane, who would become the Grand Noble Humbug of the Yerba Buena (San Francisco) chapter of ECV in 1937. By all accounts Dane was a remarkable man. He had been associate editor of the Harvard Law Review and specialized in admiralty law. Dane had a sharp wit that reminded Clampers of Mark Twain. Indeed, Dane was a published Twain scholar.20 He had all of the qualifications needed to perpetrate a great hoax. He intended to top Peterson's gag by forging the Drake plate, which claimed California for England by virtue of a concession from the Indians. Then to complete the joke, he would have the California Indians revoke the title with a second plate of brass. He assembled a band of co-conspirators: George Haviland Barron, George C. Clark, Lorenz Noll, and Albert Dressler, none of whom were Clampers. Dane probably involved outsiders so that Clamper cognoscenti would not leak word of the prank.

  Barron, retired curator of California history at San Francisco's De Young Museum, purchased a piece of brass from a ship chandlery. According to Noll, Barron hated Bolton, although he gave no reason for the curator's animosity. Barron gave the metal to Clark, an inventor, art critic, and a
ppraiser, who inscribed the brass with a hammer and cold chisel. “BEE IT KNOWN VNTO ALL MEN BY THESE PRESENTS IVNE. 17. 1579,” the inscription began, and continued on to claim “NOVA ALBION” for England in the name of “HERR MAIESTY QVEEN ELIZABETH ,” concluding with the name “Francis Drake.” Clark also made a hole that was supposed to have held a silver sixpence bearing the queen's image. He even put his initials on the plate's face, a C with an enclosed G, a signature he believed would easily reveal that the brass was a fake. The maker then belabored the plate with a ball-peen hammer to make it look old and gave it some other treatment to produce what looked like an antique patina. On the back of the brass someone wrote ECV in florescent paint that would be invisible until exposed to an ultraviolet light. Then Clark planted the plate on a hill near Corte Madera.21 Either the pranksters intended to persuade Bolton to go to the site, where he would “discover” the plate, or some other finder would show it to Bolton. Burying the plate in the ground would have the additional advantage of giving it some added weathering.22

  Bolton was an easy mark for Dane's prank. He was a Clamper who held the illustrious title Grand Royal Historian of the Yerba Buena chapter. For years he had urged his students to keep an eye out for the plate that Drake had left behind. In 1921 Bolton had participated in a commemoration of Drake's landing at the bay named for him.23 He agreed to speak about Drake at the February 1937 meeting of ECV, where the fake plate would have a starring role. But events did not transpire according to plan.

  On February 6, 1937, the Yerba Buena chapter of E Clampus Vitus met in the Hall of Comparative Ovations at the Wells Fargo Museum. Clampers freely consumed libations as usual. At particularly solemn moments a Clamper sounded the hewgag, the sacred horn of the ancient and honorable order. New members, called suckers, were initiated to the call of “Bring on your poor blind candidates,” who then saw the light of day. The initiates included William Fuller, chief of the Miwok ranchería in Tuolumne. Fuller generously announced that the Miwok round house in Tuolumne would be used as the Hall of Comparative Ovations when the Clampers met there in May, which was part of Dane's elaborate prank. After the induction ceremony Brother Herbert Bolton “expostulated at some length on Drake.”24 Historian Robert Chandler suspects that this was the moment when Bolton or some other Clamper was supposed to reveal the newly found plate. Then after a moment of reverent silence Dane would have exposed the fake with ultraviolet light, making Bolton and everyone else who was taken in the victims of his harmless prank. But there was no plate, no ultraviolet light, and no joke—at least not the one that Dane had intended.

  What had gone wrong? In the summer of 1936 Beryle Shinn, a young Oakland department store employee, was driving in the Marin countryside. Near the hill where the plate was stashed, Shinn had a flat tire. Before fixing the tire, he decided to go up the hill, where he amused himself by rolling some rocks down the slope. “As I pulled a rock from the soil,” Shinn recalled, “I saw the edge of a metal plate which was partly covered by the rock.”25 He took the plate to fix a hole in the floor of his car but deferred the repair for several months. When he finally set to his task, he noticed some crudely engraved writing and the word “Drake.” Acting on the advice of some unnamed Berkeley student, Shinn telephoned Bolton about his find. Or so Shinn said. It is possible that Shinn was the vehicle that Dane and company used to transport the plate to Bolton sometime before the ECV meeting. Oddly, Bolton did not record the date in February when he first met Shinn. Or perhaps Shinn did accidentally find the plate just as he said.

  Whatever the case, Bolton was completely taken in. “I surmised its identity even before seeing it,” Bolton said. “My mind leaped to the conjecture at once, because for years I have been telling my students to keep an eye out for Drake's plate.” Shinn, he added, had not been one of his students.26 Bolton evidently checked the text of the plate against the published sixteenth-century accounts of Drake's voyage. The close agreement with one of the texts and the apparent antiquity of the artifact in his hand convinced him that it was truly the object that Drake had left behind in 1579. There was even a hole, evidently meant to hold the sixpence mentioned in the sources.27 Seeing and touching the artifact convinced Bolton that Shinn had made an important historical find. Bolton's almost instantaneous, if not a priori, authentication of the brass tablet came also with the realization that the thing must be priceless. Of course he wanted to obtain it for the Bancroft Library, but how?

  Bolton's papers include a carelessly scrawled but unsigned note that offered Bolton 10 percent of the plate's sales price for his help in authenticating it. The note raises many questions, but two things are certain. First, Bolton kept the note in a folder with a copy of the bill of sale for the plate that Shinn subsequently executed.28 So Bolton attached some sort of significance to the note, if only as a record of his involvement in what he believed was an important historical discovery. Second, the note casts doubt on Bolton's public assertion that Shinn's “chief interest in the plate was to have it preserved for the public, and he never asked nor would he discuss a price for it.”29 Perhaps Shinn did not immediately put a specific price on the plate, but the note shows that he recognized that the plate had substantial monetary value and that he might sell it. These were important considerations in his dealings with Bolton.

  Thus Bolton, convinced that the plate was genuine, and perhaps having a pecuniary interest in it, enlisted Allen L. Chickering, president of the California Historical Society, to purchase the plate for the University of California. Chickering began to solicit donations from society members and other prominent Californians, citing Bolton's unqualified belief in the plate's authenticity.30

  On February 28, 1937, Chickering met Bolton and Shinn in the shadow of the campus campanile; the three piled in a car and took the Richmond ferry to Point San Quentin.31 They retraced Shinn's summer excursion and, after some difficulty, found the discovery site. The record Chickering kept of the trip described the commanding view of the countryside and the bay. Although bad weather obscured the scene at the time, he imagined that on a clear day one could see the “snowy Sierras.” Real or imagined, the vista that he conjured inspired “the thought…that it might be the place where the plate had been set up, but this is another story.” What other story? The location where Shinn found the plate was plain enough, was it not? Would it not have been reasonable for Chickering to conclude that if the plate was genuine, and if it was found under some rocks in this rural location, then Drake had left it there? but as we shall see, the fake plate had more tales to tell, as Chickering was perhaps already aware.

  The trip to Corte Madera left Chickering and Bolton more deeply convinced that the plate was Drake's and that it must be obtained from the young finder. On the ferry ride back to Richmond they ate lunch and the two men began to work on Shinn. Such an important historical relic ought to be on public exhibition, they argued, but arriving at a fair price would be a difficult matter. There was no telling what such an artifact was worth if a wealthy man wanted to get it for the Smithsonian Institution or the British Museum. Chickering thought he could raise $2,500 as a “finder's reward” for Shinn. The buyers would assume the risk of the plate's genuineness and “possible legal complications.”32

  On the following Monday, Shinn appeared in Bolton's office, saying that he wanted to show the plate to his uncle. Shinn promised to return it the next day. He did not. This was worrisome. On Wednesday Bolton telephoned Shinn, who said he would bring the plate to Bolton's office at 8:00 that evening. Bolton and Chickering waited until 8:45, when Shinn showed up without the plate, but with a lot of problems. Shinn was “frightened to pieces” because his uncle said that he might be prosecuted in connection with the plate, though he did not explain why. Shinn threatened to ship the plate out of the state in order to get rid of it and the worries that it caused. Chickering soothed Shinn by explaining that if he sold the plate to them, Bolton and Chickering would deal with troublemakers. Chickering agreed to pay Shinn $3,500, “taking
the risks of genuineness and of any claims.” Shinn agreed to the deal immediately. He went to retrieve the plate from his uncle but returned without it because the house was locked. He promised to bring it the next morning, Thursday, but again the plate failed to appear. Finally, on Friday morning, Shinn exchanged the plate for $3,500.33

  The documents that describe these negotiations can be read in several ways. In one view, two wily and powerful older men were determined to have the plate and put enormous pressure on an innocent young man who was beyond his depth. In another view, Shinn, a shrewd negotiator, set the trap, presented the bait, got his quarry to commit, withdrew the bait, drove up the price, limited his liability, and sold.

  We do not know if Shinn was part of Dane's elaborate joke, but Bolton's immediate, intuitive (and wrong) authentication sent the prank spinning off in an entirely unexpected direction. Instead of being merely funny, the joke turned into a windfall for Shinn, who received what amounted to one year's salary for an associate professor of history at the University of California in 1937. Perhaps it all happened just the way Shinn said it did, but by art or by accident, he walked away from the plate with a nice sum of money. He bought a house and got married.

  The buyers wasted no time in conveying the plate to the University of California. On the same day that the plate and money changed hands, Bolton told President Sproul that he and Chickering had managed to get the article with the assistance of historical society donors and prominent Cal alumni, including a member of the Board of Regents, who happened to be Sidney M. Ehrman.34 Bolton assured the president that he would “make every investigation necessary to demonstrate the genuineness of the treasure,” but he did not say precisely what those investigations would be.35 Indeed, it appears that Bolton did nothing but compare the text of the plate with the texts from the published accounts. Nothing in the record shows that he sought expert advice from anyone before he announced the discovery to the world.