Brave Old Spaniards and Indolent Mexicans: J

American Journalism, 31:1, 100–126, 2014 Copyright C American Journalism Historians Association ISSN: 0882-1127 print / 2326-2486 online DOI: 10.1080/08821127.2014.875347

Brave Old Spaniards and Indolent Mexicans: J. Ross Browne, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, and the Social Construction of Off-Whiteness in the 1860s By Michael Fuhlhage

The purpose of this article is to examine J. Ross Browne’s construction of racial identity in the territories acquired by the United States after its war with Mexico in 1846–1848. The intent is to reveal the interaction between a journalist’s social identity and his construction of the social reality of race relations by examining the most widely circulated works, personal trajectory, surrounding cultural inﬂuences, and private correspondence by Browne, one of the earliest Anglo journalists to chronicle American development of the Mexican Borderlands based on ﬁrsthand experience. The research method was cultural contrapuntal reading, which employs a combination of Marion Marzolf’s content assessment and Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading. Browne cast Spanish California elites as bringers of European progress and helpers to the Anglo American government and business leaders, Mex- ican peons as a cheap labor force for mining interests, and Spanish ladies and mixed-race temptresses as objects of desire.

he American mission of resource development in the West took root in unsettled conditions. The discovery of gold in California triggered migration that inundated the Spanish-descended ricos T 1 who had long held power over lower-class Mexican and Indian populations.

1J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (New York: Touchstone, 1981). The nomenclature of race is complicated by misunderstandings about the meaning of race itself. Americans of the nineteenth century referred to people of dark but not Negro complexions as “Mexicans” even if they were citizens of the United States. Many citizens of Mexico had light skin, owing to their Spanish ancestry and a hierarchy of race that put Mexicans of pureblooded Spanish descent Michael Fuhlhage is an at the top and pureblooded Indians at the bottom. Labels for indigenous assistant professor in the School of Communication people are complicated by similar factors. A person whom current and Journalism at Auburn American scholars might label “Native American” might actually be an University, Tichenor Hall indigenous person from Mexico, whereas indigenous Americans in a 237, Auburn, AL 36849, broader sense may be natives of an Indian nation in the United States, [email protected]. Mexico, or Canada. Even the nomenclature of Latinos in old California r American Journalism 31:1 101

Anglo newcomers who arrived with the Gold Rush of 1849 treated native Californians as “Mexicans,” regardless of their US citizenship.2 Underpin- ning this was an emergent wave of xenophobia, driven by speculation that Catholics were conspiring to undermine American freedom, that took hold among believers in Protestant, Anglo-Saxon superiority.3 Amid these influences, the 1850s saw the nation on increasingly perilous political ground. Southerners took growing umbrage at Northerners’ attacks on slavery as planters sought land to extend their peculiar institution.4 These forces played a substantial role in shaping the way US journalists perceived racial, national, and religious difference between themselves and the Mexicans they encountered.5 Among these journalists was John Ross Browne, whose articles for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine provided a detailed picture of the strangeness of Western territories and commentary on relations among Span- ish Californian elites, Mexican peons of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry (see Figure 1), and Anglo interlopers. Extensive experience in the Borderlands in the 1850s and 1860s informed Browne’s writing, which reflected the complexities of class and race in California and the territories that make up present-day Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. This article examines Browne’s journalistic work in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, personal trajectory, and the cultural influences that surrounded him. Its purpose is to examine Browne’s construction of racial identity in the territories acquired by the United States after its war with Mexico in 1846–1848.6 The is complicated by the shift from Mexican to US control. Thus, for purposes of this article, “Anglo” is used instead of “white,” “Spanish” is used for people of Iberian descent, “Californio” is used for Spanish- and Mexican-descended elites who are natives of California, “Mexican peon” is used to refer to less privileged poor working-class Californians of Mexican descent, and “Indians” is used to refer to indigenous people of North America. “Anglo” and “Indian” are referred to as “Anglo American,” “Anglo European,” “Mexican Indian,” “California Indian,” or by the names of their specific nations, such as Navajo, Apache, and so on, where such labels are needed for clarity. “Native Californians” is used to refer to non-Anglo natives of California who were citizens of Mexico before they were annexed under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War. “Mestizo” is used to refer to people of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry. 2Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, Frontiers: A Short History of the American West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 86. 3David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (London: Verso, 2007); Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938). 4Michael F. Holt, The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004). 5Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 6Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, established in 1850, served as a magazine of serialized novels, travel narratives, and other long-form nonfiction, poetry, and political commentary. It preceded Harper’s Weekly, launched in 1857 as an illustrated family newspaper to compete r 102 Fuhlhage

Figure 1: “Santa Cruz Greasers.” Arguing intermarriage led to lack of vigor, laziness, and poverty, Browne wrote, “When these mixed races are compelled to work they sicken and die.” Typical of the “indolent Mexican” type that recurred in his Harper’s articles, Browne wrote they barely farmed enough to sustain themselves. In J. Ross Browne, “A Tour through Arizona. Fourth Paper,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, January 1865, 149 (color ﬁgure available online).

intent is to reveal the interaction between a journalist’s social identity and his construction of the social reality of race by examining Browne’s most widely circulated work and private correspondence. These research questions guide this inquiry: How did Browne por- tray Mexicans, Indians, and Spanish-descended Californians in the land the United States acquired from Mexico? What inﬂuences—in popular culture, ideology, religion, and journalistic practice—shaped Browne’s representation of the Borderlands? This article reveals the mentality of a reporter as he experienced changes brought by colonization, answering James Carey’s 1974 call for a cultural history of reporting.7 The study also answers John

with mammoth illustrated papers such as Brother Jonathan. Harper’s Weekly is best known for its lavish illustrations and its campaign to bring down the Tweed Ring, the machine that controlled city government in New York in the 1860s and 1870s. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 250 Years 1690 to 1940 (New York: MacMillan, 1941), 382–384. 7James W. Carey, “The Problem of Journalism History,” Journalism History 1, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 1, 3–5, 7. r American Journalism 31:1 103

Nerone’s 2011 appeal for a critical history of journalism as an industry. Nerone’s analysis of American Journalism and Journalism History articles revealed another disciplinary need: Race is a subject of enduring interest, yet Nerone found no mentions of Latino ethnicity. Thus, the article also extends the boundaries of journalism history beyond the white–black racial binary.8 Browne’s writing is significant because of his reputation for integrity as a public servant and influence on public policy and popular literature, but also because Harper’s New Monthly reached so many readers. The magazine dominated periodical publishing with a circulation of 100,000 copies that reached 500,000 readers each month.9 Its middle- to upper-class readers hungered for its serializations of European novels, American fiction, and nonfiction descriptions of strange lands abroad and in the West, providing the Harpers a target for their promotion of American values, culture, and information. This question guided their choices of what to publish: “Is it moral, as well as interesting and instructive?”10 Hence, Browne’s writing also reveals what he and the Harpers believed readers needed and wanted. Browne’s images of Mexico did not end in the magazine. He expanded his six-part 1864–1865 serial “A Tour through Arizona” and provided sketches for the compilation Adventures in the Apache Country. First published in 1868, Adventures proved popular enough that it was republished in 1869, 1871, 1874, and 1878.11 Browne drew his notions about Mexicans and Spaniards from experience as a US Treasury Department and Office of Indian Affairs investigator—a low-level job that allowed him to travel in dangerous areas under federal protection and learn about Western affairs by demanding the facts from those who collected government funds—and as the first US mining statistics commissioner, a position that gave him prestige among commercial interests and earned enough respect that his fellow Californians succeeded in nominating him to serve as US ambassador to China in 1868–1869.12

8John Nerone, “Does Journalism History Matter?,” American Journalism 28, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 7–27. 9Eugene Exman, The House of Harper: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Publishing (New York: Harper & Row, 1945), 71; 100,000 copies printed, Broadside, 1852. American Broadsides and Ephemera database. 10Eugene Exman, The Brothers Harper: A Unique Publishing Partnership and Its Impact upon the Cultural Life of America from 1817 to 1853 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), xiv. 11Each of the editions is listed in the WorldCat database. Adventures in the Apache Country was also republished in Germany in 1874 and 1878 under the title Reisen und Abenteur im Apachelande. 12Goodman, Western Panorama: 1849–1875: The Travels, Writings and Influence of J. Ross Browne on the Pacific Coast, and in Texas, Nevada, Arizona and Baja California, as the First Mining Commissioner, and Minister to China (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1966), 258. The National Intelligencer newspaper commented March 16, 1868, on Browne’s appointment, “Every portion of the country has reason to congratulate itself upon a selection so eminently fit to be made.” r 104 Fuhlhage

Browne’s influence rippled beyond journalism and government. Literary scholars have noted his influence on the writing of Samuel Clemens, who emulated his irreverent Western storytelling, and Herman Melville. Fiction writers echoed his descriptions of elite Californios and the Mexican peons who toiled for them.13 Browne’s descriptions contributed to the development of stereotypes in the English-language press through a combination of reported fact and interpretation that laid a baseline of common knowledge about Borderlands life. Correspondents learned about Mexicans through publications but rarely from experience. Their gaze was also influenced by sectional loyalties, class, and religious and political leanings. Each facet of social identity refracted the image of the Mexicans whom Anglo correspondents encountered.

Cultural Contrapuntal Reading The method of analysis the present author developed for this article— cultural contrapuntal reading—elaborates on social identity’s inﬂuence on a journalist’s creation of texts about the Mexican Other as well as assess- ing authorial presence and intent.14 This unique approach is grounded in the idea that to understand the connection between social identities and portrayals of outgroup members, one must examine contemporaneous US

13Joaquin Miller, a poet who lived in Browne’s time, wrote of the influence of Browne’s travelogue Yusef: Or The Journey of the Frangi on Mark Twain, “It is clear to the most casual reader that if there had been no Yusef there would have been no Innocents Abroad.” Quoted in Lina Ferguson Browne, J. Ross Browne: His Letters, Journals & Writings (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), xix–xx. More recently, critic Duncan Emrich wrote, “There can be no question that Browne was one of the most widely traveled, observant, and versatile men of his time. It is unfortunate that his ability as a writer, and the influence he exerted on other writers of his time, has not been more widely recognized. His Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, for example, preceded Melville’s Moby Dick and was known to Melville, while his Peep at Washoe and Washoe Revisited were clear forerunners of Mark Twain’s Roughing It. His Yusef: Or The Journey of the Frangi also preceded Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad and the relation—even indebtedness—of the latter work to Browne’s book is apparent.” Duncan Emrich, Comstock Bonanza: Western Americana of J. Ross Browne, Mark Twain, Sam Davis, Bret Harte, James N. Galley, Dan de Quille, Joseph T. Goodman, Fred Hart (New York: Vanguard, 1950), 5; Carl Edward Rollyson, Lisa Olson Paddock, and April Gentry, Critical Companion to Herman Melville: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Facts on File, 2001), 130. 14This method builds on Russell Barber’s and Frances Berdan’s “reality-mediation model” for interpreting evidence of past cultural interaction, which emphasizes that scholars must assess ethnohistorical sources’ authorial presence and intent and investigate whether those sources reflect external reality. Russell J. Barber and Frances F. Berdan, The Emperor’s Mirror: Understanding Culture through Primary Sources (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998). Cultural contrapuntal reading is detailed in Michael Fuhlhage, “Prehistory of a Stereotype: Othering of Mexicans in the Era of Manifest Destiny,” in Identity and Communication: New Agendas in Communication, ed. Dominic Lasorsa and America Rodriguez (London: Routledge, 2013), 77–99. r American Journalism 31:1 105 media portrayal of Mexican life and culture in the form of articles, edi- torials, and books; examine private evidence about the writer’s mentality, including letters, diaries, records of the books the writer read about the outgroup, its culture, and its place of origin; and understand the dominant cultural influences of the writer’s time and place, including the creed and disciplines of the writer’s religious denomination, the teachings of the journalist’s spiritual and political leaders, and so on. Comparing written artifacts and epistemologies helps discern whether a mental map of Mexican identity and culture in the journalist’s mind before he or she reached the Border- lands matched the cultural territory that he or she encountered in external reality. Cultural contrapuntal reading draws from Marion Marzolf’s content assessment and Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading. Said’s interpretation of Orientalism resulted in a picture of a monolithic, dominant European culture. Applied to the representation of Mexico in the US press, research based solely on contrapuntal reading would logically result in a picture of a monolithic, dominant American culture, a racialized hegemonic power dominated by people called “Anglos” matched up with a racialized, dominated group called “Latinos.” But not all Latinos are alike. Nor are all Anglos alike. American identity is assumed to be monolithic in studies of Amer- ican othering, too. One example is John Coward’s excellent examination of the construction of Native American identity in the nineteenth-century press, The Newspaper Indian. But that study concentrates on the representation of the other, not the observer’s identity.15 This article is concerned with representation of the other and the interaction between the journalist’s social identity and the journalist’s perception and representation of the other. Marzolf proposed that historians draw from American studies and employ “content assessment” to understand journalism in cultural context. This method relies on “reading, sifting, weighing, comparing and analyzing the evidence in order to tell the story.”16 Marzolf detailed three prongs in this approach: assessment of content for the ways media convey values, attitudes, and social norms and embrace or exclude groups; examination of the backgrounds and social systems of the producers of media content; and the significance of journalism’s presentation of information, values, and opin- ions.17 The primary sources examined in the present study include ten feature articles that Browne wrote for Harper’s New Monthly from 1862 to 1869 about the Mexican Borderlands; his book Adventures in the Apache Country

15John M. Coward, The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press, 1820– 90 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 16Marion Marzolf, “American Studies—Ideas for Communication Historians?,” Journal- ism History 5, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 16. 17Ibid., 15. r 106 Fuhlhage

(1871); and the 624-page report he compiled about the West for the federal government, Resources of the Paciﬁc Slope (1868). Letters by and about Browne were also consulted.

Nineteenth-Century Anglos’ Construction of Mexican Identity Raymund Paredes was perhaps the first to systematically analyze nineteenth-century American writers’ descriptions of the Mexican character. Paredes noted that writing by travelers, trappers, government agents, soldiers, and journalists of the 1820s to 1840s characterized Mexicans in Texas and New Mexico as treacherous, cruel, cowardly, and indolent, and that these descriptions influenced American attitudes about Mexicans at the ex- act moment when the United States sought justification to invade Mexico.18 Anglos justified killing Mexicans by portraying them as “villainous and decadent.”19 Paredes examined writers’ messages as products, but not their journalistic processes or private beliefs. Nor did he tease out connections between social identity and portrayals of Mexicans, suggesting Paredes assumed a monolithic Anglo view of them. Travel writers functioned in tandem with fiction writers to create the Mexican image in popular consciousness since the early 1800s, when stories juxtaposed Indians, romanticized as “children of nature,” against vindictive conquistadors in the 1600s while applauding Mexico’s democratic rebel- lion against its European monarch.20 Yet after the US-Mexican War, writers shifted from the idea of the liberty-craving Mexican revolutionary toward images of bandits and cowards unwilling to fight fairly, work, or respect women.21 The leading magazine of the South, De Bow’s Review, promoted the merits of acquiring Mexico while condemning its Mexican population as too impure a race to absorb into the nation.22 Yet its editor praised Catholic padres for Christianizing the Indians.23

18Raymund A. Paredes, “The Mexican Image in American Travel Literature, 1831–1869,” New Mexico Historical Review 52, no. 1 (January 1977): 12. 19Ibid., 25. 20Robert Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 180–185. 21The bloodthirsty bandit character is exempliﬁed in the legend of Joaquin Murrieta, the Californio who admired Americans until Anglo squatters jumped his claim, raped his girlfriend, and beat him, as described in Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas. 22George Fitzhugh, “Acquisition of Mexico—Filibustering,” De Bow’s Review, Decem- ber 1858, 615. By the late 1850s, De Bow’s Review had become the South’s “semiofﬁcial spokesman,” according to Robert F. Durden, “J. D. B. De Bow: Convolutions of a Slavery Expansionist,” Journal of Southern History 17, no. 4 (November 1951): 442. 23J. D. B. De Bow, “Oregon and California,” De Bow’s Review, January 1846, 64–69. Other De Bow’s writers also defended the Catholics. See, for example, Amicus Featherman, “Catholicism,” De Bow’s Review, November 1860, 583–598; George Fitzhugh, “Acquisition of Mexico—Filibustering,” De Bow’s Review, December 1858, 613–626. r American Journalism 31:1 107

Degradation of Mexicans’ image corresponded with their decline in the Southwest. Mexicans and Californios came to be lumped together as “greasers” and foreigners regardless of the economic and political power they held before US rule.24 The colonization of the Southwest included material and discursive structures and processes. Just as Browne urged alliance with Californios to keep Mexican laborers in line, late nineteenth-century Anglo ﬁction writers promoted a fantasy heritage that included genteel Spanish Californian hidalgos to help in watching over low-born Mexican American peons whose hostility had eroded to docility.25 David Weber hinted at nationalism to explain differences in the An- glo European view of Californio laziness—rooted in Northern European belief that the Spanish were depraved, cruel, treacherous, proud, fanatical, cowardly, corrupt, decadent, authoritarian, and indolent—and Anglo Amer- ican views of Mexican indolence that sprang from American Protestantism, Anglo-Saxon racism, and Manifest Destiny.26 These beliefs provide the ide- ological backdrop for the changes brought by the US conquest of northern Mexico. The US-Mexican War of 1846–1848 culminated in Mexico’s ces- sion of territory that now comprises most of the American Southwest. US correspondents criticized Catholicism, which they saw as a superstitious and impure faith; denounced Mexicans for primitiveness; and lambasted them as indolent, ignorant, and treacherous.27 Californios who lacked the sense or resources to ally with armed, well-capitalized Anglo Americans lost their estates. Anglo squatters pushed Indian squatters off Spanish mission lands. Californio grant-holders’ titles were challenged in US courts, which required records Mexican custom did not require, and held proceedings in English, which many landowners did not speak.28

24Leonard Pitt, Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 53; Douglas Monroy, Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 200–210. 25Several authors reduced the people of the Southwest to ambiance for Anglo newcomers arriving in California from the Midwest and East, including Bret Harte, Joaqu´ın Miller, Charles Warren Stoddard, Charles F. Lummis, Stephen Crane, and Carl Sandberg, as well as the illustrator Frederic Remington. Cecil Robinson, With the Ears of Strangers: The Mexican in American Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1963), 145. 26David J. Weber, “Here Rests Juan Espinosa: Toward a Clearer Look at the Image of the ‘Indolent’ Californios,” Western Historical Quarterly 10, no. 1 (January 1979): 61–69. 27Tom Reilly, War with Mexico! America’s Reporters Cover the Battlefront (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 214–218. 28Pitt, Decline of the Californios; Robert F. Heizer and Alan F. Almquist, The Other Californians: Prejudice and Discrimination under Spain, Mexico, and the United States to 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); David J. Weber, Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973). r 108 Fuhlhage

Browne’s Life: Shuttling between Government, Commerce, and Journalism Browne alternated between journalism and government. Writing let Browne transform his experience as inspector for the Treasury Department and Office of Indian Affairs into wealth—first as stories for Harper’s, then as books and lectures. Growing expertise about prospecting led to lucrative work for Eastern capitalists. As Browne grew entangled with industry, his writing shifted from merely recognizing Mexican otherness to viciously denouncing mestizos. Browne’s writing privileged wealthy, fair-skinned Mexicans at the expense of their darker, poorer counterparts. Browne was born in 1821 in Ireland.29 After his father had served several months in prison for seditious libel and inciting revolt, his term was commuted to seven years’ banishment.30 Thus at 12, Browne found himself in Indiana.31 From there the family moved to Kentucky, where his father reported for the Louisville Journal and Louisville Advertiser, later becoming editor and proprietor of the Louisville Reporter.32 At 17, Browne roamed 600 miles on foot and 1,600 miles as a flatboat deckhand from Louisville to New Orleans to Texas and back.33 In 1839, he became a police reporter for the Louisville Advertiser.34 He briefly studied medicine, but his passion was writing.35 Browne also wrote for the Southern Literary Messenger and Gra- ham’s.36 The family moved to Washington in 1841, when his father became a reporter for the Congressional Globe, and Browne learned shorthand so he could help his father and earn enough to travel to Europe.37 With fifteen dollars to his name, Browne set off to see the world.38 He reached New York but exhausted his funds in two days after checking into the Astor House.39 Then he signed on as a whaling vessel crewman, going as far as Africa before he jumped ship in Zanzibar during a mutiny over mistreatment of the crew. He worked his passage home.40

29Browne, J. Ross Browne,xv. 30Francis J. Rock, “J. Ross Browne: A Biography” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1929), 12. 31Thomas Egerton Browne was found guilty of seditious libel in 1833 for publishing prose and cartoons that ridiculed the king. “Our Artist-Correspondent At-Large,” Harper’s Weekly, February 21, 1863, 125. 32Ibid. 33Browne, J. Ross Browne, xvi. 34Ibid. 35Ibid. 36Ibid. 37Ibid., xvii. 38“Our Artist-Correspondent At-Large,” Harper’s Weekly, 125. 39Ibid. 40Ibid. r American Journalism 31:1 109

Browne returned to Washington in November 1843.41 While reporting for the Congressional Globe, Browne wrote his ﬁrst work for Harper & Brothers, who published Etchings of a Whaling Cruise in 1846.42 Browne received just $200, but the book’s success commenced a twenty-year relationship with the Harpers, who published every manuscript he submitted after that as serial nonﬁction in the magazine and compiled the articles into books.43

Converting Symbolic Capital into Economic Capital Bookkeeping at the Ohio Statesman newspaper prepared Browne to accept a job as confidential secretary to US Treasury Secretary Robert Walker, who appointed Browne as a lieutenant in the Revenue Marine in December 1848 and sent him to San Francisco, where he was supposed to devise a plan to prevent seamen from deserting to join the Gold Rush.44 He learned in the National Intelligencer that his mission had been canceled, leaving him penniless but open to opportunities.45 California Constitutional Convention organizers whom Browne met on the voyage paid him $10,000 to report and publish the proceedings, netting a $4,000 profit and putting his name before thousands of influential readers in Congress, the executive branch, and the national party leadership.46 Though writing provided a living, Browne’s services to the mining industry proved the most lucrative. His credibility flowed from the expertise and reputation for fairness he developed as a confidential Treasury and Office of Indian Affairs agent.47 Browne developed mining industry relationships to the point that mining interests became his interests as companies com- missioned him to create articles, reports, and sketches and to sell mining property in Western lands that had been wrested from Mexicans. In 1864, he earned $3,000 above expenses making sketches of Nevada silver mines and

41David Michael Goodman, A Western Panorama 1849–1875: The Writings and Inﬂuence of J. Ross Browne on the Paciﬁc Coast, and in Texas, Nevada, Arizona and Baja California, as the First Mining Commissioner, and Minister to China (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1966), 25. 42Ibid., 27. 43Browne, J. Ross Browne, 52. 44US House. Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting Information in Answer to a Resolution of the House of the 31st of December, 1849, on the Subject of California and New Mexico. 31st Cong., 1 Sess., H. Exec. Doc. 17, 54–55. 45John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, August 27, 1849, J. Ross Browne, 128–129. 46A thousand copies were printed in English and 250 in Spanish in the initial printing, but Browne wrote to Richmond Inquirer editor Thomas Ritchie that the Senate requested 2,000 copies and the House deliberated the purchase of 2,000 more. Goodman, A Western Panorama, 35. 47Browne’s government service is summarized in Missing Pieces from the Mosaic of J. Ross Browne’s Career (Washington, DC: US Customs Service, 1988) and painstakingly detailed in Goodman’s A Western Panorama. r 110 Fuhlhage

selling them to their owners.48 He also exchanged mine sketches for referrals. Browne wrote an official with the Bodie Bluff Gold and Silver Mining Co.: May I ask the favor of your influence to procure me some more work in New York? I am prepared to report on mines in Nevada, in Idahoe [sic], Arizona, Japan or South America for a reasonable consideration. Will sketch insides and outsides—have no objection to going into the Country—any country.49 He confided to his wife, “The Eastern companies are keen to have my sketches and reports. I do nothing now, short of special jobs for particular friends, for less than $500.”50 He cleared $6,000 in early 1865.51 Browne made another $10,000 for helping an investor sell his mines in July 1865.52 He speculated on mines and other land. In 1871, he sold a mine for $400,000 and lots in San Diego for $2,500.53

Cultural Inﬂuences: Christianity, Democratic Politics, and Manifest Destiny Browne was born Catholic and laid to rest by a Presbyterian preacher who said Browne followed no creed or ritual and kept a faith that was “as unconventional as possible.”54 His father disdained the Church of England, which he lampooned in a pamphlet that protested the tithe Irish Catholics were required to pay the Protestant church in addition to their own.55 Or- ganized religion made little sense to Browne, who ridiculed the cadence of revival sermons in a private letter: “Last night-a I went to the Methodist Church-a and heard a very strange man preach-a, whose sermon I forget-a.”56 Browne’s writings suggest he was a panentheist who found God in the natural world, not in manmade ritual, and who believed God materially rewarded good people and punished the wicked.57 He declared privately, “I am a

48John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, September 27, 1864, J. Ross Browne, 312. 49John Ross Browne to R. B. Harris, March 13, 1865, J. Ross Browne, 312. 50John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, May 28, 1865, J. Ross Browne, 312. 51John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, June 3, 1865, J. Ross Browne, 313. 52John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, July 19, 1865, J. Ross Browne, 316. 53John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, June 21, 1871, J. Ross Browne, 381; John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, June 4, 1871, J. Ross Browne, 374. 54L. Hamilton, “J. Ross Browne: Beautiful Tribute to the Memory of a Noteworthy Man,” Oakland Tribune, November 20, 1875, 3. 55James D. Birchﬁeld, “Banned in Dublin: The Parson’s Horn-Book,” Journal of Library History 10, no. 3 (July 1975): 231–240. 56John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, October 13, 1844, J. Ross Browne, 46. 57Browne railed against pantheism, which he viewed as “thinly disguised” atheism, in a section of his report as US mining commissioner in which he thanked the Creator for bestowing the riches of California upon the American people. US Treasury Department, Letter from the r American Journalism 31:1 111 believer in but one religion, and that is the religion that God preaches through nature. I can never be deceived by the voice that speaks from every moun- tain, valley, running stream—every tree and shrub and ﬂower.”58 He rebuked Mexican Catholicism more mildly than his contemporaries, noting “their gilded altars and massive images of silver are the essence—the very foun- dation of their religion . . . . The people worship effect while they fancy they are worshipping God.”59 And he sympathized with Catholics. He once do- nated the proceeds from a March 15, 1859, lecture to San Francisco’s Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum.60 He would have disdained that institution had he been a Know-Nothing or if he had been caught up in anti-Catholicism.61 Browne’s early career in the South, whose leading magazine, De Bow’s Re- view, defended Spanish Catholics because of their whiteness and role in Christianizing the Indians, might explain why he was more moderate about Catholics than other writers with personal experience in the Borderlands. Browne was a Democrat. He ran for mayor of Oakland on that ticket and rejected abolitionism.62 Browne embraced Manifest Destiny, writing in his 1867 mining report, “If the Lord had not been on our side, we should not now possess this beautiful and glorious California.”63 His publishers, the Harpers, shared his belief in Anglo American superiority.64

Secretary of the Treasury Transmitting Report upon the Mineral Resources of the States and Territories West of the Rocky Mountains (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1867), 319. Browne embraced the concepts of “God is in all” and “God directs all,” suggesting his beliefs were closest to panentheism, which is characterized by a belief that God is an eternal, animating force in the universe that is present in all things; it sees God as greater than but present in all the universe, making it distinct from pantheism, which sees God and the universe as the same thing. Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 82. 58John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, April 15, 1849, J. Ross Browne, 106. 59Ibid. 60Goodman, Western Panorama, 160; “Lecture for the Catholic Orphan Asylum,” San Francisco Bulletin, March 14, 1859, 3. 61For details on the genesis of American nativism, see Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938). 62Oakland (CA) Weekly Journal Miner, April 2, 1870, 3; John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, January 12, 1846, J. Ross Browne, 50. 63J. Ross Browne, Resources of States and Territories West of the Rockies (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1867), 319. 64The Harpers believed immigrants lacked the ambition to work their way out of poverty and lacked the initiative to leave the city and go to the country, where they could lead a purer life. Exman, House of Harper, 30. Harper’s Monthly favored writers who warned the flow of Catholic immigrants must be stopped. Lorman A. Ratner, Paula T. Kaufman, and Dwight L. Teeter Jr., Paradoxes of Prosperity: Wealth-Seeking versus Christian Values in Pre-Civil War America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 52–53. James Harper was elected mayor of New York on a Nationalist Republican ticket that promised to restore native-born Protestant-American control of city government. Exman, House of Harper, 30. r 112 Fuhlhage

Public Writing: Spanish Elites, Mexican Laborers, and Mixed-Breed Temptresses Browne’s articles about California, Mexico, and the Southwest in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine reflected earlier Anglos’ observations about its residents who pre-dated the US conquest. His judgment that Cali- fornia Mexicans were indolent mirrored those in Two Years before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s 1840 memoir of life on a merchant vessel that plied the California coast, which Browne had read.65 That George Wilkins Kendall, the New Orleans Picayune editor who covered the US-Mexico War, believed the same points to the prevalence of the preconception of Mexican indolence.66 Less public information also informed Browne, whose roles as federal agent, stenographer for the California Convention, and friend of federal bureaucrats gave him access to government documents.67 Browne gained wealth by passing intelligence to mining interests, thus leveraging the information he gleaned from his role as US mining commissioner while he described Mexican laborers and Spanish elites (see Figure 2) for Harper’s Monthly. His interest in identifying a cheap, reliable labor source colored his relations with the industry and his work for Harper’s. Yet his career differed from editors who benefited from party patronage: as an independent correspondent, he was less dependent on party patronage than editors of party papers. This perhaps made him more sus- ceptible to business interests’ influence because he wanted their support, identified with them, and aspired to their status. Boosterism was common among Western editors who knew the fates of their publications were tied

65Browne ran across the book while on his whaling voyage. John Ross Browne to Richard Henry Dana Jr., November 9, 1846, J. Ross Browne, 52. The book to which Browne referred was Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years before the Mast (New York: Harper Bros., 1840). Before the Mast was so popular it has never been out of print. An estimated 175,000 copies were sold from 1840 to 1849, making it one of the top sellers of the decade. Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowler, 1947), 303. 66George Wilkins Kendall, in a passage that exempliﬁes his belief in Mexican indolence, wrote during the American occupation of Matamoros that “The Mexicans would never had made anything out of the country . . . more than a living.” Tom Reilly, War with Mexico!: America’s Reporters Cover the Battlefront, ed. Manley Witten (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 39; George Wilkins Kendall, Dispatches from the Mexican War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 54. 67J. Ross Browne, “A Tour through Arizona. First Paper,” Harper’s New Monthly Mag- azine, October 1864, 556. Among the government documents Browne referred to Paciﬁc Railroad Surveys, which informed his writing about Arizona and New Mexico, and John Russell Bartlett’s description of the US–Mexico Boundary Survey Expedition. The boundary survey was widely available in the United States. John Russell Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua: Connected with the United States and Mexican Boundary Commission, during the Years 1850, ’51, ’52, and ’53 (New York: D. Appleton, 1854). r American Journalism 31:1 113

Figure 2: Browne described “The Prefect of Magdalena” as “a fat gentleman of imposing dignity, who touched his hat with ofﬁcial courtesy, and made us a diplomatic speech on the propriety of observing the obligations of international law.” The prefect is representative of the “brave old Spaniard” type. The engraving ran with J. Ross Browne, “Tour through Arizona,” January 1865, 140 (color ﬁgure available online). to those of their communities.68 But rather than use a newspaper to boost a single community, Browne leveraged the voice of Harper’s New Monthly to introduce his ideas to a national audience through serialized narratives and their subsequent publication by Harper & Brothers to gain the prestige he felt necessary to gain a lucrative appointment as US ambassador and to promote Western mining and economic development.69 Browne mined articles from his experience during the Gold Rush many years after he arrived in California in 1849. A two-part series in 1865 told

68Barbara Cloud, The Business of Newspapers on the Western Frontier (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1992), 153–154. 69The hybrid nature of Browne’s career was not unheard of among journalists of his time, whether in the East or the West. Many journalists aided political parties, held ofﬁce, and served as conﬁdantes to party leaders in nineteenth-century America. See Hazel Dicken Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 31; Cloud, Business of Newspapers, 225; David Dary, Blood and Black Ink: Journalism in the Old West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). r 114 Fuhlhage

of his journey from San Francisco to San Luis Obispo. He passed through the Salinas River Valley, covering about 250 miles of open terrain, Spanish mission grants, farms, and ranches between the hills rimming the Pacific to his right and the Coast Range to his left. Conflict among Californios, Mexicans, Indians, and Anglo newcomers unfolded as Americans poured into the land to claim what was not theirs. Brown declared in an article about the state’s New Almaden mine: No event in the history of American enterprise has promoted in a greater degree the extension of civilization than the discovery of the gold placers of California in 1848. In regular progression one beneficial result has followed another, till nearly the whole of that vast region divided in part by the Rocky Mountains and stretching west to the Pacific Ocean, bordered on the north by the British Possessions and on the south by Mexico, has been redeemed from the sway of the nomadic tribes and rendered available to the uses of civilized man.70 By that logic, neither Spaniards nor Mexicans did enough to relieve the earth of its valuable commodities; therefore, they must make way for US progress or take part as its disciples. This image mirrored Dana’s image of the indolent Mexican in Two Years before the Mast. Browne’s work vacillated between embracing Latinos as needed laborers and rejecting them as an obstacle. The nature of labor in the West made Californios necessary to US capitalist designs. Criticism of the Catholic Church is comparatively mild in Browne’s work. Unlike his fellow Anglo correspondents, Browne saw good in the works of the church. He praised the “suffering, heroism, and ecclesiastical zeal” of the missionaries, “whose labors have made it a classic land.”71 He admired their commitment to spreading European civilization, writing, “Not only were they governed by an intense religious enthusiasm—sometimes misguided, but always sincere—and an exalted spirit of self-sacrifice, but by a patriotic ambition to wrest from barbarism new empires for the Spanish Crown.”72 This view, similar to those of Southern writers in De Bow’s Review, contrasted with Kendall’s view of Mexican Catholic priests, who he said grew rich off their “benighted and ignorant followers” and were interested only in preserving their power.73 Rather, Browne romanticized the conquistadors who marched

70J. Ross Browne, “Down in the Cinnabar Mines,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, October 1865, 545. 71J. Ross Browne, “Explorations in Lower California, First Paper,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, October 1868, 579. 72Browne, “Explorations in Lower California, Second Paper,” November 1868, 746. 73Most other Anglo American writers of his time agreed with Kendall, who interpreted Mexican belief in saintly intercession as evidence of superstition and impure faith that had r American Journalism 31:1 115 beneath the banner of Spain and the cross of Rome, imagining “the brave old Spaniards and their heroic explorations across the Colorado.”74 The notion that Catholics imposed civilization on an American wilderness may have been enough to redeem them in Browne’s eyes. Their industriousness, assertion of European superiority over Indians, and Christian faith gave them much in common with US proponents of Manifest Destiny.

Spanish Progress and Mexican Indolence Throughout his articles, Browne associated progress with Anglos while portraying Mexicans as obstacles to progress. The idea of the indolent Mex- ican marched with Browne across the desert Southwest. Belief in European superiority provided convenient explanations for peons’ behavior. When they did not work, they were indolent. When they would work for money, they did so because of Americans’ ability to impose order on the region’s natural resources. To Dana, Mexicans were spendthrifts undeserving of respect because they would not bargain.75 But to Browne, when Mexican miners stopped working, they were indolent. Spaniards imposed European progress on the Baja California landscape while Mexicans followed their orders.76 To Browne, Mexicans were barely above the level of animals and would allow everything to decay if left to themselves. Describing the mission of San Miguel, on the central California coast, Browne wrote: Not a living being was in sight. The carcass of a dead ox lay in front of the door, upon which a voracious brood of buzzards were feeding; and a coyote sat howling on an eminence a little beyond. I walked into a dark, dirty room, and called out, in what little Spanish I knew, for the man of the house. “Quien es?” demanded a gruff voice. I looked in a corner, and saw a ﬁlthy-looking object wrapped in a poncho, sitting lazily on a bed.77 Discovery of gold in California, silver in Nevada, and copper in Ari- zona made mining companies hungry for accurate information to guide their decisions. They found a reliable source in Browne. His Harper’s Monthly been tainted by indigenous inﬂuence. George Wilkins Kendall, Dispatches from the Mexican War, ed. Lawrence Delbert Cress (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 182, 238, 252. 74Browne, “Tour through Arizona. First Paper,” 568. This view of Catholic priests as bringers of civilization matched the attitude of Browne’s contemporary George Fitzhugh, who wrote that the Spaniards would have maintained control of Mexico if they had not intermarried with indigenous Mexicans. George Fitzhugh, “Acquisition of Mexico—Filibustering,” De Bow’s Review, December 1858, 613–626. 75Dana, Two Years before the Mast, 172. 76J. Ross Browne, “Dangerous Journey. In Two Parts—Part 1,” May 1862, 741. 77Browne, “Dangerous Journey, Part 2,” 11. r 116 Fuhlhage

articles established him as a trusted expert on Western mining.78 Businesses and the federal government consulted him. Congress tapped him in 1866 to investigate the Western Slope’s mining potential as it considered establishing a national mining bureau.79 He drew on his observations of gold panning, hard-rock mining, and the control of labor, consulting scientists in California and extracting information from dozens of government reports to write his 624-page Resources of the Pacific Slope, submitted in November 1866. By the end of February 1867, the Government Printing Office had published 31,000 copies.80 As his findings filtered into the minds of policymakers during the fall of 1866, the Lower California Colonization Land Company hired him to lead an expedition to ascertain the profit potential of establishing a Baja California colony.81 The tour resulted in two 1868 articles for Harper’s New Monthly that fixed in his mind and writing the image of American progress chasing away decay that resulted from Mexicans’ lack of enterprise. Browne claimed American leadership could sow seed capital in Mexico and put its people to work for US interests, concluding Mexicans would work well if carefully supervised. In the 1868 articles, Browne concluded Mexicans had more strengths and fewer deficiencies than miners of other nationalities did. Americans were “bold and enterprising, wasteful and prodigal, restless and somewhat disposed to quarrel; but fortunately there are not many of them.”82 Cornish miners were “illiterate, though naturally intelligent; frugal . . . and reliable when their avarice is not too strongly tempted. Physically they are strong and heavy—good for endurance.”83 Italians, Chileans, French, and Irish “develop respectively their characteristic traits of passion and impulse, recklessness and lack of common sense.”84 Germans worked hard but lacked “boldness and enterprise,” by which Browne likely meant they were unwilling to risk their lives to go deeper underground. But Mexicans were model workers: The Sonoranians and native Californians are generally expert miners. As prospectors they are unsurpassed. They possess great natural sagacity; know every indication by instinct; are willing to run any amount of risk, and seem imbued by an adventurous spirit which fits them peculiarly for the business of mining. Irregularity is their besetting fault. They can do any kind of work which affords vari- ety and requires little method. Under a rigid supervision they are

78Goodman, A Western Panorama, 222. 79Ibid. 80Ibid., 224. 81Ibid., 225. 82Browne, “Down in the Cinnabar Mines,” 553. 83Ibid., 553. 84Ibid. r American Journalism 31:1 117

accounted among the most useful men in the employ of the Com- pany.85 Browne’s characterization of Mexicans as risk-takers contrasts with Kendall’s description of them as “an enemy whose cowardice has no parallel.”86 The roles Browne assigned Mexican men and women reinforced an emerging image of male Mexicans subordinated to employers and female Mexicans as objects of sexual desire. Payday for contract laborers in the mines near San Jose, who made two dollars a day, gave Browne the opportunity to illustrate this: The Spaniards are flush, and like sailors, spend their money on the fair sex with a prodigal hand. Senoritas˜ from San Jose know where their charms can be appreciated, and stage-loads of them arrive in season to partake of the festivities. The late Superintendent undertook to place an embargo upon this branch of commerce, but did not succeed. Enterprising females would come in spite of rules and regulations.87 Californio and Mexican miners under US direction north of the border were productive, Browne wrote, while their counterparts in Baja were “lazy and harmless, to suit the climate, devoting themselves chiefly to sleeping and gambling.”88 In Baja, Browne observed, the Mexicans “care for nothing but the simple means of subsistence,” and he argued, “Avarice is a sign of civilization. These primitive Californians do many things from hatred and malice, but seldom do any thing for money.”89 Thus, greed was a virtue because it brought about capitalist progress—an observation no doubt logical and soothing to the investors who hired him. Avarice, after all, was the key to prying land from the natives. “The only practical way of acquiring real estate in Lower California is to settle among the people and lend them money at usurious interest, secured by mortgage,” Browne recommended. “They are never able to pay it back; and their property falls a sacrifice to their indolence or want of forethought.”90 Driving Mexicans into debt would secure a long-term labor force for US industrial interests, but Browne warned Mexicans south of the border would not work hard enough. Because of this, companies would have to import foreigners. He emphasized Americans should possess and control the land, not live there. Only a frugal people, such as the Chinese, would do

85Ibid. 86George Wilkins Kendall, Dispatches from the Mexican War, ed. Lawrence Delbert Cress (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 267. 87Browne, “Down in the Cinnabar Mines,” 553. 88Browne, “Explorations in Lower California, First Paper,” 582. 89Ibid., 582. 90Ibid., 583. r 118 Fuhlhage

since the land would not provide enough to feed an American workforce plus crops for export.91 Before Browne worked for the Lower California Colonization Company, he prepared a report to Congress that revealed his understanding of company intentions and his beliefs concerning Americans’ potential impact on the land, though he would not predict “whether these companies shall prove beneﬁts and blessings to humanity, or whether they shall prove huge monopolies and establish legal systems of slavery and peonage.”92 The company, which hired Browne after he wrote the report, owned most of Baja: 46,800 square miles, purchased for $260,000 in gold.93 Resistance to US settlement likely forced the company to rely on cheap labor from China and Africa.94 Browne’s report assigned Anglo-Saxons, Irish, and Mexicans a higher position than Asians and blacks:

No companies and no combination of companies can colonize and control the free will of the Anglo-Saxon, the Celtic, and the Latin races. If men of such blood and lineage come to this country they will come of their own free will—their own complete masters. As a consequence, then, since the charter or purchase right of the company exacts that at least two hundred families shall be colonized within a certain period, it is most likely that such families must belong to the African or China races.95

Through resistance to American attempts at imposing workplace disci- pline and cultural values, Mexicans earned a place alongside Anglo-Saxons and the Irish as free, in Browne’s reckoning. But rather than respect them, Browne looped them in with every source of danger in the desert in this October 1864 introduction to a Harper’s series:

I have now to offer a new programme of exploration and adventure, very different indeed from our last, but possessing peculiar charms in the absence of every species of accommodation for travelers, and extraordinary advantages in the way of burning deserts, dried rivers, rattlesnakes, scorpions, Greasers, and Apaches; besides unlimited fascinations in the line of robbery, starvation, and the chances of sudden death by accident.96

91Ibid. 92John Ross Browne and Alexander Smith Taylor, Resources of the Paciﬁc Slope: A Statistical and Descriptive Summary of the Settlement and Exploration of Lower California (New York: D. Appleton, 1869), 175. 93Ibid., 175. 94Ibid. 95Ibid. 96Browne, “A Tour through Arizona. First Paper,” 553. r American Journalism 31:1 119

To Browne, indolence and inertia deﬁned the natural state of the Mexi- can, who could not be brought to care about progress, induced to labor even with the offer of gold, or roused from his torpor for anything other than things that would satisfy his appetites with the least effort. Browne perceived laziness everywhere he encountered Californios. In Baja, he wrote, “Two or three half-breeds, who contrive to live in some mysterious way, were lazily reclining in under the bushes, as if time and business were matters of no concern to them.”97 The Sonorans he ran across “were smoking cigarritos by the ﬁre, others lying all about under the trees playing cards, on their ragged saddle-blankets, with little piles of silver before them; and those that were not thus occupied were capering around on wild horses, breaking them apparently.”98 Thus, Mexicans worked, at times. “The native or Mex- ican population, although good miners, cannot be relied upon for labor,” Browne wrote in 1868, when his view of Mexicans hardened.99 As Browne spent more time with Mexicans, another explanation for indolence emerged: miscegenation, which he associated with laziness and moral degeneracy.

Miscegenation: Browne’s Wellspring of Character Flaws Mixed-race Mexicans suffered particularly harsh portrayals by Browne. Calling them mongrels and half-breeds, Browne associated treachery and villainy with hybridity. Lack of vigor and cowardice were conditions of their watered-down blood, Browne implied. He found miscegenation everywhere in Arizona. He speculated about its causes: Owing to the climate, perhaps, and idleness, which is the father of all mischief and many mixed breeds of babies, these mongrel little humans abound to an amazing extent in the small towns of Sonora. Nearly all of them have Indian blood in them, and many denote a growing proclivity toward the American race.100 Arguing intermarriage led to lack of vigor, laziness, and poverty, Browne wrote, “When these mixed races are compelled to work they sicken and die,” noting they barely farmed enough to sustain themselves.101 The people, not the quality of the soil, were to blame, Browne charged. Parts of Arizona had rich earth that could produce wheat, corn, and citrus if the people would work the land. Instead, he wrote, “All day long they sit by the doors of their

97Browne, “Explorations in Lower California, Third Paper,” Harper’s New Monthly Mag- azine, December 1868, 12. 98Ibid., 13. 99Browne, “Explorations in Lower California, Second Paper,” 740. 100J. Ross Browne, “A Tour through Arizona. Fourth Paper,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, January 1865, 141. 101Ibid., 140. r 120 Fuhlhage

ﬁlthy little adobe huts, smoking cigarritos and playing cards. I fancy they like it better than working. At least they live by idleness. Industry would kill them.”102 Miscegenation had done worse things over several generations south of the border. He wrote: Sonora can beat the world in the production of villainous races. Mis- cegenation has prevailed in this country for three centuries. Every generation the population grows worse; and the Sonoranians now may be ranked with their natural compadres—Indians, burros, and coyotes.103 The most dangerous intermarriage, Browne contended, involved “the infu- sion of rascality in it from American sources.”104

Sexuality: The Senorita˜ and the Murderess Miscegenation was also implicated in Browne’s depiction of Mexican women. Browne approved of those who behaved as Anglos but condemned those who looked too Indian or African as malevolent and carnal. Browne’s description of a California fandango provides a window into his perception of Mexican women. For Spaniards and Mexicans in mid-nineteenth-century California, social life revolved around fandangos and fiestas. Browne por- trayed work as a masculine realm, but dances brought the genders into one sphere in which he observed and judged the participants. In Browne’s eyes, the frontier degraded all who came to it. Browne did not hide his disgust with the Anglo American men he encountered. Most were Texans and “compared not unfavorably with the Sonoranians in point of savage costume and appearance.”105 The agave, yucca, beargrass, and cactus of the desert plains of Chihuahua through which they crossed had shredded the broadcloth frock-coats of those who had coats.106 Others wore red flannel shirts with pantaloons tucked into their boots.107 Revolvers and Bowie knives swung from their belts, giving them “a reckless, devil-may- care” appearance.108 Browne added, “With their uncouth costumes, bearded faces, lean and brawny forms, fierce savage eyes, and swaggering manners— they were a fit assemblage for a frolic or a fight.”109

102Ibid. 103Ibid., 141. 104Ibid. 105J. Ross Browne, “Dangerous Journey. In Two Parts—Part II,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1862, 16. 106Ibid. 107Ibid. 108Ibid. 109Ibid. r American Journalism 31:1 121

The women came in two categories: beautiful Spanish senoritas˜ and half-breed criminals, all fine dancers with a taste for flashy jewelry and dresses “in which flowers, lace, and glittering tinsel combined to set off their dusky charms.”110 Browne observed, “those who had no great pretensions to beauty in other respects were at least gifted with fine eyes and teeth, rich brunette complexions, and forms of wonderful pliancy and grace.”111 These senoritas˜ faded into the background compared with “the belle of the occasion,” a “dark-eyed, fierce looking woman, of about six-and-twenty, a half-breed from Santa Barbara” (see Figure 3).112 Browne described her as part temptress, part witch, part animal, implying that her mixed blood had degraded her appearance and behavior. He wrote, “Every glance of her fierce, flashing eyes was instinct with untamable passion. She was a mustang in human shape—one that I thought would kick or bite upon very slight provocation.”113 Suitors flocked to her. An Anglo informed Browne she had stabbed to death a rival who tried to steal a man from her, and she had killed her child in a fit of jealousy over “the supposed infidelity of its father—whose identity, however, can not be fixed with any certainty.”114 In a scene evoking The Odyssey, Browne cast himself as an Odysseus-like character to her Circe: I thought I could detect something of the secret of her magical powers in her voice, which was the softest and most musical I had ever heard. There was a wild, sweet, almost unearthly cadence in it that vibrated upon the ear like the strains of an Aeolian. . . . There was a power of alternate ferocity and tenderness in her deep, passionate eyes that struck to the inner core wherever she fixed her gaze. I could not determine for the life of me which she resembled most—the untamed mustang, the royal game-bird, or the rattlesnake. ...Had it not been for a horror of her repulsive crimes, it is hard to say how far her fascinating powers might have affected me.115 He called her features “far from comely, being sharp and uneven,” noting her skin was “scarred with fire or small-pox,” and her figure was “too lithe, wiry, and acrobatic to convey any idea of voluptuous attraction.”116

Border Warfare as a Factor in Browne’s Representation of Mexicans Sonora’s Mexicans, defenseless against Apache marauders who had crossed the border under US protection in the early 1860s, received Browne’s

110Ibid. 111Ibid. 112Ibid. 113Ibid., 17. 114Ibid. 115Ibid., 16. 116Ibid. r 122 Fuhlhage

Figure 3: “Belle of Fandango” depicts the “half-breed temptress” type, who “seemed to have some supernatural capacity for arousing the ﬁercest passions of love, jealousy, and hatred.” In J. Ross Browne, “A Dangerous Journey,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1862, 17 (color ﬁgure available online).

strongest condemnation.117 Local “calico” treaties with US entrepreneurs allowed Apaches to attack with impunity. Under these pacts, Apaches promised to leave US settlers alone in exchange for gifts of salt, beef, ﬂour, and the right to prey on Sonorans.118 Sonora was devastated. “Arizona possessed at least

117Browne, “Tour through Arizona. First Paper,” 558. 118Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the US-Mexico Border- lands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 41. r American Journalism 31:1 123 the pretense of military protection,” Browne wrote. “It soon became infested with the refuse population of Sonora—the most faithless and abandoned race, perhaps, on the face of the earth.”119 Browne left the calico treaties out of his articles while condemning Sonorans for attacking mining companies: The Sonoranians, greedy for plunder, rushed in from the borders by hundreds, and commenced ransacking the mines, stealing the ma- chinery, and murdering the few employees that remained. At Tubac, the head-quarters of the Arizona Mining Company, the Apaches be- sieged the town on one side, while the Sonoranians lurked in the bushes on the other. Twenty men held it for three days, and finally escaped under cover of night. There was nothing left.120 In light of the calico treaties, Mexicans’ attacks on American mining companies were not acts of plunder, but acts of revenge and resistance. Even if they were not aware of them, they knew the US government did nothing to restrain the Apaches because it lacked an Indian policy in Arizona Territory. Mexicans defended their rights when US volunteers crossed into Mexico and took their property, but Browne seemed appalled that they even tried. Browne’s hostility toward Mexicans escalated just after he wrote about Sonoran attacks on mining interests. This made sense, given his stake in the industry’s well-being. While he celebrated the onset of US progress in Arizona Territory, he delighted in the Mexicans’ suffering. This included pushing Mexicans out of their homes, an act that allowed the quartering of US troops. He wrote in the December 1864 Harper’s: Since the coming of the California Volunteers, two years ago, the state of things in this delightful metropolis has materially changed. The citizens who are permitted to live here at all still live very much in the Greaser style—the tenantable houses having been taken away from them for the use of the officers and soldiers who are protecting their property from the Apaches.121 Mexicans were oppressed on one side by Americans and by Apaches on the other. Rendered homeless by soldiers who occupied their houses, the Mexicans in Tucson also were deprived of livestock by marauders.122 The connections between US culture, Browne’s alliances and trajectory, and his representation of Mexicans fit logically. His mining, real estate, journalistic enterprises, and preoccupation with money show commercial- ism lay at the core of his social identity rather than religious, military, or political concerns. It was certainly more important to him than any notion of

119Browne, “Tour through Arizona. First Paper,” 559. 120Ibid., 561. 121Browne, “Tour through Arizona. Third Paper,” 24. 122Ibid., 32. r 124 Fuhlhage

journalistic objectivity, an ideal only emergent in his times.123 Distinctions between deadly “half-breed” harlots and comely Spanish ladies reﬂected a Southern concern for racial purity while allowing for strategic marriages between ambitious Anglo men and the daughters of Californio elites. Browne’s distinction between hardworking, risk-taking Mexican miners who were kept on task by white American overseers, on the one hand, and slothful, indolent, unreliable “greasers,” on the other, reﬂected the concerns of a man who relied on the mining industry for prosperity. These themes underscored capitalists’ desire to acquire land and a subordinate race suited to work that land.

Browne’s Contribution to the Construction of “Off-Whiteness” Browne’s public and private writings demonstrate that he believed the United States must dominate the Borderlands. Too, he believed they must dominate the non-Anglo-Saxon races that occupied those places. The un- derpinnings of this belief sprang from his Southern identity, Protestant religion, and belief in the free-enterprise system. His Catholic roots steered him away from the anti-Catholic path common among nativist members of the Know-Nothing movement. But entrepreneurialism and dependence on mining interests for lucrative contract work sketching mining operations gave him a clear social identiﬁcation with capitalists who required a rationale for divesting Mexicans of their land and resources. By 1870, US acquisition of Mexican territory was long complete, and businessmen had begun extending US power into Latin America through economic means. Abolition meant planters no longer had expansion as a rationale for acquiring Mexico. Plus, Mexican politics were too chaotic and the mixed-race population too unruly to make acquisition desirable. The next stage of the US imperial mission was to consolidate its gains and bring Latin America under closer control.124 This study illustrates a phenomenon described by Ian F. Haney Lopez,´ who argued:

Races are not biologically differentiated groupings but rather social constructions. Race exists alongside a multitude of social identities that shape and are themselves shaped by the way in which race is given meaning. We live race through class, religion, nationality, gender, sexual identity, and so on. Race is highly contingent, speciﬁc to times, places, and situations. Whiteness, or the state of being

123Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978). 124Fred Rosen, Empire and Dissent: The United States and Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). r American Journalism 31:1 125

White, thus turns on where one is, Watts or Westchester, Stanford University or San Jose State.125 Haney Lopez´ and other critical race scholars argue that “race is a social construction fabricated in part by law.”126 He showed court rulings concerning racial identity relied heavily on “common knowledge” understandings of the meaning of whiteness. An 1879 ruling stated, “The words ‘white person’ . . . in this country, at least, have undoubtedly acquired a well settled meaning in common popular speech, and they are constantly used in the sense so acquired in the literature of the country, as well as in common par- lance.”127 Common knowledge’s origin in literature points to representations in the popular press as a spring from which flowed key ingredients in the social construction of race. When Browne distinguished the dark-skinned Mexican temptress from her benign off-white counterpart, the Spanish lady, he spelled out attributes that would congeal into the cinematic stereotypes Gary D. Keller categorized as the naughty and alluring “Cantina Girl” and the intellectually and deviously sexual “Vamp,” whom Keller distinguished from the “faithful, self-sacrificing senorita.”˜ 128 Similarly, Charles Ramirez Berg described three male–female pairs that exemplify the stereotypes that emerged from the attributes of Latino otherness and congealed into coherent character types during the twentieth century: Half-breed Harlot and Bandit; Male Buffoon and Female Clown; and Latin Lover and Dark Lady.129 Such characters lack wealth and power of their own, instead relying on racially colored traits of sexuality, cleverness, and submissiveness to persuade powerful Anglos to give them what they desire or need. The asymmetrical power relations between them and Anglos defined Latinas as inferior, just as Browne characterized them. Browne gathered and interpreted information that fed the streams of prejudice and contributed to the social construction of Californios and Mexicans as not quite white. As Laura Gomez has argued, Mexican American racial

125Ian F. Haney Lopez,´ White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), xiii. 126Ibid., 155. See also Richard Delgado, ed., Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), and Ian F. Haney Lopez,´ Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003). 127Ibid., 5. 128Debra Merskin, Media, Minorities, and Meaning: A Critical Introduction (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 160–161. 129Charles Ram´ırez Berg, Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). For a survey of depictions of Mexican-Americans in novels and cinema, see Arthur G. Pettit, Images of the Mexican-American in Fiction and Film (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980); Gary D. Keller, “The First Decades: Film Types,” Bilingual Review 18, no. 2/3 (May–December 1993): 70–111; and Charles Ram´ırez Berg, “Colonialism and Movies in Southern California, 1910–1934,” Aztlan´ 28, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 75–96. r 126 Fuhlhage

identity was legally and socially constructed through the creation of categories. Mexican Americans were legally constructed as white but socially constructed as “off-white,” a phenomenon also observed by Tomas´ Alma- guer.130 The construction of racial identity, literary scholar Kirsten Silva Gruesz contends, “is produced in no small part by the web of political ma- neuvers designed to control, or to acquire outright, the territories Spain had once claimed in the hemisphere.”131 This process of the construction of race drove the status of Californians of Mexican and Spanish descent from one of uncertainty to one of inferiority. To borrow communication theorist Daniel Hallin’s terminology, Mexican social status had once occupied the sphere of legitimate controversy during the early nineteenth century; as interpreta- tions of Californio and Mexican identity and belonging became more rigid in the print culture of the 1850s–1860s, their inferiority entered the sphere of consensus among Anglo American elites.132 Control must be maintained after it has been acquired. Anglo Americans did so, to return to Gomez’s idea, by creating categories. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo extended the rights of American citizenship to Mexicans in California and the Southwest. Thus, Mexicans were legally constructed as white, but Anglo Americans socially constructed them as off-white. Browne, inﬂuenced by his social identity, contributed to this construction of off- whiteness. Browne wrote his mining survey to provide objectively accurate information to federal decision-makers. It was descriptive but evenhanded, contrasting sharply with his sarcastic, condescending articles for Harper’s Monthly. The former described government and capitalist need for labor in the West. The latter discursively shaped the region’s formerly Mexican citizens into two subcategories: elites whose antecedents were the Spanish conquerors whom Browne praised and would help the new Anglo American leaders, and peons who would satisfy the need for laborers.

130Laura Gomez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 4. Almaguer argued that though Californios had European origins similar to those of the Irish, interlopers assigned the Spanish-descended elites of California to an intermediate position above blacks and Indians but below Anglos. Tomas´ Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 45. 131Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), xi. 132Daniel Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Copyright of American Journalism is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.