Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 Photograph by Fred Welch RAy ALLEN BILLINGTON A Founder and First President of Western History Association The Frontier and I Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 RAy ALLEN BILLINGTON hat Leonard J. Arrington, the persuasive editor of The Western Historical Quarterly, should invite me to prepare an unabashedly Tpersonal account of my love affair with Western history is both embarrassing and humiliating. Embarrassing because I had been guilty of suggesting that he publish such a seriesof articles by frontier historians, drawing my inspiration from a similar series currently appearing in one of the sociological journals, and little suspecting that I would be his first victim. Humiliating because I had proposed the reminiscences of the more elderly statesmen of the profession, those whose writing careers might reasonably be expected to be nearing an end. To realize that I am classed with those who have one foot in the academic grave, with those whose memories must be probed before too late, comes as a shock. Old age, after all, is always ten years in the future; it was when I was thirty or forty or fifty, and it is now that I am sixty-six. But, painful as may be the task, I am prepared to answer the questions the editor has posed, ques­ tions that provide such guideposts as exist for this stroll backward along memory lane. I do so, however, fully aware that reminiscences rarely mirror the past accurately and often violate the goddess of objectivity worshipped by all historians. John Crow of the University of London tells of a visit to the site of the Battle of Waterloo made by a descendant of the Duke of Wellington to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of that battle. There he was introduced to the one surviving French soldier. "Do you," the soldier was asked, "remember Napoleon?" "Oh yes," answered the old man. "He was very tall and wore a long white beard." Ray Billington is now senior research associate at the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California. His Westward Expansion has been read with delight by a whole generation of students of the American West. This is the first of a series of autobiographical essays by distinguished Western historians. 6 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY January The papers of Frederick Jackson Turner, father of all frontier his­ torical studies, provide countless examples of the fallibility of the human memory. Four times in his later years he was asked to reconstruct his early career, and particularly to explain the steps that led to his enuncia­ Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 tion of the frontier thesis in 1893. Four times he did so, sometimes in letters thirty pages long, and each time he was hopelessly wrong. Thus he described to Carl Becker in 1925 the origins of his doctoral dissertation on the Wisconsin fur trade: [Professor William Francis] Allen assigned me, in one of his classes, a thesis on the subject "Common Lands in Wisconsin." ... I soon saw that it wasn't a subject that would get me far, and while I was looking over the material, Dr. Draper happened in the library (then in the State capitol) and looking over my shoulder said that I might be interested in some old French fur trader's letters from those villages. Of course I was glad to see them, and he let me loose on a box of papers, waterstained, tied in deer thongs, written in execrable French which, however, did me no harm for I was guiltless of any knowledge whatever of French. So I learned Kanuck French, and fur trade history from these manuscripts.... Thus, while a Junior, I did the thesis, which in substance, I later turned in for my doctoral dissertation. It was my own idea - by accident. That passage could be cited in courses in methodology as an example of the unreliability of the human mind. True, Turner did prepare a paper in Professor Allen's course during his junior year, but the subject was a French landholding in his native Portage - the Grignon Tract - and had nothing to do with the thesis that he later prepared for the master of arts degree at Wisconsin and submitted in revised form for the Johns Hopkins University doctorate. That Lyman C. Draper, former director of the State Historical Society Library, showed him the old documents is unlikely, for he was ill that winter and spent most of his time under a doctor's care in New York. More probably the new director, Reuben Gold Thwaites, was responsible. And certainly Turner's glib reference to learning "Kanuck French" was a masterly overstatement. His struggle to master that language over the next years, as told in letters to his fiancee, forms a saga of heroic and tragic proportions. His inability cost him the hoped-for chance of earning his doctorate in one year at Hopkins. "The Hopkins instructor," Turner confessed, "had hard work to keep a sober face when I read some French aloud at his request." If Frederick Jackson Turner could be guilty of such distortions, there is scant chance that the truth will be well served as I address myself to the 1970 RAY ALLEN BILLINGTON 7 first of the questions suggested by Editor Arrington: How did I become interested in frontier history? As I reconstruct those distant days, the major turning point in my academic life occurred on March 15, 1924 - almost a half-century ago. On that day I was expelled from the University of Michigan for conduct Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 "highly objectionable and morally reprehensible." This was a fitting climax to the three years spent at Ann Arbor, where I had majored in campus activities, was a virtual stranger to the excellent library, and gloried in any grade above a "D." My life was the campus newspaper, for I had every intention of a journalistic career. There was, I suppose, just retribution in the fact that a journalistic caper terminated my Michi­ gan years and turned me toward an academic future. My sin was editing a self-proclaimed "scandal sheet" designed to raise money for an addition to the student union building. By modern standards, the mild double meanings that filled the columns of The Union County Clarion would bring yawns rather than blushes to a profanity-oriented college generation. But if I did not deserve expulsion for immorality, I did for stupidity; my assumption was that college professorswere too clean of mind to recognize even the most innocent double entendre. Thirty-five years in academic circles taught me how wrong I was. That March 15 date set my life on a new course. The University of Wisconsin was finally persuaded to admit me as a mid-term junior. "We will," wrote President Edward A. Birge to President Marion Le Roy Burton of Michigan, "admit Billington as a matter of comity and amity." At Madison that fall of 1924, alone in a rooming house, with no friends or fraternity brothers to lead me astray, with no student offices or publi­ cations to monopolize my time, I made the startling discovery that attend­ ance at class could be rewarding, that study was fun, and that the library reading room held as many charms as a meeting of the committee on the junior prom. This was an eye-opening experience. So was the realization that the little group of intellectually oriented students to be found on the Wisconsin campus offered more stimulating companionship than I had dreamed existed. That year and a half in Madison pointed me not simply to an aca­ demic career but to a career in history. My intention was to major in literature, and courses under such master teachers as James F. A. Pyre (who made a ritual of searching every pocket for his watch as the hour drew to a close) and R. E. Neil Dodge (who stretched my imagination by requiring a daily theme) did not diminish the excitement of the subject. But they were overshadowed - far overshadowed - by two superb in- 8 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY January structors who first kindled my enthusiasm for history: Carl Russell Fish and Frederic Logan Paxson. What a pair they were! Fish, boasting an exaggerated Harvard accent, colorful in dress and mannerism, rich in anecdote, an actor who made Cotton Mather or Daniel Boone come alive on the platform, made the past live anew as he led us through the survey Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 course in American history or his famed semester of Representative Ameri­ cans. Paxson, precise in manner and speech, coldly efficient in his organi­ zation of the subject, rich in knowledge and exact in phraseology, com­ pressed such a deal of information into his semester courses on the frontier and recent America (which began with the Civil War then) that the stu­ dent felt capable of arguing with an encyclopedia when he had crammed for an examination. Why did those courses, and others in history, spark my interest more than courses in literature or philosophy? I have not the slightest idea. I only discovered that I could master historical books more readily, that I enjoyed them more, and that an "A" was more easily attained from Fish or Paxson than from any other instructor.