The Hasinais: Southern Caddoans As Seen by the Earliest Europeans

by Herbert Eugene Bolton

Renowned as the founder of Spanish borderlands studies, Herbert Eugene Bolton was the first U.S. historian to build his research on Spanish archives and other forgotten archives in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Mexico, and Cuba. Yet before that, from 1906 to 1908, Bolton studied the Hasinai Indians of Louisiana and Texas.

Russell Magnaghi has edited Bolton's previously unpublished examination of the Hasinais, a settled, agricultural American Indian tribe in East Texas and one of the two major branches of the Caddoan Indians. Bolton's ethnohistorical analysis' includes chapters on the Hasinai interaction with the Spanish and the French; their economic life and social and political organization; their housing, hardware, and handicrafts; their dress and adornment; their religious beliefs and customs; and their war customs and ceremonials.

Hardcover

First published December 31, 1987

About the author

an American historian who pioneered the study of the Spanish-American borderlands and was a prominent authority on Spanish American history. He originated what became known as the Bolton Theory of the history of the Americas which holds that it is impossible to study the history of the United States in isolation from the histories of other American nations, and wrote or co-authored 94 works. Bolton was born on a farm between Wilton and Tomah, Wisconsin in 1870 to Edwin Latham and Rosaline (Cady) Bolton. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a brother of Theta Delta Chi, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1895. That same year he married Gertrude Janes, with whom he eventually had seven children.

Bolton studied under Frederick Jackson Turner from 1896 to 1897. Starting in 1897, Bolton was a Harrison Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and studied American history under John Bach McMaster. In 1899, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and then taught at Milwaukee State Normal School until 1900.