Manhood, Military Forts and Ethnological Thought: John Gregory Bourke and the Rise of Border Ethnology, 1870s–90s

This article explores how some army forts in 1870s, 1880s and 1890s Texas, New Mexico and Arizona emerged as sites for the production of ethnological knowledge about Mexican and native (Apache, Zuni) peoples. It focuses primarily on US Army Captain John Gregory Bourke's diary entries and publications about his time in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona military garrisons from the late 1860s to the 1890s. Expanding upon cultural studies scholar José Limón's discussions of Bourke's ambivalent relationship to the subjects of his ethnographic study, this article investigates how Bourke's excursions into the built-environment in and beyond border military forts shaped his understanding of the logics of empire and how his writing, in turn, influenced popular conceptions of the borderlands. Turning to historian Gail Bederman's exploration of turn-of-the-century conceptions of manhood, this article examines how Bourke's ethnographic forays from the homosocial and white-dominated enclosure of the military fort into the multi-racial and gendered borderlands defined and challenged ideas about manhood and masculinity on the ‘frontier’. This article proposes that the study of army fort personnel helps tease out how militarised individuals made sense of the built-environment through their racial and gendered observations of border populations.