Persistent Frontiers

Prospecting in the rich gold fields of South African (and Mexican history), I stumbled over a fine historical nugget. I know, the pairing sounds odd, but there are more connections than you might think, running from about the 1880s on up through the Mexican Revolution.

The mining frontier that ran down the Rocky Mountains into Mexico also spread across the seas to South Africa and Australia. Prospectors, mining engineers and hard rock miners followed the glimmer of mineral riches, and it’s not unusual to run across the same folks on different frontiers, betting on the next boom. The great Frontier Partisan Scout Frederick Russell Burnham made his name in Rhodesia and South Africa — but he also tried for years to colonize the Yaqui Country in Sonora, Mexico. Burnham’s operated with the financial backing of the famed mining engineer and “revolutionary capitalist” John Hays Hammond — who was deep into the workings of the South African mining industry. (Hammond is the subject of the new book The Cowboy Capitalist, which implicates Hammond heavily in the notorious Jameson Raid of 1896, which led directly to the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902.

So, the South Africa-Mexico connection — and an obscure but fascinating nugget…

Among those attempting to establish colonies in northern Mexico in the early 20^th Century was the Boer guerilla General Ben Viljoen. And damned if another prospector hasn’t mined the vein that produced that nugget for a book due out next year.

Here’s Professor Andrew Offenburger:

A ten-year research project, just completed, started with an intriguing footnote: in 1903, a colony of Boers from southern Africa immigrated to Chihuahua, Mexico. Boers? In Chihuahua? It sounded like the set-up to a joke. The citation soon transformed into a veritable rabbit hole of research, into which I fell, circling outward with evermore questions, trying to understand this history, to make the strange familiar. Why did these colonists later move to the United States? What did this borderland offer destitute settlers, and vice versa? Why did the Yaqui Indians of Sonora, Mexico, keep emerging in the sources? How did this all relate to the Mexican Revolution?

Soon, the historical antecedents and context became clear, and my questions transformed from the specific to the regional, national, and global. Each question required its own cyclical process—read, research, write, and repeat—to address broader topics like frontier adventurism, race, masculinity, capitalist development of the Mexican North after 1880, U.S. ties to southern Africa and other mineral frontiers, and the relationship between capitalism and indigenous dispossession from southern Africa to the American West and Mexico.

The results of this research will appear in spring 2019 as a book (provisionally entitled Frontiers in the Gilded Age) in the Lamar Series in Western History, published by Yale University Press. The book examines how Mexico and southern Africa were two (of many) nodes on a global frontier network, traveled by capitalists and adventurers alike, who drew upon a romanticized frontier ideology to understand their world.

Professor Offenburger is the keeper of the website Persistent Frontiers. Now THAT’s a title custom-made to get my attention — and he has it, entirely.

This website borrows the idea of a “persistent frontier” put forth by the Western historian Howard Lamar. In his presidential address at the Western History Association in 1972, Lamar said that, contrary to popular belief, frontiers did not lose their relevance at the end of the nineteenth century; frontiers — historical, cultural, and academic — remained especially relevant to the twentieth-century West.

Persistent Frontiers takes Lamar’s idea and personalizes it. Assembled by Andrew Offenburger, Assistant Professor of History at Miami University, this website documents the people, places, and ideas encountered in studying and teaching the U.S. West, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and global frontiers.

Oh, hell yes.

Reckon I’ll be pitching my tent alongside the workings of the Offenburger Mine next year, maybe stake out a claim or two in that rocky desert ground and see what I can dig up my ownself…