Early on the Morning of January 30, 1953, the telephone brought the sad though not unexpected news of the death of Herbert Eugene Bolton at his home in Berkeley. There, since a few days before his eighty-second birthday in July, he had lain ill from a cerebral hemorrhage. Though he made a partial recovery in the ensuing months and was able to converse with friends, he finally came to the end of the long trail that he had pioneered in Western and Latin-American history. From humble beginnings on the American frontier, but stimulated by the forces it generated, he became one of the most productive scholars of the century and the ablest interpreter of the essential unity of the peoples of the American nations.