GIVE THE MAN ROOM
BY ROBERT J. CASEY
_Travel_
Four Faces of Siva
Baghdad and Points East
Easter Island
The Land of Haunted Castles
The Lost Kingdom of Burgundy
The Black Hills
The Texas Border
_Personalities_
Such Interesting People
More Interesting People
Mr. Clutch
_War_
The Cannoneers Have Hairy Ears
I Can’t Forget
Torpedo Junction
Battle Below
This Is Where I Came In
_Mystery_
The Secret of No. 37 Hardy Street
The Secret of the Bungalow
Hot Ice
News Reel
The Third Owl
_Romance_
The Gentleman in Armour
Cambodian Quest
_Satire_
The Voice of the Lobster
_Technical_
Manual of Radio Interference
_Verse_
The Vest Pocket Anthology
BY MARY BORGLUM (MARY W. MONTGOMERY)
Told in the Gardens of Araby (with IZORA CHANDLER)
[Illustration: GUTZON BORGLUM]
_GIVE THE MAN
ROOM_
_The Story of Gutzon Borglum_
By ROBERT J. CASEY
and MARY BORGLUM
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY, INC.
_Publishers_
INDIANAPOLIS NEW YORK
Copyright, 1952, by MARY BORGLUM
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 52-5804
First Edition
To
LINCOLN and LOUELLA,
MARY ELLIS and DAVID
Beauty is like a soul that hovers over the surface of form.
Its presence is unmistakable in Art or in Life. The measure
of its revelation depends on the measure of our own soul-consciousness,
the boundaries of our own spirit.
--GUTZON BORGLUM
_CONTENTS_
CHAPTER PAGE
1. MOUNTAINTOP 15
2. THE DIM BEGINNING 22
3. ALONE 30
4. CALIFORNIA 36
5. OVERSEAS ART 45
6. ENGLAND 55
7. QUIET IN NEW YORK 66
8. VARIETY OF LIFE IN A STUDIO 79
9. THE BIRTH OF A MYTH 87
10. PUBLIC MEMORIALS 94
11. STAMFORD AND POLITICS 104
12. CHICAGO CONVENTION 113
13. AND DR. TRUDEAU 126
14. AIRCRAFT INVESTIGATION 137
15. FLIGHT, PATIENCE AND SHERIDAN’S HORSE 151
16. WARS OF AMERICA MEMORIAL 159
17. STONE MOUNTAIN 171
18. THE IMPERISHABLE MONUMENT 182
19. THE EMERGENCE OF LEE 195
20. MONEY 204
21. AFTERMATH 214
22. BACKSIGHT 220
23. AND SO FORWARD 230
24. TRIBUTE TO WILSON 238
25. FOR THE PARKS 244
26. THE CZECHO-SLOVAK ARMY 250
27. THE NOBLE SPORT 255
28. FRIENDS AND HOME 263
29. SHRINE OF DEMOCRACY 275
30. DEDICATION 284
31. CARVING THE MOUNTAIN 293
32. CONVERSATION 300
33. --AND FINAL PEACE 309
INDEX 321
_LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS_
Gutzon Borglum _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Interior of 38th Street Studio 30
Model of Angel’s Face 31
Borglum Working in First Improvised Studio at Stamford 40
“Dr. Trudeau,” The Beloved Physician 41
“General Sheridan” 56
“Wars of America” Model 57
“Abraham Lincoln” 64
Gutzon and Mary Borglum 65
Stone Mountain 96
Working Platform Near Summit of Stone Mountain 96
Model of Stone Mountain Group 97
Stone Mountain, Showing Superimposed Carving of Central
Group 128
North Carolina Memorial at Gettysburg 129
“The Trail Drivers” 160
The Borglums’ Daughter 161
Woodrow Wilson Memorial at Poznan 192
Torso and Leg of Dancer 193
Gutzon Borglum and Son Lincoln 224
Lincoln Borglum 225
Lincoln and Gutzon Borglum in Hoist 256
Plaster Model in Mountain Studio 257
View of Rushmore Showing Heads of the Four Presidents 288
F.D.R. at the Unveiling of Jefferson, August 1936 289
GIVE THE MAN ROOM
CHAPTER ONE
_MOUNTAINTOP_
If you are studying the history of Gutzon Borglum, the place to stand is
at Stone Mountain, Georgia.
It is an impressive spot, quiet, little visited, a vast bubble of
granite rising abruptly some 800 feet out of a grassy plain, and
thousands of feet long. Good roads lead to it from Atlanta. There is, or
used to be, a little information office at the foot of its towering
cliff, and usually there is someone about to sell souvenirs or to give a
sketchy and bewildering account of the mountain’s history. High on the
cliff there is a flat place from which several acres of surface rock
have been removed; and to the left of the flat is the somewhat
unidentifiable head of a man. The guide will tell you that this is the
representation of Robert E. Lee, as indeed it might be--Lee or anybody.
There is little left to mark the handiwork of man in this neighborhood.
Grass and brush have covered the fallen rock. The scaffolds are down,
the tool sheds and storehouses vanished. The steel hooks are gone from
the face of the cliff. There are no great funds in the hands of the
local patriots. But this is the place. It was because of his work here,
because of what he discovered about granite at Stone Mountain, and
because of his carving of the head of Robert E. Lee, which today nobody
can rightfully attribute to him, that Gutzon Borglum’s memory will be a
long time in dying.
Stone Mountain’s story is often repeated and seldom--very
seldom--authentic. What you see of the place today is mostly what was
here on one dire day in February 1925 when Borglum’s work on it came to
an end--forever. But there is much about it that anyone who cares may
know.
Mrs. Helen Plane, an aging Daughter of the Confederacy, had dreamed one
night that the history of the South’s Great Cause might be carved in
vast figures on the surface of this cliff, General Robert E. Lee,
President Jefferson Davis and a list of towering generals marching
forever across the granite at the head of the defiant troops. She
brought the matter to the attention of Borglum, and he was probably the
one artist in the world who would understand what she wanted done and
would find a way to get it done. That was in 1915. Borglum made a trip
from Washington to Atlanta and inspected the mountain.
In 1924 this fantastic undertaking was no longer anybody’s dream; it was
well under way. The first group of figures, Lee and Davis and Jackson
and the generals, had been outlined on the mountain, following the flag
to perpetual glory. Lee himself was appearing in a stature that Art had
never before given to anyone anywhere.
Machinery was in place for diagram projection, power, hoisting,
drilling, carving, hauling, dynamiting. The business of high-explosive
carving had been brought to a point of almost unbelievable fineness and
accuracy. After years of money shortage the Stone Mountain Confederate
Memorial Association was looking into a debt-free future with a million
or two dollars of surplus cash in the treasury. The last march of the
Confederacy was definitely on its way....
* * * * *
Up in Pierre, South Dakota, State Historian Doane Robinson, a scholar
with patriotism, an extraordinary love for beauty and very little
knowledge of magnificent finance, looked at the news photographs of the
Stone Mountain project and studied the rotogravure outlines of what the
sculptured cliff would look like when Gutzon Borglum finished with it.
And he wondered that nobody had ever thought of trying a similar scheme
in the mountains of South Dakota, the Black Hills. He wrote a letter to
Borglum inquiring why.
The sculptor wrote that he was perfectly willing to look into the
sculptural possibilities of the Black Hills if anybody in South Dakota
was willing to provide the necessary expenses. A few months later
Robinson wrote, somewhat erroneously, that the state of South Dakota
would underwrite this not too considerable sum; so Borglum came out,
looked at the Hills and toured their hinterland late in the summer of
1925.
* * * * *
In February 1925 the sculptor had a bitter disagreement with some of the
executive committee of the Confederate Memorial. He thought these men
careless in handling public funds. They made complaints and fired him.
He broke up his models and went away from Georgia. Without him the
mountain stayed uncarved.
That same year a group of Black Hills patriots guaranteed a fund of
$25,000 for a patriotic mountain carving. Gifts of $5,000 each were
received from Senator Coleman DuPont, Charles E. Rushmore--who gave his
name to the peak later selected for the memorial in the Black Hills--The
Chicago and North Western Railway, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy
Railroad, The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway and the Homestake
Mine. Herbert Myrick contributed a donation of $1,500. The Northwestern
Public Service Company of Huron, South Dakota, had offered a power
plant. Doane Robinson sent out another call to Borglum, and Borglum made
a second trip to the Black Hills.
In the summer of 1927 Calvin Coolidge, President of the United States,
dedicated the Rushmore Mountain project. And before the ending of the
Second World War the carving of this peak was finished--the only thing
of its kind on the face of the earth.
* * * * *
From the top of Mount Rushmore four Presidents of the United
States--Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt--gaze out
from an unbelievable block of hard rock into glowing sunlight, placid
but remarkably alive. Hundreds of thousands of persons have come from
the far corners of the world to look at them, and are still coming in
expanding companies. The money spent by the Treasury of the United
States for the carving of this peak has long since been returned to its
source through the gasoline tax of the tourists. The faces of four men
important in the history of the country will be preserved to us, barring
some unpredictable catastrophe, until the mountains are worn as flat as
the surrounding prairies. And an interesting feature of all this is that
there were only a handful of people in the world who believed it
possible until it was done.
It is safe to say that the carving of Mount Rushmore would never have
been attempted and could never have been carried out save for the early
experiment on Stone Mountain. Borglum had to learn how to remove large
masses of rock--more than 50,000 tons in his first twenty months in
Georgia. So he had learned how to carve with dynamite and had trained
stone workers so well that they could blast down to within three inches
of the surface to be chiseled. He learned about drills and their
sharpening. He learned how to suspend his workmen on slings that were
easily maneuvered and entirely safe. He found out how to project
patterns from a distance onto the rock to be carved. And he knew how to
do all these things quickly when, eventually, he moved on to Rushmore.
On the South Dakota memorial his fame now rests and probably will
continue to rest until the end of time. He might possibly have felt
bitter about that. The sculpture into which he poured his greatest
enthusiasm was undoubtedly the Confederate memorial. It had movement
instead of stasis. It told a story in a language that no man could fail
to understand. The piece of his carving that he himself loved best may
have been the seated Lincoln at Newark, New Jersey. None of his other
works--nor any sculpture in the world--is as big as the work on
Rushmore. But not at this time will any expert in sculpture come to
select one of the carvings of Mount Rushmore as Borglum’s masterpiece.
That is not to say that the Four Faces are not well done. They are.
Lincoln’s has the same pathos that marks Borglum’s head of him in the
Capitol at Washington. Jefferson and Washington come to us out of the
unphotographed past of more than a century ago as real men. Theodore
Roosevelt many of us knew when he was alive, and he is himself. But all
four of them are overpowering because of their size. They are the
product of an art that few men ever attempted before and none
accomplished.
It is a striking thing about Borglum that nobody knew very much about
him, even his friends. More people know of him now than ever did when he
was living, and to most of them he is a man whose sole work was the
carving of Mount Rushmore. Few of them know of the tragedy of Stone
Mountain. Virtually none has ever heard of his Wars of America Memorial
in Newark--forty-two human figures and two horses cast in bronze.
Some of his pieces that few people know about--his horses, his figures
of Lincoln, whom he devoutly loved, his statue to James McConnell on the
University of Virginia campus at Charlottesville, his simple tribute to
Edward L. Trudeau--show his genius as a sculptor. His other pursuits are
in dozens of record books, already dusty and forgotten.
For example, he was a member of the New York City Parks Association for
a dozen years, and until the day he quit he was a factor in keeping the
parks free from injurious exploitation. He organized a bus company in
Stamford. He somehow became a leader of the Progressive party in
Connecticut. He conducted an investigation of airplane manufacture
during the First World War. In the same war he gave the use of his
grounds and what money he could raise for the recruiting of a
Czecho-Slovak expeditionary force. He designed roads and reconstructed
historic old buildings. He contrived waterways and beautified highways
and rivers. He designed coins and medals. He invented projection
apparatus and hoisting machinery. He wrote magazine and newspaper
articles and built up an amazing file of information about sculpture. He
invented an airplane. He laid out a breakwater for Corpus Christi,
Texas. He experimented with dynamite so long that he could calculate
stone removal in ounces. And as he continued his work of mountain
carving he made himself an engineer in a new and difficult trade.
It is interesting to note that he did all of these things well. Some
have said that he had a touchy temper, but those of us who knew him,
say, over forty years didn’t think so. He could never understand that
money might have a different value to other people than it had to him.
He would get annoyed when the treasurer of one of his projects would
hesitate to empty the treasury for a power plant or some other machinery
at the moment he needed it. He got genuinely angry only at people he
suspected of being dishonest.
Neither did he make many enemies. One man, long a member of the
executive committee of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission,
probably knew him longer in irritating circumstances than anyone else on
earth. Once he came down from Mount Rushmore to Rapid City frothing at
the mouth.
“All he knows about money for this business is that somebody has to dig
it up,” he roared. “He thinks I make it out of something just because he
needs it. He’d bust the whole state of South Dakota in two weeks just
because he needs some dynamite or an A-rig.”
“But,” someone inquired, “do you think he’ll get this memorial
finished?”
“Hell, yes!” he roared. “And nobody else could do it either!”
One is surprised that such a diversified character could have had much
time left to spend in sculpture. As a matter of fact, he probably did
more of it than any other individual in his profession and time. He was
a prodigious worker as well as a talented dilettante in fields where he
thought his influence needed. His paintings between 1890 and 1901 seem
to have been virtually numberless. Many of them are appearing now and
then, more valuable than ever.
Some of his better sculpture has disappeared. One of his pieces was used
by a lady as security for a loan. It has gone from human ken. His study
of Woodrow Wilson at Poznan, Poland, was uprooted and no doubt melted by
the Nazis in the Second World War. A second artist took the hat off
Robert E. Lee on Stone Mountain “because Lee would never wear a hat in a
place where ladies were present.” The face as one sees it today was
altered in this thoughtful improvement. Much of Borglum’s early work
seems to have passed through similar vicissitudes.
However, most of what he did throughout his creative years seems to be
with us still--statues in a dozen states, small ones, grand ones, but
always anatomically perfect ones. If he had never done anything but the
Newark Lincoln and the Wars of America group, he would have done enough
to put him among the leaders of his art. But beside those and a generous
scattering of bronze and marble all across the United States, there is
still Rushmore. His own criticism of Rushmore is still the most apropos:
“They’ll be a long time wearing that one down.”
CHAPTER TWO
_THE DIM BEGINNING_
The beginnings of Gutzon Borglum are not easy to trace. Until more than
fifty years after his birth nobody seems to have cared where he came
from or when. Nobody was much interested in who his parents were or how
or where he was brought up. By that time the evidence of his boyhood was
far away and hazy.
When in middle age he turned his head toward the Far West he had known
shortly after the Civil War he saw a past that was exciting, colorful
and glamorous. He was lyrical in talking about it and wrapped up in
memories of unbelievably noble inspiration. But the oddest feature of
his reminiscence is that, except for his stylistic urge, he never
wandered far from historic fact.
Gutzon Borglum was born in a frontier town in Idaho. His early childhood
was spent in Fremont, Nebraska, jumping-off place of the covered wagons,
haunt of wild Indians. And whatever hints he conveys about Gutzon, he is
probably telling the truth. He was never anybody but Gutzon.
He intended, when he sat down to recall his youth, to write an
autobiography. But writing an autobiography was just one more task that
took its place in a tremendous program of brass casting, airplane
design, mountain dressing, sea-wall building, picture projection, boxing
promotion, park improvement, old-building restoration, motor-bus
operation, horse raising, politics and--every now and then--colossal
sculpture. When he died he had written two chapters and several hundred
thousand words of notes and journals, an astonishing record, presenting
a picture of an old warrior battling for youth against a cynical world.
He said in his introduction:
This story is told to lend an encouraging, believing hand to all
lonely, creative souls who are wandering into the uncharted,
untraveled wilderness of God’s greater universe, finding through
their own understanding new and undreamed worlds; and to those who
continue alone to pour into unpeopled space their cry--unafraid,
expecting no answer. Courage to stand alone; courage to master, to
know, to do alone. Courage to spurn the tradesman’s reward and
popularity. Courage to be without great approval, in spite of
government, in spite of today’s laws, tomorrow’s threat--every
threat--in spite of Heaven. God’s greatest gift to us and His
supreme test is courage bestowed only on those He trusts entirely.
There are two points in this worthy of attention: his recognition of the
need for courage and the stressing of his loneliness. He had the
courage. No one in half a century of continuous battling had more. His
loneliness must have been in his soul, not literal. With friends and
enemies who included a line of Presidents of the United States,
senators, congressmen and public officials, artists, writers, singers,
politicians, sheriffs, policemen and such, all of them in vast numbers
and continuously present throughout the years, he could have been lonely
only in his more detached moments. He certainly had a full life. The
portions of it unfilled with other people were of his own choosing. In
his chronicle he wrote:
I should like to begin this story with Eric the Red, the great
warlike Dane, driven from Denmark to Norway, from Norway to
Iceland, and finally from Iceland. From there he drifted with the
tide before the chill winds southward in his Viking ships, dodging
the ice in the Atlantic Flow, the cooled Gulf Stream, circling up
by Greenland which he claimed and named. Or even better to have
been with our fellow Danes who invaded Greece and gave that people
their heroic age, left in their bloodstream the blue in the eyes of
Pericles, the gold of Helen’s hair, the short nose of Socrates and
the one blue eye of Alexander the Great. For I am as certain as I
am of anything, that the spirit and the ancient Danish or Borglum
blood were with and in the raiders of the Mediterranean who roused
the geese in Italy’s imperial city and awoke drunken Rome.
The fact that he had lived long enough to write these stirring words
probably justifies his admiration for his forebears. He must have sprung
from hardy stock. He had come through fifty years, part of it in the
parlous times of the new West, where only the good started and only the
strong survived. The family of which Gutzon was a part must have had
good ancestry. There were nine of them--six of them boys--and they lived
as the pioneers did, a routine without much luxury, and all of them
rounded out good long lives.
Gutzon doesn’t seem to be sure about their origins and early development
any more than he is sure of his own. He never gave a thought to such
things until he was about fifty years old and inquisitive admirers began
to ask questions. Somewhat confused, he gave some ill-assorted answers,
many of which remain puzzling today. In his notes, for instance, he says
that he was born on March 25, 1867. This, according to some evidence
given by his brother Solon, seems to be correct. Yet the biographical
sketch in _Who’s Who in America_, which he himself wrote, says that he
was born in Idaho on March 25, 1871. One must leave it at that.
Borglum was a man of great imagination, and he built up a fine character
for the men of the hardy North country from which his ancestors had
come. In his mind they came from “the North of Denmark, the land bending
eastward under the cruel winds from Greenland and Iceland, the
rendezvous of Vikings and high-sea rovers. There we have what are called
Black Danes.... They are unquestionably an exchange token from Spain,
Rome or Greece.... In our own family of blonds there are always some
with fine dark eyes and hair to remind us of our ancestral wanderings.”
The best Borglum’s father did for this family research was to locate a
prospective Borglum with Frederick of Sweden in his crusade to the Holy
Land. This man seems to have been named Reinhardt. But he saved the
prince from a charging goat in the south of France and was given the
title _de la Mothe_, “the one of courage.” This forebear returned to
Denmark and, Borglum’s father reported, “his arms carry the crusader’s
shield in the center.” The founder of the modern branch of De la Mothes
was a priest who, in due course, joined Luther and married a nun. Gutzon
wrote:
The menfolk became priests, soldiers, adventurers, and I have books
left by them in their own scripts. In this black dune, the
wind-swept northern part of Denmark, there is an ancient Norman
pile called the Borglum Kloster which, in the nineteenth century,
was a hunting lodge for the kings and nobles. The De la Mothe
family was closely connected with this cloister. On a visit not so
long ago I found in the great chapel, buried in its floor, the only
memorial tablet to our ancestors extant.
Some years ago, after the unveiling of Gutzon’s statue of Woodrow Wilson
in Poznan, he took his wife and two children on a flying visit to
Denmark. They arrived in Copenhagen about 8:00 A.M., and by 8:15 Gutzon
was a sensation. He was a great sculptor by that time, and he had an
international reputation. But the baggage carriers, the cabdrivers and
the early passers-by did not know that. He was interesting to them only
because he spoke to them unhesitatingly in archaic Danish, the Danish of
a hundred years ago. “I learned it at my mother’s knee,” he explains,
“and she had learned it in her youth, now a century past.” He was
linguistically one with the Danes of 1800. The romantic swashbucklers
of crusading times no longer seemed quite so close to him.
The King of Denmark saw the Borglums after their return from Borglum
Kloster and “the black duneland of the North.” He sent his chamberlain
to the hotel with an invitation because Gutzon, fifteen years before,
had made a three-quarter bust of the king’s grandfather. It was proudly
displayed on a gilt mantel.
“Is it a good portrait?” asked the sculptor.
The king smiled. “Yes, it is,” he said. “It is a good portrait with just
a touch of American vigor.”
His Majesty then presented Gutzon with the Order of the Knights of
Danenborg. “Interesting,” the king said as he draped the ribbon about
Borglum’s neck, “to think that your people killed one of our kings.”
“I had heard of some disturbance in the old days at Borglum Kloster,”
Borglum said. “There was violence....”
“That was it. The king was seized. They took him to a prison and a week
later they hanged him. But you, of course, hadn’t much to do with that.”
“No,” admitted Borglum, “I hadn’t. I don’t know what to say.” The king
smiled again. “I’ll forgive you,” he said. “You know, Borglum, your
people, the Jutlanders, may be said to have saved Denmark. They were the
only ones the Swedes could not defeat.”
“That makes me feel better,” declared Gutzon.
But the king seemed not to have heard him. “Yes,” His Majesty went on,
“the Swedes took virtually all the country. They overran the villages
and cities. They captured Copenhagen. They took everything valuable.
But, of course, they never took Jutland. That’s where your people were.”
* * * * *
The financial situation in Denmark in the middle of the nineteenth
century was what caused James Borglum, Gutzon’s father, to come to the
United States. The markets were bad, the crop yield had been none too
good and there was discontent in the family over the probable division
of what little would be left of Grandfather Borglum’s estate.
James de la Mothe Borglum at twenty-three was a Latin-and-Greek scholar
in his last year as a medical student. He took passage with his
sweetheart on a freighter from Esbjerg across the North Sea to London.
They were married in London and immediately afterward took passage in a
three-masted sailing ship on a voyage from Liverpool to New York. Of
this voyage Gutzon writes:
The trip was a nightmare. The ship was dismasted in a violent
storm. The passengers helped to clear away the wreckage and drop it
overboard. Then with a few spars for masts and sails made out of
bedding they gathered wind enough to carry them to the New World.
They were six weeks on the way, most of the time at the mercy of
the mad sea.
The honeymooners lingered only a day or two in New York. Steam trains
took them to Nebraska City on the west bank of the Missouri River. There
they joined an expedition of 126 wagons starting out for Oregon.
They were months on the road, rarely traveling more than ten miles a
day. The day’s course depended on the distance between water holes. They
traveled without incident until they came into the land of the Cheyennes
at the confluence of the North and South Platte rivers. The team boss
had died. James Borglum, who was an able doctor and popular with the
people in the train, was chosen to converse with some visiting Indians.
One of them asked permission to examine Borglum’s pistol and shot
himself with it. The chief blamed the mishap on the white spokesman
because he had owned the pistol. He demanded the surrender of Borglum’s
person and was refused. The Indians, loudly muttering, went away.
They spent a restless night, but the expected attack did not come.
Toward midnight a band of wild horses rushed into the expedition’s herd
of mules, horses and oxen. These animals were well tied and guarded and
there was no alarm save for the sudden screaming of a woman. Nothing
amiss was discovered until a check was made toward morning and the wife
of a teamster was found to be missing. Twenty years later she was found
in Montana, the wife of a chief, with grown children. She refused to
leave her adopted people or to return to the whites.
James Borglum never forgot the tragedy of this long trip. The desperate
hardships came near the end. There was scarcity of everything. It is
hard to realize the amount of food consumed by some 450 men, women and
children in four months, or the amount of water necessary daily on a dry
plain in midsummer to keep horses and oxen on their feet. Borglum used
to tell of a small group of voyagers who had joined his party in
Wyoming. They had been living on mule harness which they boiled to give
salt and “some strength” to the water.
James de la Mothe Borglum crossed the line into Idaho and reached Bear
Lake on the road to Oregon. There, literally, he dug in--half the house
in the ground, then sod, then log. That was in 1862--or maybe 1863. John
Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum joined the family there most likely, as his
unfinished autobiography says, in 1867.
Gutzon remembers his mother (Ida Michelson Borglum) as a great woman,
gifted and beautiful. She had one other son, Solon, born on December 22,
1868, the boy to whom Gutzon frequently referred as his little brother.
Not many years after Solon was born, Gutzon recalls, “She left us. I was
five. She turned to see me as she lay ill. There were tears in her eyes
and she was trembling as she took my hand.... And she told me to take
care of little Solon.
“I never forgot it, but I wondered why. I thought she was going to stay
with us. She and Father had always been with us. I could not
understand....”
Gutzon was a baby. He was at the age when children are said to be only
slightly interested in family changes, but he seems to have realized
that something had happened.
“By the time I was seven,” he says, “I knew what it meant not to have a
mother of my own. I thought I didn’t want to stay around things that
reminded me of her any more. So I ran away.”
CHAPTER THREE
_ALONE_
Gutzon Borglum was seven years old; so the time must have been roughly
1874. In the twelve or thirteen years since James de la Mothe Borglum’s
caravan had come to Bear Lake, Idaho, he had been singularly restless.
Gutzon had been born in Idaho, Solon a year later in Ogden, Utah. Father
Borglum had moved back eastward. He had another wife. He had acquired
horses and cows, a home and an office. When Gutzon ran away, home was in
Fremont, Nebraska.
The child left suddenly, accompanied only by his dog. He hadn’t thought
to provide himself with food. He had heard of Omaha; so he started in
that direction. He was three days on the way and had gone what seemed to
be miles and miles when the sheriff caught up with him and brought him
home. The sheriff dropped him at the Borglum house and went away.
Fearful and hungry, Gutzon slept that night in the dog kennel.
Next morning he had a memorable return to the bosom of the family. His
father was somewhere out of town, and his grandfather on his mother’s
side had come for a visit. The grandfather was a martinet who felt that
children should be taught that it is wrong to run away from home. He
took charge of Gutzon and Gutzon never forgot him.
“I was only seven,” the sculptor remembered, “but I made up
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF 38TH STREET STUDIO
At the left is “I Have Piped and Ye Have Not Danced” and at the right is
the “Mares of Diomedes.”]
[Illustration: MODEL OF ANGEL’S FACE
This is one of the offending feminine faces.]
my mind that I would get away from there and that I would keep trying
until I succeeded ... and, eventually, that’s what I did.”
For all his muddled childhood, Gutzon loved his father. James Borglum
was kind, tolerant and a philosopher. He sensed his son’s unhappiness,
even though he would have had trouble explaining it, and a great bond
developed between them. The boy went everywhere with him when not in
school, even on his sick calls out in the country. Gutzon remembered
that they would ride along for miles and miles in sunshine or cold or
wet, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, but always in perfect peace.
One afternoon the doctor called to him and asked him to help hitch the
horse. Gutzon at the time was a little over eight years old, but he did
what he could with the harness and thereafter believed that he had been
just as skilled and agile as any professional horse handler.
“I want you to come with me,” his father said. “There is a wounded man
out on Rawhide Creek and I may need some help.” And Gutzon saw nothing
wrong about that, either.
“We’ll fix him up fine,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have to sew him up.”
“Sure,” said the doctor as he lifted Gutzon into the buggy.
Rawhide Creek was a stream with a sorry reputation. It had taken its
name from an English hunter who had turned away from slaughtering
buffalo long enough to murder a young squaw. Other squaws had tied him
to a cottonwood tree near the creek and skinned him alive. Gutzon
recalled in his chronicle:
As for our call for medical help, we found our man in the cabin
armed. He was stern, fine looking. I admired him greatly and what
followed made us lifelong friends. He was an outlaw on the run who
had been in some shooting scrape and had received a charge of goose
shot in his arm. Father had no anaesthetic for him. I doubt if at
the time there was more than a pint of it in the whole state of
Nebraska. The wounded man was bleeding terribly, his arm resting on
some blood-soaked blankets. A piece of rope, tightly drawn about
the elbow, partly stanched the flow. He was alone with two
inscrutable Pawnees. After they had washed the arm in warm water,
my father turned to me and said, “Gutzon, you will have to help
hold his arm.”
The Indians gripped the man’s hand; my job was to keep the
lacerations open so that Father could find the shot. We were still
working when there was a sharp knock at the door. Sheriff Gregg,
with a deputy at his heels, came in and put our patient under
arrest. Gregg and Father were friends and Father said, “He stays
here till this job is done, Bob.” And we went on doing what we had
to do.
The man, whose name was Fielding, was then taken to jail to be held
for trial. There I visited him frequently with Father and later
alone with the permission of the sheriff who liked me. Fielding was
an excellent draughtsman and I brought him red and blue pencils. He
loved to draw the American Eagle and the flag as we saw them on the
older coins.
Weeks later when his arm was well healed there was a sudden alarm
of “Jailbreak!” Fielding and another man had sawed through one of
the bars with a hacked table knife. It must have been the work of
many days. I prayed that he would escape. But posses went out and
caught him as he was crossing the river in an open skiff. Report
came back that the sheriff had killed him in midstream with a lucky
shot.
Fielding was a kindly man. He told me of his shooting trouble. He’d
been wronged, robbed and shot at. Why he broke jail I never knew.
He dreaded imprisonment. I shall always feel that he had a great
deal to do with awakening my interest in drawing and developing my
ability in that direction, although I really had no idea of
becoming an artist until I was fifteen. We never know where little
unsuspected impulses for good may lead, or what is back of them.
Often in a family of five or six children there is one who does not
want to work. He would like to write on birch bark, examine a
flower, get a little color on a board or canvas ... and there is an
artist. All very simple and natural, but it comes out of the lives
and struggles of perceptive men and women who follow these impulses
along. I believe music first started when some mother was trying to
get her little child to sleep when he was scared to death about
something. She found that certain tones were pleasant when she
repeated them. And thus the thing that is behind all instrumental
music--woman’s voice--brought harmony and sweetness to life.
Not all of Dr. Borglum’s errands had to do with wounded men, and the
little boy found that some of the simpler ones were more terrifying.
Once they went on a long quest that had something to do with a baby.
Gutzon stayed outside the house. He sat on a knoll, looking at the moon
across a ravine. Of this incident Gutzon writes:
I had watched it come out of the grass in front of me. It was about
three times its usual size as it came above the dull blue horizon.
My father came and I asked him, “What is the moon?” And without
waiting for him to answer I told him how beautiful she was and how
I loved the moon better than the sun, better than anything in the
world. He picked me up and said, “I’ll give her to you if you
promise never to take her away from us.”
I wriggled out of his arms and ran toward her. I stumbled, fell,
rose up, ran on, began to cry but kept on, faster and faster,
Father slowly following.... But the moon was retreating faster than
I could move. And then the knowledge came to me--I could not have
my moon. I stood weeping my heart out.... That moon has hung in my
heaven for well over half a century with the child fable written
all over it.... I have never reached it.
Fremont was a town of bewildering experiences. It was filled with
fantastic excitement--Indian alarms, the coming and going of prairie
schooners, visits of parties of Cheyenne and Sioux chiefs, gun fights
beyond the hills and reports of Indian massacres on the Niobrara.
Against all this the simple village life of the Swedes and Danes looked
like that of quaint foreigners. Yet there were tragedies among Gutzon’s
own people--sickness and death and evil times, thin crops and blizzards,
high winds and floods.
There was a brief school life at home, then school life at a distance.
Each year when the boy returned he would find that some of his Fremont
had vanished. Not exactly _vanished_, he felt; rather, the town had
grown and he had grown, and somehow they had parted. The doctor moved
his family after years of this to Omaha. There didn’t seem to be much
difference.
He had been gone a long time--or so it seemed to him--when he was
eighteen years old. The thought came to him that he must see his old
playground and playmates, swim in the old Rawhide, go graping or be once
more with the boys and girls with whom he had grown up. He bought a
train ticket for Fremont and long remembered how he could hardly wait to
reach the town.
The train slowed down at the platform and he was off before it stopped.
He looked at the crowd of strangers pressing about, and tried to catch a
glimpse of a familiar face. At last he found a few ... but very few.
He went into town and to the homes of friends. He found the girls he had
known. Their hair was piled high on top of their heads; their dresses
were long, their manners awkward. The boys stared at him and didn’t say
anything. He couldn’t tell what had happened to these people, and, he
realized later, they were puzzled in the same way about him. All of them
had grown.
There was no longer any school from which to play hooky, no occasion to
hang one’s clothes on a cottonwood and dive into mud from an old stump.
Gutzon was now a stranger to all that. And, though he refused to see it,
so were these close friends of a few years ago. None of them could
understand. He wrote:
I turned like one frightened and hurt and brokenhearted and ran
back to the station. There on the platform I sat for hours waiting
for any train to get away from Fremont. No--away from the reality
that had blotted out my magic world, the world that a boy of from
six to twelve lives in. And I have never had the courage to return.
The Fremont, Nebraska, of my boyhood days has gradually
reconstructed itself and still lives in my memory with its two
little streets and a half. Its quaint old citizens I know are still
trading, spinning yarns--the occasional Indian or more, single
file, quietly moving about. There are some prairie schooners and
the annual one-ring circus. And as I pass the town, as I have done
many times, it has always been at night--for which I have been
strangely glad. I watch in the dark for all the old ways and byways
I know so well, and the dark has always helped me to believe that
they are all there just as I left them.
Thus far the words of Gutzon Borglum. He ceases to comment on his life
in the forbidding period of early youth. He is hopeless about what has
gone by and terrified at what lies ahead. But he need not have been. He
was alone, a child of the night, only in his imagination. Actually, he
was one of the very few human beings of his period who were singularly
popular. He might have succeeded at anything he tried.
CHAPTER FOUR
_CALIFORNIA_
Dr. James de la Mothe Borglum is somewhat difficult to see as he moves
briefly and grayly through the background of Gutzon Borglum’s records.
But it is quickly obvious that the restless-footed doctor never moved
anywhere without being noticed. He assuredly left one heritage to his
son: an inquiring, seldom satisfied mind.
Eventually this adventurous, nervous, eager spirit settled down in Omaha
to a long, useful and almost uneventful life as a general physician. He
was much loved and quite successful, but few of the mourners who turned
out for his funeral had any idea of his questing past. He had come from
Denmark to the settlement called St. Charles-on-Bear-Lake, Idaho. He had
moved with his family from there to Fremont and on to Omaha. From Omaha
he had moved to Los Angeles and finally back again from Los Angeles to
Omaha.
His journey to Los Angeles in the middle eighties seems to have been of
little importance except that Gutzon was started definitely on his art
career. This was the father’s last gift to his son. Ever after, Gutzon
was independent and lived his own life.
The doctor, in his earnest search for religious truth, found time for
the less argumentative features of a good education. He tried to give a
firm basis in Greek and Latin classics to his son Solon Hannibal. He
sent two other sons, Gutzon and August, to St. Mary’s, a Jesuit college
in Kansas. He studied the Sanskrit Vedas and the doctrine of Mormon, and
once served as president of the Theosophical Society of Nebraska.
During his investigation of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky, Russian-born
founder of the Theosophical Society of America, came touring from India.
She visited the Borglums in Omaha and sat for a portrait by young
Gutzon. This portrait hung for many years in the Borglum home, and the
brooding eyes of the lady seemed to follow the Borglums about the room
wherever they moved. Gutzon used to explain that this was a familiar
trick in painting and not hard to achieve.
Gutzon was interested in art while the family still lived in Fremont.
His schoolmates there recalled that the margins of his books were
covered with sketches and that he liked to draw maps and make
caricatures of his teachers or of local men in public life.
His teachers at St. Mary’s had readily noticed his talent. They had set
him to drawing saints and angels--subjects of which, at the time, he was
not particularly fond. He refers to his Kansas experience in an article
written in 1919:
My interest in the beautiful began before I came to St. Mary’s, but
it was due to encouragement there, and to a definitely expressed
desire on the part of two young men who were graduated the year I
left that the determination was awakened in me to treat seriously
what I had previously considered a delightful trick.
One of these men was named Murphy, and I shall never cease to
remember with profoundest gratitude his earnest talk to me as we
walked up and down during the evening recess. He talked to me of
the great masters. He got books for me. I came to know the whole
Italian school, painters and sculptors. And for years it seemed
that I knew little else. As a result I have never gone to Italy.
[Nor did he until 1931.] As I grew older I found I had a powerful
bias toward Italian art and its melodrama. But I did not want to go
there, even though I admire Italian and Grecian art more than all
else.
Murphy went out of my life and I have never heard of him since. He
may not--doubtless does not--remember what he did for me. But in
those evenings at school he set me afire. And the goal he painted
seems bigger, better, more wonderful and worthwhile now than it
did, even then. So he served. He may never have known it, but I owe
everything to his inspiring words.
The whereabouts of Murphy was never traced because his first name
apparently had been forgotten, and hundreds of Murphys passed through
St. Mary’s before it surrendered its charter and became a Jesuit
seminary sometime after the First World War. People who knew the place
in the eighties are not surprised at Gutzon’s declaration that his real
inspiration came from there. It was a small school that had grown out of
an early mission to the Potowatomi Indians, but it had few
characteristics that identify the tank-town college. Out of it in half a
century came a singular troop of famous persons, many of whom no doubt
crossed Gutzon’s path without realizing that he was a fellow alumnus.
Judges, lawyers, bishops, educators, engineers, builders, doctors,
merchants, chiefs, sailors, soldiers, politicians, inventors, musicians
and all the rest of them are included in the list. It is interesting to
note that Borglum is the institution’s only offering to sculpture.
His life at old St. Mary’s seems to have been perfectly normal. He had
several fights which he remembered ever after. He remembered, too, that
he was always in the right, which is likewise perfectly natural. His
chief exploit in fisticuffs was a wrangle with three rather hard lads in
the dining room, and there is a tradition that he won. At any rate, he
learned how to protect himself with his bare fists--a skill that he
always counted as a major asset.
He finished the academy course--the equivalent of high school--when, at
that period in the West, he was considered sufficiently adult to find a
job. Dr. James suddenly moved his family to California. Gutzon quit St.
Mary’s and went to work as a lithographer’s apprentice in Los Angeles,
and studied engraving and designing on stone. At the end of six months
he was producing work that he thought was good. That, of course, was
nothing to cause any emotional outbursts among the lithographers,
because Gutzon thought that everything he produced was good.
The young man wanted better pay, but he didn’t get it. The lithographer
said that if he stayed at his work he would someday be an experienced
hand. But Gutzon sacrificed this opportunity. He went to work for a
fresco painter, and he got more money. He rented a little studio and did
part-time work as he pleased.
On a ranch somewhere in the vicinity was Solon Borglum. Of all the
family he was closest to Gutzon because he had shown interest in art.
Gutzon eventually got him to leave the ranch and to take up the study of
painting and sculpture seriously. He contributed to Solon’s support and,
in time, to his tuition in a Cincinnati art school. But there is little
mention of this in his written record, for he was shy about such things.
California was a constant surprise to him. He was by himself and
supporting himself. He felt free and able, and he was proud of himself.
His father had gone back East with a family that in time totaled nine.
Someplace with that brood was August, Gutzon’s companion at St. Mary’s.
It was to be a long time before Gutzon would see some of his other
brothers and sisters. But no matter! California was warm in the winter,
and it didn’t cost much to get things to eat. And he kept meeting people
who interested him. While he was still with the lithographer he met an
artist named Eberlie, a really good painter of the Düsseldorf school.
Eberlie turned out beautiful ensembles that seemed perfect in color and
design. Gutzon yearned to do the same thing.
Something had awakened in him. He went on and on with his work in the
tiny studio, producing little that looked like anything, learning slowly
what was wrong. He couldn’t have quit. He was still there even after Dr.
Borglum and the family had moved back to Omaha.
Information about his early years in this paradise, however, doesn’t
come so much from him as from strangers. Charles F. Lummis, whom he knew
well and with whom he later wrangled extensively, wrote a piece about
him in _The Land of Sunshine_ (later, _Out West_) magazine in 1906. He
said:
It was a matter of nine years ago. Los Angeles was a country town,
just emerging from adobehood. This writer found a green, serious
lad belaboring canvas in a bare room on what was then Fort Street.
He had no money and not many friends. The painting he was at had
many shortcomings and showed his lack of art education. Yet there
was in them a creative breath that promised to make him heard
from....
He was born in the West and was Western in every fibre. Soon after
graduation from seminary he came to Los Angeles, and presently
began the long, hard struggle of an unbefriended artist. By and for
himself, by sheer dint of pluck and brains, he hewed his way. At
last his pictures attracted the attention of one of the few
connoisseurs then here.... A couple have been sold to Easterners at
good prices....