Gutzon Borglum: The Sculptor of Mount Rushmore
By the time he reached the Black Hills, Gutzon Borglum was already a sculptor of national reputation and national argument. Born in Idaho in 1867 to Danish immigrant parents, he had studied in Paris, absorbed something of Auguste Rodin, and built a career on public work meant to be seen by crowds. He was confident past the point of modesty, quick to quarrel, and drawn to scale that frightened more cautious men. None of those qualities would soften in South Dakota.
He came to the project because the state historian Doane Robinson had floated the notion of carving giant figures into the granite of the Hills to draw travelers. Robinson had imagined Western heroes among the eroded spires called the Needles. Borglum, invited to look the country over in the mid 1920s, rejected the Needles as too thin and brittle for what he had in mind, and he rejected the regional theme as too small. He wanted a national subject and a national audience, and he wanted a wall of stone that could hold faces measured in dozens of feet.
Choosing the mountain and the faces
The granite he settled on was a southeast-facing cliff named for a New York lawyer, Charles Rushmore, who had visited the area decades earlier. The exposure mattered. Borglum wanted morning and midday light to fall full on the carving, and he wanted rock sound enough to take the work. He studied the formation, tested it, and judged it would serve.
For the subject he proposed four presidents, meant to represent the founding, growth, preservation, and expansion of the republic rather than four men chosen by personal taste. The reasoning behind that quartet is its own story, told in the article on the four presidents. What matters here is that Borglum framed the work as something larger than tourism, a record of national purpose cut into the oldest rock he could find. That framing helped him raise money and win federal support, and it suited a man who never thought small.
A difficult, gifted man
Borglum had a way of attaching himself to grand and contested undertakings. Before Rushmore he had begun an enormous Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain in Georgia, a project that ended in a bitter break with its sponsors and the destruction of his early work there. He carried into the Black Hills both the experience of carving on a cliff and the habit of falling out with the people who paid the bills. Through the Rushmore years he feuded with commissioners, congressmen, and at times his own crew, and the project survived as much in spite of his temperament as because of his vision.
Yet the vision was real, and the technical achievement was largely his. He developed methods for transferring measurements from a studio model to the mountain at a fixed ratio, using a pointing system built on a horizontal bar and plumb line so that workers high on the cliff could mark where stone had to come away. He directed the use of dynamite for rough shaping with a precision that surprised observers, leaving only inches of rock to be removed by drilling and finishing. The men who did that labor, the drillers and powdermen and call boys, carried out his designs at considerable risk, and their part is described in the account of the carvers.
Borglum also planned more than faces. He imagined a great chamber cut into the canyon wall behind the heads, a Hall of Records to hold the founding documents and explain to distant generations what the carving meant. Funds and time ran short, and that ambition was left unfinished.
He worked at Rushmore from the late 1920s into 1941, through the lean years of the Depression, defending the appropriations, adjusting the design as flaws in the rock forced changes, and pressing always for more. He did not live to see it finished. He died in the spring of 1941, and the final season fell to his son Lincoln Borglum, who had grown up on the project and knew it as well as anyone alive.
What he left behind was the thing he had promised and more troublesome than he admitted, a carving on land the Lakota had never agreed to give up. The mountain bears his ambition plainly. So does the unresolved question beneath it.