Black Hills

Chapter 16 The Six Grandfathers

PAHA SAPA STEPS OFF THE BOTTOM STEP OF THE 506 STEPS down from the summit of Mount Rushmore and feels a wave of absolute exhaustion roll over him. He has to step aside and grab the railing just to remain standing. The other workers, most of them thirty to forty years younger than he, bound and joke and leap their way off the staircase, roughhousing, slapping, and shouting their way to the parking lot.

It is six p.m., and the direct sunlight has passed beyond the carved southern face of the mountain, but the waves of heat off the white granite hit Paha Sapa like a hot-knuckled fist. He has been up there all this long Friday, dangling from his cable and moving from site to site at the base of the three existing heads and the fourth field of white granite ready for carving the Roosevelt head, but only now does this absolute tsunami of fatigue and exhaustion strike him.

It is the cancer, he knows. The increasing and encroaching pain has been a factor, but one he’s been ready for and can deal with. This sudden weakness… Well, he is seventy-one years old, but he has never been weak before. Never.

Paha Sapa shakes his head to clear it, and sweat flies from his long, still-black braids.

—Old Man!

The August cicadas are loud and there is a buzzing in his ears, so at first Paha Sapa is not sure the cry is for him.

—Old Man! Billy! Hey, Slovak!

It is Mr. Borglum, standing between the hoist house and the path to the parking lot. Paha Sapa lets go of the railing and raises a weary hand. They meet in the clearing near where the shouting, laughing men are lining up to pick up their paychecks at the office.

—You all right, Billy?

—Sure.

—You looked… well, I guess pale isn’t the right word… fagged out. I need to show you something up on the mountain. You ready to head back up?

Paha Sapa turns his head toward the 506 steps of the stairway and wonders if he can climb them, even without his usual morning load of fifty or sixty pounds. His plan was to work all this Friday night to prepare and deliver the dynamite to a hiding place here—the site still to be determined—and then spend all of Saturday night placing the charges in time for President Roosevelt’s visit on Sunday. Now he wonders if he can even stagger up the stairs in this heat.

Borglum touches his back but only briefly. Paha Sapa rarely sweats so that others can notice—it’s been a long, bad joke on the site—but today his work shirt is soaked through.

—We’ll take the tram up.

Paha Sapa nods and follows Borglum to the aerial tramway platform below the hoist house. Edwald Hayes is acting as hoist operator this Friday afternoon and touches his dusty cap as Mr. Borglum approaches.

Paha Sapa hates the tramway but says nothing as he and Borglum squeeze themselves into the upright, small-outhouse-sized space and Borglum signs to Edwald to start the ride up.

Paha Sapa knows that his fear of the tramway cage falling is foolish; he spends every day of his working life dangling from a one-eighth-inch steel cable, and the tram is suspended from huge pulleys running on a seven-eighths-inch cable stretched from the hoist house on Doane Mountain to the A-frame above the Roosevelt head thirteen hundred feet away and four hundred feet above the valley floor. The cage itself is propelled by a three-eighths-inch cable driven by a large drive wheel at the hoist house.

But Paha Sapa—along with all the other men after the accident with the tram—knows that while that drive wheel is supposed to be fixed on its axle by a steel key, and both wheel hub and axle contain key seats for such a steel key, in truth the wheel has always been fastened by only a single setscrew driven through the hub and into the key seat of the axle itself. That setscrew worked itself loose at least once, breaking the hoist shaft and sending the cage whizzing unstoppedly down the long wire while plucking the entire A-frame and its platform off the top of the mountain.

Gutzon Borglum was scheduled to be in the tramway for that ride but arrived a few minutes late, so Edwald sent a load of water cans up instead. Those cans were thrown over two acres of Doane Mountain and smashed to bits. If Borglum had been on time, the Mount Rushmore project would, most likely, have been shut down after the death of its sculptor.

Borglum shows no nervousness now as they rise higher and higher above the mountain, toward the basin between the three existing heads, rising directly toward the patch of smooth white granite that has been prepared for the Teddy Roosevelt head.

There is no breeze. If anything, the heat up here is worse than down below, with the white rock on three sides of them focusing and radiating the stored heat from the day’s worth of blazing sunlight. The temperatures in Rapid City have broken all records; Paha Sapa guesses that it must be a hundred and twenty degrees or more here at the locus of all that white heat. He has been hanging and dangling and moving and drilling and working in it since seven a.m.

Borglum waves to Edwald far below, and the tram cage stops suddenly, swinging sickeningly back and forth. Both men hang on to the chest-high edge of the wooden cage itself, and Borglum has his hand on the guide wire. Now the sculptor reaches up and cranks down the emergency brake that Julian Spotts, the most recent bureaucrat to be put “in charge” of the project (Mr. Borglum is, always, the man really in charge), ordered added to the tramway system after another brake failure had sent some men hurtling to the bottom.

They are very high: past Washington, even with Jefferson’s eye, looking across the rough mass of rock that delineates Abraham Lincoln’s shock of hair from his forehead. The Theodore Roosevelt head has not been begun yet and is present only as a near-vertical swath of blindingly white granite awaiting the last careful blasts and then the carvers.

The tramcar quits swaying. Both men lean on the northwest side of the cage, looking down at the white granite.

To say that no work has been done on the Roosevelt head would be a lie. Over the past year, especially the productive four months of summer, Borglum has penetrated and had Paha Sapa blast away more than eighty feet of the original gray, wrinkled, rotten granite here on the south face of the Six Grandfathers. During all that blasting and carving away, only Borglum was confident that they would find carvable stone beneath the rotten rock. But they did, finally, and enough… barely… to carve the Roosevelt head.

If there are no mistakes.

The problem is that there is only so much rock left, and they have used most of it up. To any observer on Doane Mountain or in the valley below the heads, Mount Rushmore looks like a deep, solid mountain—one could imagine walking out onto the summit from the forest and mountaintop behind it—but that continuity is an illusion, as Paha Sapa knows from his hanblečeya there exactly sixty years ago to this day.

Behind the north face of the Six Grandfathers, behind the three presidents’ heads now emerging from the granite and the fourth head ready to be carved, there is a long and deep canyon. This split in the rock begins just north of the Lincoln head and runs southwest behind the heads for about 350 feet.

The first three heads, already emerged from stone, had adequate rock behind them. The Teddy Roosevelt head, set so far back and near the hidden vertical cliff of this hidden canyon, has only thirty feet of rock left from which to carve this last president. Another ten feet of looking for carvable rock after the eighty feet he blasted away, Paha Sapa knows, and they would have had to give up on Roosevelt; there simply would not have been enough good rock there to work with.

Borglum takes off his white Stetson, mops his brow with the red handkerchief from his back pocket, and clears his throat.

—We’re within five feet of the nose, Billy.

—Yes.

The heat from the white granite is palpable. Sickening. Paha Sapa tries to blink away the black spots swarming in his vision.

—I’ve scheduled you to work both tomorrow and Sunday in preparation for the president’s visit.

—Yes.

—There will be a lot of VIPs down there besides Roosevelt. Senator Norbeck’ll be here—I don’t know how he’s lasted this long with that jaw cancer of his. Governor Berry, of course. Tom wouldn’t miss rubbing up against a president, even if the president is a New Deal Democrat. A bunch of others, including Doane Robinson and Mary Ellis.

Mary Ellis is Gutzon Borglum’s daughter. Paha Sapa nods.

—So I want the demonstration blast to go off really smooth, Billy. Really smooth. Five charges. I figure beneath the fresh granite here, cheating a little toward Lincoln so it’ll be more visible. Who would you like to do the drilling for you tomorrow? Merle Peterson? Palooka?

Paha Sapa rubs his jaw. Sensation there and everywhere is muted because of the pain throughout his body.

—Yes, Payne would be good. He knows what I want for the charges even before I say it.

Paha Sapa and Jack “Palooka” Payne have been working together almost every day of the blazing summer on both the Lincoln head and the granite field being readied for Teddy Roosevelt.

Borglum nods.

—I’ll tell Lincoln to assign Palooka to you tomorrow. Anything else you need? I do want this demonstration blast to go smoothly.

Paha Sapa looks Borglum in the eye. The intelligence and determination he sees looking back is—has always been—almost frightening. Is frightening to most people.

—Well, Mr. Borglum, this is the president of the United States.

Borglum scowls. His displeasure at the reminder rolls off him in a wave that is as palpable as the late-August heat.

—Damn it, Billy, I know that. What’s your point?

—My point is that the president is usually met with a twenty-one-gun salute. Isn’t that the protocol?

Borglum grunts.

—Anyway, it wouldn’t take that much more effort for me tomorrow, especially if I have Palooka and Merle as drillers, to rig twenty-one charges from just to the left of Washington’s lapel all the way around to where we’ll be blasting Lincoln’s chin out someday. And I could rig them in a series, so everyone could tell there were twenty-one separate blasts.

Borglum seems lost in thought for a minute.

—They’d have to be fairly small charges, Billy. I don’t want to blow Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s eardrums out. I like the New Deal.

Paha Sapa knows that he should smile at this, but he’s too tired. And too much is riding on Borglum’s answer.

—Small charges, sir. Except for beneath TR and below Lincoln, where we do have to move some real rock. But they’ll sound the same. And I’ll pack enough loose rock around the charges that there’ll be plenty of dust and rock fall…. The civilians always love that during a demonstration.

Borglum considers for only a second longer.

—All right, a twenty-one-blast salute it is, then. Good idea. But don’t kill yourself—or Palooka and Merle—tomorrow getting the blast holes ready. This damned heat… Well, do your best.

Borglum squints up to where the sun is disappearing beyond Washington’s head.

—I’ve told Roosevelt’s people that he has to be here by noon. If he’s not here by noon, I’ll do the unveiling of Jefferson without him.

—Why’s that, Mr. Borglum?

Borglum turns his fiercest countenance toward Paha Sapa.

—The shadows, of course. Any later than noon, and the features of the three heads will become somewhat obscured. Roosevelt has to see Jefferson and the others at their best. I told his people—damned bureaucrats—that if the president isn’t here for the ceremony’s beginning at eleven thirty, the president can go fuck himself.

Paha Sapa only nods. After five years with Borglum, he is not surprised or appalled that the sculptor thinks he can boss around the president of the United States. He also knows that Borglum will wait until dusk if he has to. In the end, Gutzon Borglum needs the patronage of the rich and powerful, and he does what he has to in order to get it.

As if to refute this thought, Borglum almost growls his next statement.

—Billy, let’s skip that twenty-one-blast-salute idea. FDR’s president, and I’m all for the New Deal, but five charges should serve. If they go off at once, no one can tell the difference.

—Yes, sir. Can I still have Palooka as my driller?

Borglum grunts assent and leans on the latched door of the cage, looking across and down at the white slope that will be Teddy Roosevelt. The air still ripples with heat.

—Old Man, you can see Teddy Roosevelt’s head there, can’t you?

—Yes.

—You know, Billy, you’re the only one on this project, other than me, who can see the full head while it’s still in the rock. Even my son… Lincoln… has to go refer to the new version of the models to understand just what we’ll be doing, just what Theodore Roosevelt will look like when he comes out. But you, Billy, you have always seen the figures in the stone. I know you have. It’s a little uncanny.

Of course he can see it. Of course he always has been able. Didn’t he watch that fourth head and the three others—and their giant bodies—rising out of this soil and mountain like newborn giants clawing and chewing through their cauls sixty years ago? And, he realizes now, not for the first time, he has been one of the midwives for this unholy birth. By his own count, Paha Sapa has been personally responsible for blasting away more than 15,000 tons of rock from the side of the Six Grandfathers this shortened year alone. His own rough calculations have told him that in his five years here as powderman, Paha Sapa has moved and removed more than five hundred million pounds of stone—a good portion of the more than eight hundred million pounds of moved rock that the project will probably require before it is finished, including that which was moved before he came on the job—and every pound he has helped remove, every ounce, has felt to Paha Sapa exactly like carving into and removing the flesh of a living relative.

Mitakuye oyasin! All my relatives—every one!

The irony of the Lakota ending-discussion statement, the bonding statement that ends argument and planning and any further discussion of an issue, hits him harder than ever. He is betraying all his relatives, Paha Sapa realizes. Every one.

Suddenly, with a wave of nausea, he also realizes that he will fail in his mission.

For months, for years, he has planned this final blast—the one that will bring down the heads—but suddenly everything is rushed. He is out of time and out of energy. Just when he needs his strength, the gods are taking it away from him.

As Borglum drones on about future blasting on the TR site, Paha Sapa reviews his options.

His plan was to work all this night preparing and transporting the twenty crates of old, unstable dynamite he has stored in his shed in Keystone. Then hide it here on the site somewhere.

But where? He’s scoured Doane Mountain and all the other areas. He can’t place that many crates of explosive on the face of the mountain two days early—the crates would be detected for sure. There will be fifty men putting in unpaid overtime tomorrow, Saturday, rigging the huge flag that will hang over the Jefferson face for the ceremony, drilling, doing last-minute finishing work, working as Paha Sapa will be to prepare the demonstration charge for Sunday.

No, the crates have to be transported here tonight, Friday night, and hidden so that they remain out of sight until Saturday night, when—if his energy returns—Paha Sapa can get the dynamite up onto the mountain and out onto the faces and concealed the way he has planned, and rigged and wired to detonators and his master detonators for Sunday’s final blast in full view of the president of the United States and the reporters and the newsreel cameras.

But he’s found no hiding place that will work. There are no guards, per se, on the Monument site, but various people—including Borglum and his family—live in the cluster of cabins on Doane Mountain. Any arrival of a truck in the middle of the night or starting up of the equipment would be heard at once. And investigated.

And there is simply no place secret enough to hide the twenty crates of dynamite for the busy Saturday ahead. Paha Sapa has considered the various storage sheds, including the huge one holding the delivered but never-used submarine engines now rusting away there, but the place is too close to Borglum’s and his son’s living quarters.

Borglum drones on.

Paha Sapa moves closer to him and stealthily lifts the latch to the tram cage’s door, hiding the motion with the bulk of his body. They are both leaning against that door now.

Paha Sapa knows how strong Gutzon Borglum is: the strength of the sculptor’s powerful arms and body are second only to the strength of his personality. In his suddenly weakened state, Paha Sapa knows that he could not win a fight or wrestling match with the always wary Wasicun, but all he has to do here is swing open the door with his left hand and throw himself forward against Borglum, sending both him and the sculptor out through the sudden emptiness where the door and fourth wall of the cage had been. They are more than three hundred feet above the valley floor.

Paha Sapa tenses his muscles. He is sorry now that he has never composed his Death Song. Limps-a-Lot was correct in saying that only arrogant men waited to do this important thing. He could not sing it aloud now, but he could be singing it in his mind as he throws himself against Borglum and as the two fall, entangled, kicking and gouging, all the way to the gray boulder field below.

Will Borglum curse and fight? wonders Paha Sapa. Will I scream despite myself ?

He hesitates. The carving of the heads is far along. Paha Sapa knows that Borglum anticipates never actually finishing the Mount Rushmore Monument; he sees himself working on it for another twenty years, twenty-five, thirty, for the rest of his life. But even with the addition of the ill-fated (until now) Entablature project and the Hall of Records in the canyon behind, a job almost equal to the carving of the Four Heads themselves, Paha Sapa knows that Borglum anticipates the bulk of the project being finished before the end of the 1940s.

Can his son, Lincoln, finish the project? Paha Sapa knows and admires Lincoln, so unlike his father in everything except courage and resolve, and thinks that he might well be up to the task. If the Park Service does not cancel the project for some unforeseen reason. If the federal money does not dry up.

But it has not dried up—at least permanently—through the worst the Depression has thrown at them so far. Current funding for 1936 and beyond looks strong, stronger than at any time in the project’s shaky history. And this new supervisor, Spotts, is a man who gets things done. And if FDR arrives less than two days from now not only to be present during the dedication of the Jefferson head but to mourn the death of the sculptor behind this grand idea—Paha Sapa can see in his mind’s eye the heads shrouded in black crepe rather than Jefferson covered with an American flag—the president could be so moved that he vows more money to complete the project, including the Hall of Records, ahead of schedule. And Lincoln Borglum would carry on his father’s dream into the 1940s and…

The Hall of Records.

Realizing how close he is to falling out with Borglum even without the shove, Paha Sapa secretly slides the door latch back into place.

Borglum is speaking to him.

—So let’s go up and have a look.

The sculptor reaches over his Stetsoned head and tugs down on the chain that releases the brake arm. Then he waves to Edwald far below.

The cage jerks and sways wildly for a moment and steadies itself only as they begin rising toward the top of the unstarted TR head. If Paha Sapa had not latched the cage door when he did, the swaying alone would have thrown the two of them out.

They glide through heated air above gouged granite to the summit of the Six Grandfathers.

PAHA SAPA FIRST SAW GUTZON BORGLUM through billowing clouds of steam and dissipating blasting smoke as the sculptor stepped out of the cage into Mineshaft Number Nine a mile below the surface near the town of Lead. The sculptor had come looking for a powderman listed on the Homestake Mine rolls as Billy Slovak.

He’d heard about Borglum for years, of course: the man wanted by the entire state of Georgia for single-handedly ruining their Stone Mountain monument; the arrogant SOB who drove his yellow roadster into South Dakota gas stations and expected the attendants to fill the tanks for free simply because he was the Gutzon Borglum; the fanatic who fielded the only baseball team in thirty miles that could take on the Homestake boys—and who treated baseball as a blood sport (in the Black Hills, Paha Sapa knew, baseball had always been a blood sport) but who had his team ally with the Homestake Nine when it came to beating the shit out of the vicious Cee Cee (Civilian Conservation Core) bastards.

This was the man Paha Sapa had heard and read about who was tearing the heart and guts out of the Six Grandfathers in an arrogant attempt to carve the heads of US presidents into a mountain sacred to nine Indian nations. And Paha Sapa had no doubt whatsoever that this Borglum person never even knew, much less cared, that Indians everywhere, and the majority of South Dakotan white people, for that matter, thought that carving mountains in the Black Hills was a defilement.

This was the man who stepped out of the steam and blasting smoke, his short, stocky torso backlit by work lights, the thin beam of light from his borrowed mining helmet weak in the fog of dust and smoke and powder, and began bellowing into the endless hole of shaft nine…

—Slovak! Is there a Billy Slovak here! Slovak!

Paha Sapa had taken the name for mining work thirty years earlier, when he’d moved back to the Hills with baby Robert after Rain’s death, leaving Pine Ridge Reservation with no doubts or regrets. He needed money. The Holy Terror Mine had been open then—a death trap—and was still owned by the man who’d named the mine after his wife, who was indeed a holy terror. But the working conditions in that mine were so terrible—especially for powdermen, who lasted about three months—that the owner, William “Rocky Mountain Frank” Franklin, would hire, they said, even a redskin if the man knew how to set a charge properly.

Paha Sapa didn’t know how to do that, but he learned quickly under one Tarkulich “Big Bill” Slovak, an older immigrant who said that he’d known six words of English when he came to America and started work as a seventeen-year-old powderman in the Brooklyn Bridge caisson under the East River in 1870, five of those words being “Run!” “Get down!” and “Look out!” Paha Sapa survived as Big Bill Slovak’s assistant for thirty-four months, and somehow the name Billy Slow Horse on the payroll became Billy Slovak, right beneath the older man’s name. Then Big Bill had died in a cave-in (not of his own making), and “Billy Slovak” resigned before the Holy Terror was shut down for the first time in 1903—not for lack of gold, but from insolvency due to all the lawsuits from families of all the miners killed or maimed in accidents there.

But Paha Sapa left that hellhole with memories of Big Bill’s constant monologues about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, with a work card with the name Billy Slovak on it, and with recommendations saying that he was an able powderman.

Borglum and Paha Sapa stood there talking in the roiling dust and smoke and steam and Paha Sapa’s thought was Why in God’s name did the Homestake owners let you come down here to steal their men?

But they had, and that’s why Borglum was there—he had assumed that this “Billy Slovak” would instantly know who he was and what he was doing in the Hills—and he offered Paha Sapa the job as assistant powderman for four dollars more a month than the sixty-six-year-old Indian was making in the Homestake.

And Paha Sapa saw what he could do to the Four Stone Giants who were emerging from his sacred hills and he agreed on the spot—he would have agreed if Borglum had offered him no pay at all.

And then they shook hands on it.

It was not quite like the flowing-in-vision with Crazy Horse, but it was far more like that than the sudden forward-seeing visions he’d shared with so many others. Gutzon Borglum’s life and memories did start flowing into Paha Sapa through that handshake, but somehow Borglum seemed to sense that something was happening—perhaps the man had his own vision abilities—and the sculptor jerked his hand away before all of his life, past and future, and all of his secrets, flowed to Paha Sapa the way Crazy Horse’s had.

In the months that followed, when Paha Sapa had the time to open his own defenses to allow Borglum’s memories in, he realized that, unlike with Crazy Horse, there were no future memories there. It would have pleased Paha Sapa if there had been. If Borglum, only two years Paha Sapa’s junior, was going to outlive him—which would be the case if Paha Sapa succeeded in his plan—he could have seen his plan succeed in Borglum’s future memories, the way he had seen the death of Crazy Horse. Paha Sapa would have seen his own death.

Instead, Borglum’s captured thoughts and memories were all prior to the day the two men met and made physical contact in late January of 1931, and when Paha Sapa had the time and inclination, he picked through the sculptor’s life like a man raking through the ashes of a burned-down home. Even the shards were complex.

Paha Sapa must have been the only man working for Borglum who knew that the woman whom the sculptor claimed as his mother in his already-published autobiography was actually his mother’s older sister. It took some raking for Paha Sapa to understand.

Borglum’s officially listed parents, Jens Møller Haugaard Borglum and Ida Mikkelsen Borglum, had been Danish immigrants. But they were also Mormons who’d made the trip to America with other Danish converts to live and work in the “New Zion” that Mormons were erecting near the Great Salt Lake somewhere in the desert of a territory called Utah. Jens Borglum and his wife, Ida, had gone west with the wagon trains, although they could only afford a pushcart.

A year after they reached Utah, they brought Ida’s younger sister, eighteen-year-old Christina, over from Denmark to join them. As was the custom with the isolated, insulated Mormons at that time, Jens took Christina as his second wife. They moved to Idaho, where, in 1867, young Christina bore her husband a son, John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum. Then, back in Utah, Christina had another son, Solon Hannibal de la Mothe Borglum.

But the railroad was connecting the nation and the railroad passed straight through Ogden, the city where the Borglums lived. And with that connection isolation ended and national outrage at the Mormons’ practice of polygamy poured in. Congress, the newspapers, and an endless stream of newly arrived non-Mormons expressed their outrage over what they considered a barbarous, non-Christian practice.

Jens took his wives and children and headed east on that same railroad. In Omaha, knowing the discrimination that awaited them, Gutzon Borglum’s real mother, Christina, withdrew from the marriage, stayed on briefly as a “housekeeper,” and then left the family to go live with another sister. She later remarried.

Jens Borglum went to the Missouri Medical College, studied homeopathic medicine, changed his name to Dr. James Miller Borglum, and set up a medical practice in Fremont, Nebraska. There young Gutzon grew up in some small confusion, since his and his brother Solon’s official and public mother was actually their aunt.

All this seemed unimportant but fascinated Paha Sapa as he allowed Borglum’s childhood and young-adult memories to filter through in the months after they first met.

The first image that Paha Sapa was struck with was much more recent: the fifty-seven-year-old Borglum in 1924, already a self-proclaimed world-famous sculptor, high on the cliff face of Stone Mountain in Georgia, shoving large working models of General Stonewall Jackson’s and General Robert E. Lee’s heads to smash on boulders far below; the sculptor ordering a worker to take a sledgehammer to the huge twelve-by-twenty-four-foot working model of the seven figures of the famous Confederates (identities of four of them yet to be determined) who were supposed to fill Stone Mountain in what would have been the largest and greatest sculpture in the world.

The damned Georgians weren’t going to fully fund him, they wanted to bring in another sculptor, and he—John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum—would be God-damned to hell if he let those Southern redneck bastards have any of the fruit of his labors there.

Paha Sapa looked at these recent memories as if recalling a vivid, violent dream and watched as Borglum, finished with smashing and burning and destroying everything—working models, plans, maquettes, busts, designs for giant projectors and platforms, everything—then ran like a rabbit for North Carolina.

The state of Georgia still had warrants out for the famous sculptor.

So, in the end, Paha Sapa realized those first months of inhabiting some of Borglum’s memories and old thoughts, Crazy Horse and sculptor Gutzon Borglum were very much alike after all. Both had been driven from childhood to achieve some violent greatness. Each saw himself as singled out by the gods for great deeds and accolades. Each had dedicated his life to goals of his ego, even if achieving those goals meant using others, casting them aside, and lying and hurting when necessary.

Borglum had never lifted another man’s scalp or ridden naked through enemy fire, as Crazy Horse had done repeatedly, but Paha Sapa now saw that the sculptor had counted coup in his own way. Many times.

He also could see—thanks to his years talking to Doane Robinson and to the three Jesuits at the little tent school above Deadwood almost sixty years earlier—that while Gutzon Borglum’s heritage was Danish, his attitude toward life was essentially classically Greek. That is, Borglum believed in the agon: the Homeric idea that every two things on earth must compete to be compared and then sorted into one of three categories—equal to, less than, or greater than.

Gutzon Borglum was not a man who would settle for anything other than “greater than.”

In the fragments and shards of ego-distorted memory, Paha Sapa saw Borglum as a brash twenty-two-year-old would-be painter who went to Europe and studied under an expatriate American artist named Elizabeth “Liza” Jayne Putnam. Although she was eighteen years older than Borglum and infinitely more sophisticated, he married her, learned from her, and then discarded her and returned to America to create his own studio. Once in New York in 1902, Borglum opened his studio and promptly contracted typhoid fever and had a nervous breakdown.

Borglum’s brother, Solon—the only sibling born from his own real mother, now unacknowledged and only the most distant of memories—was a renowned sculptor, so Borglum decided to become a sculptor. A better and more famous sculptor.

Borglum’s discarded wife, Liza, now fifty-two, rushed to America to nurse her younger husband out of his illness and melancholia, but she learned that Borglum had already begun that healing by meeting a young Wellesley graduate, Miss Mary Montgomery, on the boat from Europe. Miss Montgomery—quite young, quite passionate, intensely well-educated and opinionated (but never so much that she contradicted Borglum or his ego)—was to be, of course, the Mrs. Borglum that Paha Sapa and all the other workers at Mount Rushmore knew so well.

Doane Robinson, who had come up with the idea of carving figures into the dolomite spires in the Black Hills to attract tourists, had seen the virile, aggressive, self-confident Gutzon Borglum as the salvation of his—Doane’s—dream of massive sculptures in the Hills. But over the past five years, as more shards of Borglum’s memory surfaced through the ash for Paha Sapa, he has seen that—especially after the debacle at Stone Mountain in Georgia—the Mount Rushmore project, enlarged and aggrandized as it constantly was by the sculptor, was actually the salvation of Gutzon Borglum.

In 1924, while the Georgia State Police were still hunting for Borglum and just after an innocent Doane Robinson had approached the sculptor (and, perhaps more important, just after Doane Robinson, South Dakota’s Senator Peter Norbeck, and Congressman William Williamson had sponsored a bill appropriating $10,000 toward the project), Borglum was fifty-seven years old. In October of 1927, when the actual drilling on the mountain first began, Borglum was sixty years old. (Paha Sapa had heard that the sculptor, Borglum, had announced that the Washington head would be completed “within a twelvemonth” and that there “would be no dynamite blasting”… that all the carving of the mountain would be done by drill and by chisel. Paha Sapa had smiled at that, thinking of the tens and tens of thousands of tons of granite that would have to be moved just to find carvable stone. He knew even before Borglum did that 98 percent of the work on Mount Rushmore, if the project actually proceeded, would be done by blasting.)

There are hundreds of memories and powerful images that flowed into Paha Sapa that black day deep down in shaft nine of the Homestake Mine, before Borglum sensed some deeper connection in the handshake and abruptly pulled away (but did not rescind his job offer, whatever his temporary uneasiness), some of the memories, of course, explicitly sexual, some felonious, but Paha Sapa tries to avoid these, just as he long ago would have shut his ears to the lusty ramblings of the Custer ghost, if he’d been able to. Despite Paha Sapa’s sacred gift of these visions, he hates intruding on other human beings’ privacy.

Borglum is sixty-nine years old this August day as he rides to the summit of the mountain with the powderman he thinks of as Billy Slovak, just two years younger than Paha Sapa, and thus far three of the four great Heads have emerged from the stone, and these only partially. The sculptor plans to reveal much of their upper bodies and some arms and hands. And Borglum has more ambitious plans for the mountain—the Entablature, the Hall of Records. Gigantic projects in and of themselves. But Paha Sapa knows that Borglum has no worries about his age or health or about time itself; Borglum, he knows, plans to live forever.

THEY REACH THE TOP and step out of the cage and Borglum strides to where some of the boys have spent the day preparing the framework and armature of the crane that will drape the huge American flag over Jefferson and then lift and swing the flag back to reveal the head. The sculptor is talking, but Paha Sapa keeps walking along the ridgeline, past the crane and Jefferson.

From up here, one can see—feel—how very narrow the ridge of rock is between the blasted-in trough in which three of the four heads are emerging and the unseen wall of the canyon behind this ridge. When—if—the Teddy Roosevelt head is finished, the ledge between the carved face on one side and the vertical drop to the canyon on the other side will be narrow enough that it might make people nervous to stand on it.

Paha Sapa sees the crevice in the rock and the patch of soil where he dug his Vision Pit sixty years minus two days earlier. He continues along the ridge to the northwest.

Atop the heavily faulted knobs along the ridge above where the four heads are emerging, there’s a small village of structures—wooden cranes, winches, winch houses, stairways spidering up and down the rocky knobs, wooden platforms, A-frame supports for the tramway and other devices, the vertical mast and the horizontal boom of the pointing machine that translates the scale models in Borglum’s studio below into the carving on the actual mountain. There is also one shack big enough for some of the men to crowd into during lightning storms or hail, outhouses, and various storehouses, including one set apart just for dynamite storage. (Paha Sapa has considered storing his extra twenty crates of dynamite there, of course, but the chances of it being discovered, even in just the one day he needs before deploying the charges, are simply too great. Alfred Berg, “Spot” Denton, and the other powdermen are in and out of there all the time.)

Far along the ridge, all by itself, is one small exposed post and steel winch platform. It’s smaller than all the ones clustered above the heads and it’s on the wrong side of the ridge, overhanging the vertical drop into the narrow dead-end canyon that lies behind the visible face of what the wasichu insist on calling Mount Rushmore.

Paha Sapa steps out onto the platform. The two-hundred-foot drop is precipitous and somehow seems worse than the exposure on the south face where the heads are emerging. The canyon below is narrow, claustrophobic even to look down into, and littered with massive tumbled boulders. The evening shadows have filled almost all of the narrow defile now, but Paha Sapa can still make out what he’s come to see: on the opposite wall of the granite cliff, far below, there is a single square—no, a rectangle—of black, five feet tall by six feet wide, almost lost to the shadows.

Paha Sapa knows what it is because he helped blast it out the previous autumn: a twenty-foot test shaft for Borglum’s future Hall of Records.

He suddenly feels the sculptor standing close behind him.

—Damn it, Billy. What are you doing farting around over here?

—Just thinking about the Hall of Records, Boss.

—Why? We won’t get to it until next year. Maybe the year after that.

—Yes, but I’m trying to remember all the things you said about it, Mr. Borglum. How deep it’ll go. What’ll be in it.

Borglum squints at him. The sculptor is looking directly into the setting sun, but much of the squint is suspicion.

—Damn it, Old Man. Are you getting senile on me already?

Paha Sapa shrugs. His gaze goes back to the tiny black rectangle more than two hundred feet below.

But Borglum cannot resist giving a speech.

—Next to the carvings themselves, Billy, the Hall of Records will be the greatest thing in America. There’s going to be a grand stairway—broad, majestic, carved out of white granite—coming all the way up from the valley and into and up the canyon itself, with level areas with benches so that people can rest along the way and observe various statues and historical markers. We’re going to have busts of famous Americans—some of you Indians included, Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, whatshername, the girl that went with Lewis and Clark—lining the grand stairway all the way up and into the canyon. It’ll be lighted at night… glorious! Then, just when the people think it can’t get any more glorious, they’ll come to the Hall of Records itself… there, right down there where I had you and Merle and the others open that test shaft. The hall’s entrance will be a single polished-stone panel forty feet high. It’ll have inlaid mosaics made from gold and the world’s best lapus lazuli, and the mosaics surmounted by a symbol of the United States of America… maybe it’s a symbol of your people as well… a single bas-relief American eagle with a wingspread of thirty-nine feet. Then the door itself, the entrance… it’ll be some twenty feet high by fourteen feet wide… they’ll be cast-glass doors, Billy, transparent but as permanent as the mountain. Those doors’ll open into the high chamber, which will be eighty feet wide and a hundred feet long. There’ll be three hundred and sixty feet of wall space in that high chamber and all of it beautifully paneled and recessed to a depth of thirty inches. There’ll be permanent indirect lighting there. It’ll be beautiful day or night. Into those recesses will be built illuminated bronze-and-glass cabinets in which we’ll place all the records of the United States… hell, of the Western World, of civilization itself… the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address… all of it… and not just political stuff, Billy, but all the documents that show the glory of our civilization, show it to people and people’s descendants a thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand and five hundred thousand years from now: documents of science and art and literature and invention and medicine. I know what you’re thinking—that paper documents like that don’t last thousands of years, much less hundreds of thousands. That’s why all these documents, the Declaration, the Constitution, all of them, are going to be typed up onto and into sheets of aluminum and then rolled and protected in tubes of alloyed steel that’ll last damn near forever. We’ll seal those cabinets… hell, I don’t know when, nineteen forty-eight maybe, or fifty-eight, or sixty-five, I don’t care… but I plan to be here, trust me on that… and once sealed, those cabinets will be opened only by an act of Congress… if Congress lasts that long, which I heartily doubt. And on the wall above those cabinets, Billy, extending around the entire long hall, there’s going to be a bas-relief, carved into bronze and plated with gold, that will show the whole adventure of humanity discovering and occupying and building up and perfecting the western world… us, our United States of America. And beyond that first main hallway there are going to be wide, brightly lighted tunnels going to more rooms and repositories, each one illustrated with its own murals, each one dedicated to a specific aspect of our time and glory… maybe even a room for statues of women who’ve made something of themselves, even just pests, like that Susan B. Anthony that those damned feminists keep demanding I carve there next to Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln…. I tell them the truth, that we’re out of good carving rock there forever, Billy, but down here in the Hall of Records, for generations, for centuries…

Borglum pauses, and Paha Sapa does not know if he’s become self-conscious about the length of his speech or has simply run out of breath. He suspects the latter. But he doesn’t really care. He just wanted the sculptor to go on babbling for a few minutes so that he could keep looking down into the now shadow-filled canyon and see the solution to his problem.

The test bore shaft for the Hall of Records. Only five feet high by six feet wide and twenty feet deep, but plenty of room in which to store his twenty crates of unstable dynamite tonight. And then, on Saturday night and into the wee hours of Sunday morning—with the help of just one winch operator, the dim-witted ex–Rushmore worker named Mune Mercer, already warned to be ready for some “special night work Mr. Borglum wants”—Paha Sapa will winch those twenty crates up here to the ridgetop, right here almost within touching distance of his Vision Pit, and then Mune will handle the winches on this side as Paha Sapa drops down on his cable, dancing in that unearthly gravity he’s grown to dream about, the toes of his boots touching the faces only every twenty feet or so, as he places the twenty crates of dynamite in his pre-prepared spots and rigs the detonation wires that will blow the three existing Heads and the rock for the fourth waiting Head right off the side of this mountain forever. As Mr. Borglum has just said—there’s no more good rock here to carve from, forevermore.

He turns and looks at the fiercely squinting sculptor.

—It’s an incredible and wonderful vision, Mr. Borglum. A truly wonderful vision.