Black Hills

Epilogue

GUTZON BORGLUM’S VISION OF MOUNT RUSHMORE WAS NEVER COMPLETED.

Besides specific plans to finish carving elements of Washington’s, Jefferson’s, and Lincoln’s upper bodies, including coats and lapels, with Abraham Lincoln’s left arm and hand grasping his lapel to be finished in some detail, Borglum also insisted on the necessity of completing the long-planned Entablature and the Hall of Records, which had already been begun.

Originally, as part of Borglum’s search for money and official support in the late 1920s, the Entablature was to be a huge area of the mountain to the right of the four heads, words chiseled onto a flattened, clean white surface in the shape of the Louisiana Territory, each letter of each word taller than a man. It was (according to Borglum’s insistence and early announcements) to have carried an appropriate passage to be written by Calvin Coolidge. Borglum had begged Coolidge to compose this message when the president was there at the first dedication of the Mount Rushmore site in 1927, and Coolidge had reluctanctly promised to do so.

The ex-president began slowly composing his message to people a hundred thousand years in the future after he’d left office in 1929, and in 1930 he’d completed the first two paragraphs, which were released to the world’s press by Gutzon Borglum. The world’s press almost hurt itself laughing and criticizing Coolidge’s stilted Entablature Message. In private, Coolidge was furious because these two paragraphs were not the paragraphs he had written. With typical arrogance, Borglum had taken the liberty of rewriting them before releasing them to the press.

Despite the ex-president’s privately expressed anger, Borglum had begun the actual carving on the Entablature site, blasting and carving in a giant 1776 where the first paragraph would go. Coolidge then withdrew from the whole affair. Despite pleas from the Mount Rushmore Commission, the ex-president refused to write another word. In the following year, 1931, the retired president asked a friend, Paul Bellamy, who was visiting Coolidge at the ex-president’s home in Massachusetts, just how far Bellamy thought the distance was “from here to the Black Hills.” Bellamy opined that he thought it must be about fifteen hundred miles.

“Well, y’know, Mr. Bellamy,” said Coolidge while drawing on his cigar, “that’s about as close to Mr. Borglum as I care to be.”

Coolidge died in 1933. Undaunted, Borglum brought his Entablature idea to the Hearst newspaper chain in 1934, suggesting that there should be a national contest, open to all Americans, to write the Entablature “manuscript.” Borglum was willing to offer cash, medals (designed by himself, of course), and a college scholarship to the winner.

The National Park Service, which was overseeing the Mount Rushmore Project by then, thought it was a terrible idea and so did Borglum’s and Mount Rushmore’s most faithful and successful backer, South Dakota’s Senator Peter Norbeck. Borglum ignored their warnings and concerns and went ahead with the national contest, convincing FDR to be on the judging committee along with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, nine US senators, and a sprinkling of other notables. The Underwood Typewriter Company agreed to donate twenty-two new typewriters as prizes.

In 1935, the judging committee, including President Roosevelt and the First Lady, made its recommendation for five finalists. Borglum didn’t like them and tossed them all out. The grand prize was finally won by a young Nebraska man named William Burkett, and the money and scholarship allowed Burkett to attend four years of college during the depths of the Depression. Burkett was so grateful that he asked to be buried in the unfinished Hall of Records, where, in 1975, the Park Service installed a seven-foot-tall bronze plaque bearing the full script of his winning Rushmore Entablature Contest essay. The Park Service denied his request.

The Hall of Records and the giant carved stairway leading to it were central parts of Gutzon Borglum’s design for the Mount Rushmore “Shrine to Democracy,” and he started serious work on the entrance tunnel in the winter of 1938–39. Both the noise of the jackhammers in the confined space and the incredible amount of fine dust kicked up made work in the tunnel dangerous and almost unbearable. Borglum pressed on.

In the summer of 1939, Congressman Francis Case, on behalf of the appropriations committee, personally looked into working conditions inside the advancing Hall of Records entrance hallway and reported that working conditions there were nearly impossible and that the odds for the workers contracting silicosis and then suing the government were too high.

Work on the Hall of Records ceased forever with the blowing of a whistle on a July afternoon in 1939. After workmen left the mountain in 1941, it was discovered that mountain goats had taken up residence in the 14-foot-wide-by-20-foot-high tunnel that ran 75 feet into the mountain.

The Theodore Roosevelt head, the fourth and last figure to be completed on Mount Rushmore, was officially dedicated on the night of July 2, 1939, nine years after the George Washington head had been unveiled. That night was the first time the Mount Rushmore faces were fully lighted—however briefly—and Borglum did so first by skyrockets and aerial bombs and then by a battery of twelve powerful searchlights being switched on. Singer Richard Irving sang Irving Berlin’s brand-new song, “God Bless America.” Although President Roosevelt did not attend, some 12,000 guests turned out for this dedication of the final head, and silent-movie cowboy star William S. Hart and a group of “Sioux Indian dancers in full regalia” added excitement to the evening.

Borglum announced that he had years, if not decades, of work still ahead of him at Mount Rushmore. Much “bumping”—refining of the facial features by specialized pneumatic hammers—remained, and he still had to blast out and carve the upper bodies, Lincoln’s hand, and so forth. Nor had he given up hope on the Hall of Records; he was looking at improved ventilation and other work safety features to put into place as soon as the funds flowed again.

In February of 1941, Borglum had begun a new charm offensive with FDR and Congress—insisting to the president that funding had to be improved so that the “Shrine of Democracy” could be fully finished, as he had promised Roosevelt in 1936, during the president’s time in office. Borglum set off for Washington to argue for increased funding—as he had every spring for the past fourteen years—and this time his wife, Mary, went with him. They stopped off in Chicago so that Borglum could give a speech and while there, Borglum saw a specialist about a prostate problem he’d been having.

The doctor recommended surgery and Borglum decided to get it out of the way immediately so that he could lead the spring work rush back at Mount Rushmore.

A series of blood clots from the surgery kept Borglum in the hospital for two weeks, and on February 28 a messenger arrived with the crushing news that President Roosevelt was cutting all non-defense spending to the bone and would no longer approve moneys for projects such as Mount Rushmore.

On March 6, 1941, exactly one week after he received the news from Roosevelt and after a series of embolisms created by more blood clots, Gutzon Borglum died in the Chicago hospital.

Many of the workers who’d labored on Mount Rushmore for almost fifteen years thought that Borglum’s body should be interred in the unfinished Hall of Records hallway tunnel, but the Park Service would not consider such a thing. Borglum’s remains were temporarily interred in Chicago and then moved to Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, three years later. A memorial service for Borglum was held for the workers and local friends of the boss in Keystone’s white-steepled Congregational church.

The Park Service, Congress, and the Mount Rushmore Commission were ready to shut down work that very week, but the Mount Rushmore workers petitioned the commission to appoint Borglum’s son, Lincoln, as the new director and to go on and “complete the work as to his father’s wishes.”

The commission agreed, but it was only a token gesture. With only $50,000 in funds remaining, the twenty-nine-year-old Lincoln Borglum focused the last months of work on finishing up some of the fine details on Teddy Roosevelt’s face and doing some final touch-ups of George Washington’s collar and lapels.

That last summer season of work went very well and seemed, at least to a visiting outsider, like all the other productive summers of work, with baseball games by the Rushmore team, horseplay coming down the 506 steps on Friday, Saturday night dances, free Sunday afternoon motion pictures at Lincoln Borglum’s place, and lots of hungover men not receiving to-MAH-to juice after climbing the 506 stairs on Monday morning.

But it wasn’t the same, and every man still working on the project knew it. Nothing in the increasingly alarming world in the autumn of 1941 seemed quite the same.

The last whistle blew and the last pneumatic drill and bumper fell silent on Mount Rushmore on October 31, 1941.

THE STORY OF PAHA SAPA’S SON Robert’s Jewish-Belgian father-in-law, Monsieur Vanden Daelen Adler, was later told in the 1955 book Survival of a Belgian Jewish Diamond Cutter and was turned into the low-budget 1959 movie Diamonds or Death, starring Macdonald Carey as Adler and Ruth Roman as Adler’s wife (“Zigmond” in real life, “Suzanne” in the film) with the twenty-five-year-old Maggie Smith, in only her second film role, playing “Renée.” The film, never released on VHS or DVD, is known today to historians for the wonderful deep-focus photography by Paul Beeson and by its moody, totally inappropriate-to-the-subject score by jazz trumpeter Dizzy Reece. Some Star Trek fanatics are aware of the film due to the brief and rather awkward appearance in it of actor Leonard Nimoy (credited in the movie as “Leonard Nemoy”) as the Nazi sidekick to the Gestapo officer “Heinrich” who was so obsessed with stopping the Adler family from fleeing Belgium. (“Heinrich,” overplayed by Henry Rowland, had been an uncredited Nazi officer in the infinitely superior Casablanca seventeen years earlier. Nemoy-Nimoy had only four lines in the movie, but his atrocious German accent with those four lines somehow is well-known to serious Star Trek fans.)

In reality, diamond cutter turned diamond merchant Vanden Daelen Adler had one of the greatest success stories of any Jew seeking to get his family out of Belgium before World War II.

When the war broke out in 1939, Belgium had a population of around nine million people, some 90,000 of them Jews. More than 80,000 of these Jews were concentrated in the two major cities of Brussels and Antwerp. More than three-fourths of Belgian Jews before the war were self-employed, with the majority of these involved in diamond cutting or the selling of diamonds. The diamond trade in the port city of Antwerp was almost completely in Jewish hands.

Germany invaded and occupied neutral Belgium in May of 1940. Thousands of Jews fled Belgium during the invasion and thousands more were deported to France (where they would soon fall under German control again), so that by November of 1940, there were an estimated 55,000 Jews remaining in the country. Reports of the number of Belgian Jews killed during the war vary greatly, ranging from an American prosecution exhibit at the Nuremberg War Crime trials that “approximately 50,000” Jews deported from Belgium were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers between April 1942 and April 1944, to claims by some Belgian historians that “more than half of the Jewish population of Belgium survived the war” to arguments by even more recent revisionist historians that “Belgium lost virtually none of its native Jewish population.” The so-called Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry announced in 1946 that, out of a total of 5.7 million European Jews who perished during the war years, 57,000 were Jews from Belgium. One Jewish historian later put the number at 26,000. No two historians seem to agree.

As one of the first wealthy Belgian Jews to take the rise of Hitler seriously and then take early action, Monsieur Vanden Daelen Adler’s plan was to get all of his extended family out of continental Europe by October of 1936.

It helped that in 1936 the four most important diamond exchanges in Belgium (of which about 80 percent of the merchants were Jews) united in the Federatie der Belgische Diamantbeurzen diamond federation. Vanden Daelen Adler was elected the first chairman of that federation.

If he’d wanted to, Adler could have easily stolen diamonds or cash for his purposes, but instead he used his own wealth, which was considerable (almost $1 million in 1936, equivalent to more than $15 million today). He had a list of 124 family members whom he thought he could get out of Europe in 1936: the majority of these family members outside of Belgium were in France (from whence his family had emigrated to Belgium in the 1780s), but some were in other European countries, including Germany. Adler saved 85 of them. The rest, for various reasons, refused to leave.

In 1936, immigration laws in England, the United States, and most other countries were designed to keep Jews—even wealthy Jews—out, but Vanden Daelen Adler had been working for three years bribing officials and greasing those rules. Those family members he could not get to England or the United States (where he sent his elderly mother, two sisters, his daughter, his granddaughter, and her future husband), he managed to get to Latin America. Adler did not trust any place in Europe as being safe from the Nazis, and in 1936 he was having second thoughts about England. He did help twelve of his relatives and in-laws gain secret passage to Palestine, although it was a risky trip. Adler later admitted to his biographer that, in spite of his later success as a diamond merchant in the United States, he wished he himself had emigrated to Palestine so that he could have helped create the state of Israel.

Adler’s position as chairman of the Federatie der Belgische Diamantbeurzen in those final months of his preparations for the family exodus helped immensely. No one in Antwerp or Belgium questioned his many trips to England, the United States, or other countries. And—except for some rare stamps—diamonds are the most portable form of wealth known to humankind.

Vanden Daelen Adler would later say that his proudest achievement, after having saved eighty-five members of his extended family (not including himself), was that after doing so, he arrived in the United States with less than a hundred dollars left from his original wealth of almost $1 million. By 1940, Adler’s new diamond business in the United States had regained most of his fortune but he spent a large part of that wealth to buy guns and other weapons for Palestine after the war to help create a Jewish state.

Adler died of a heart attack in 1948, just three weeks after Israel came into existence.

DR. ROBERT ADLER OCHS, born in Denver, Colorado, in 1937, was once quoted as saying, “My profession is physics; my religion is humanity.”

It’s true that Ochs began blending his brilliant career in physics and his ability to explain science to the public at a relatively young age. His first book, The Existential Joys of Physics, became a modest bestseller and an alternate Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1960, when Ochs was only twenty-three years old. His 1974 book, Mankind and Mystery: Science Looks at the Cosmos, remains one of the top five bestselling popular science books in publishing history. In the late 1970s, Ochs’s discursive, almost casual BBC series Man, Mystery, and Science, using Jacob Bronowski’s technique (from his series The Ascent of Man) of just chatting conversationally while stepping from place to place around the world to look into the history and humanity of physics and other science through the ages, was—Dr. Carl Sagan once admitted—one of the prime inspirations for the later hit American series Cosmos.

Of the nine books that Robert Ochs published during his decades as a working physicist and science populizer, the one he admitted to being most proud of was a small, privately published and circulated volume entitled Conversations with My Tunkašila. In this little book, Ochs told of the “summer vacations” from the time he was fourteen until he was twenty-two that he spent visiting his Oglala Sioux great-grandfather in the Black Hills of South Dakota. In the early years, the two would go camping together, despite his great-grandfather’s advanced age.

Conversations with My Tunkašila created quite a stir among some of Ochs’s academic friends around the world, since—besides long discussions about Lakota beliefs and attitudes about courage and life—the physicist’s elderly “tunkašila” had explained how knowledge of astronomy had given his Sioux peoples what the old man called Wakan Waśt’e, “ the cosmic powers of good.”

The old man had described new constellations hidden within known constellations, such as Wi˙cin˙cala śa¸kowin, “The Seven Little Girls,” and how, when that constellation reached a precise point in the summer sky, the Natural Free Human Beings would gather at HiNan ¸Ka˙ga Paha, Harney Peak in the Black Hills, to welcome back the Thunder Beings. Ochs also cited his tunkašila on how to find and track the movement of the oval constellation Lo INaN¸ka O˙caN¸ka, the Race Track, and telling of how his people would, when Lo INaN¸ka O˙caN¸ka reached a precise position in the spring sky, gather together at Pe śia, the spiritual center of the Black Hills (a location the old man would not reveal, but which Robert Ochs hinted was where his beloved tunkašila had built his cabin), for what Ochs’s Lakota great-grandfather called the O¸kiśat’aya wowaĥwala, or “Welcoming back all life in peace.”

There were dozens of other astronomical observations, all relating to specific geographic points such as Devil’s Tower in Wyoming (where the summer solstice was celebrated) to Bear Butte in South Dakota to various former winter camps of the Natural Free Human Beings in Nebraska and western South Dakota. Each celebrated a subtle shifting of certain stars within known constellations and each was tied to some ancient ceremony. But what astounded the astronomers who read Ochs’s privately distributed book was that his old great-grandfather had revealed cosmologies and levels of astronomical observations known by the Plains Indians that had never been guessed at by ethnographers, historians, or scientists.

And everything in the night sky and on earth, as young Robert Ochs’s tunkašila revealed, was connected, more than symbolically or ceremonially, with what the old man called the CaNgleś¸ka Wakan, or “Sacred Hoop.”

Scientists in a dozen fields, who had long been sure that the Sioux, Cheyenne, and other Plains tribes had had no serious astronomy, were forced to revise their beliefs and textbooks based on Dr. Ochs’s short little privately published book.

It was in the last summer that Ochs visited his so-called tunkašila, when Robert was twenty-two years old, that he published his revolutionary doctoral thesis, Revised Variations in Velocity Shear Induced Phenomena in Solar and Astrophysical Flows Due to Quantum Effects. He dedicated the thesis to his great-grandfather.

Dr. Ochs retired in 2007, at the age of seventy, and is currently a professor of physics emeritus at Cornell University and a leading consultant on the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble telescope that will go into solar orbit far beyond the moon, currently scheduled for launch no earlier than 2013.

DR. CONSTANCE GREENE, born in 1972, the paleo-ecologist, environmental expert, and ethnologist once called “the twenty-first century’s female Leonardo” by Time magazine, credits some of her interest in the human aspects of various Pleistocene rewilding efforts around the world to camping trips she took with her father, Robert Ochs, when she was a girl.

In a BBC interview she did in 2009, Dr. Greene—known as Connie not just to her students and friends but to most of her peers around the world—said:

When I was ten years old, my dad took me camping to a place in South Dakota called Bear Butte. You’re not allowed to camp on or near the butte unless you’re Native American, but somehow my dad got permission, so we camped near the summit of that interesting lacolith. Except for rattlesnakes, there was no danger up there, so Dad let me wander by myself a lot as long as I stayed within shouting range. There was this one afternoon—it was raining, I remember, and I met… I mean I had this dream about… at any rate, at age ten, I suddenly saw that if we were ever going to bring back the big predators to the world, in other nations as well as in the dying American West, the rewilding—it was already a term that I’d heard from my father and his friends—the rewilding would have to have a human component. Indigenous peoples should have a choice. You can’t just… I mean, you can’t… keep a culture alive by trying to freeze it in stasis while you’re embedded deep within a different culture. It’s impossible. It ends up amounting to dressing up a few days a year, chanting old chants that few believe in any longer, and doing dances that your great-great-great-great-grandparents did, too often to get a few bucks from tourists. It doesn’t work. But if we were really going to set aside these millions and millions of acres and hectares of land and reintroduce the closest genetic cousins to the megafauna top predators and other extinct species that evolved there originally, that used to live there, that used to own the damned place… I thought, why not the original people too? Why not give them a choice? I thought it was a good idea at the time—I was ten, remember, but my mom and dad had a weird habit of listening to me—and so did all my relatives.

PAHA SAPA never worked for Gutzon Borglum again, although it is said that the two remained friends until the end of Borglum’s life.

One piece of advice that Paha Sapa did take from his former boss was to consult with Borglum’s doctor. It turned out that the 1935 diagnosis of cancer by the “quack in Casper” had been false. In January of 1937, Paha Sapa underwent surgery for a long-term and very painful intestinal obstruction. The surgery was successful, there was no tumor or malignancy, the obstruction never returned, and Paha Sapa remained relatively pain free for the rest of his life.

Sometime in 1937, Paha Sapa moved to a remote place deep within the Black Hills and built a small but comfortable home there. He was not a recluse; he traveled frequently to visit his grandson, his later grandchildren, and old friends such as Borglum. But after World War II, word got out among the Ikče Wičaśa that there was an old man in the Black Hills with the name Black Hills, and some people—at first it was just other old men, but later it was more and more young men—made the long trek into the Hills to visit with this Paha Sapa, trade stories, and, increasingly, to ask questions about the Old Days.

Somehow the legend grew that this old man had carried the ghost of Long Hair Custer with him for sixty years.

More and more young Lakota men—and then young Lakota women—came to visit Paha Sapa, traveling first from the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation, then from the Rosebud, then Lower Brule, Crow Creek, Yankton, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock reservations. Then, almost shockingly, young and old Cheyenne and Crows and even Blackfoot from their reservations way over in the northwestern corner of Wyoming and Montana. When members of tribes from California and Washington state began visiting the old man—tribes Paha Sapa had never even heard of—he laughed and laughed.

Paha Sapa did turn away data-hungry ethnologists, Native American apologists, and at least one media-famous founder of the American Indian Movement, but he always had time to sit and talk and smoke a pipe with any young person or old person without, as the wasichu like to say, an agenda. Many of the Natural Free Human Beings who visited him during the summers of those last years remember his curious great-grandson Robert, and how the boy had a gift—unusual for wasichus, they said—of knowing how to listen. The old man also often had other great-grandchildren around or was planning a trip to Denver or elsewhere to visit them. Even when the elder’s arthritis became very painful near the end, he would neither complain nor curtail such travel.

Many of those who visited Paha Sapa in those last decades remember that one of his favorite phrases was—Le aNpet’u wa¸ste! This is a good day.

One of the younger Lakota visiting heard that and asked Paha Sapa if he didn’t mean to say Crazy Horse’s and the other old warriors’ famous old saying “This is a good day to die!” but Paha Sapa only shook his head and repeated Le aNpet’u wa¸ste!

A good day to live.

Paha Sapa died at his home in the Black Hills in August of 1959. He was ninety-three years old.

As per his wishes—found written in pencil on an old napkin he’d kept—Paha Sapa was cremated, and the majority of his ashes were buried next to his wife, Rain, at the old Episcopal Mission Cemetery on Pine Ridge Reservation.

But, as per those same wishes, some of Paha Sapa’s ashes were taken by a few of his friends and relatives, including his great-grandson Robert, and either scattered or buried somewhere along the small river called Chankpe Opi Wakpala where, it is said, the heart of Crazy Horse and the bleached bones of the old-days wičasa wakan Limps-a-Lot, whose wisdom was taught so widely and so well by Paha Sapa in his last years, also lie there undisturbed in places secret, sacred, and silent except for the sound of the wind moving on the face of the high grass and amid the leaves of the waga chun trees.