Black Hills

Chapter 6 On the Six Grandfathers

506 STEPS.

Paha Sapa pauses at the base of the stairway and looks up at the 506 steps he has to climb. They are the same 506 steps he has climbed almost every weekday morning for the past five years. It is 6:45 on a summer morning—Friday, 21 August—and already the sun has turned the air in the valley as hot as it gets here in the Black Hills. The air is filled with the sound of grasshoppers and the butterscotch scent of heated ponderosa pine. Because it’s Friday, Paha Sapa knows, the crew coming down from the top this evening will play their “mountain goating” game—the 506 steps are separated into flights by some forty-five ramps and platforms, and the goal of the cheering workmen will be to “mountain goat” down by leaping from platform to platform without touching any of the fifty or so steps in between. No one has ever done this successfully, Paha Sapa knows, but no one has broken his neck or leg either, so the mountain goating will happen at the end of this long workday as well, the wild leaping accompanied by the shouts and cheers of the hardworking drillmen and hoist men and miners and powdermen released for their weekend.

Paha Sapa looks up at the 506 steps and realizes that he is tired even before beginning the climb.

Of course, he is seventy-one years old this month, but this is not the reason for his fatigue so early in the day. The cancer that Paha Sapa was diagnosed with just a month earlier—in Casper, Wyoming, so that no word would reach Borglum or the workers as it might if he’d gone to a doctor in nearby Rapid City—is already eating him from the inside out. He can feel it. It means that he has less time than he had hoped.

But Paha Sapa, even though he carries a forty-pound box of blasting caps and fresh dynamite on his shoulder, does not pause to rest on one of the forty-five ramps or landings on the way up. His strength has always been surprising for a man of his size, and he will not surrender to weakness now until it becomes absolutely necessary. And it is not yet necessary.

Paha Sapa has often heard visitors below estimate the height from the valley floor (where the parking lot and Borglum’s studio are) to the top of the stone heads as “thousands of feet,” but it’s only a little over four hundred feet from the lowest point at the base of the talings of tumbled shards and boulders to the tops of Washington’s and Jefferson’s and (emerging) Lincoln’s heads. Still, that’s the equivalent of climbing the stairs in a forty-story building—something that Paha Sapa has seen in New York—and it takes the men about fifteen minutes to climb to the top of what is now called Mount Rushmore.

Of course, there’s always the aerial tram—that open-topped, small-outhouse-sized box that is whizzing past Paha Sapa as he trudges up another flight of fifty steps—but even the new men know about the time some years ago when the A-frame tipi structure at the top of the mountain collapsed, sending the tram (and cable and A-frame and platform from above) hurtling to the floor of the canyon. Borglum was waiting to ride on the tram that day—he was always zipping up and down or hovering in it, studying some aspect of the work or hauling up VIPs—but the tram had just been loaded with casks of water, so Borglum waited and watched it fall. He still rides it daily.

But few of the other workers do, especially after a second accident earlier this summer in which the loosening setscrew had let go some two hundred feet from the top, sending the tram with five men aboard hurtling down toward the hoist house below. They’d rigged a hand brake since the first accident years ago, but the brake quickly overheated, so the only way they could slow the tram cage was by coming down in a series of spurts and jerks, pausing to let the brake cool, then spurting and jerking their way down again. Then Gus Schramm, who must weigh 225 pounds, pulled on the chain so hard that the brake arm broke off completely, sending the cage hurtling down the last hundred feet or so. Luckily, Matt Riley in the hoist house had the presence of mind to brace a fat board against the cable drum, which slowed them slightly, but the five men still went flying out of the tram cage at the end, three landing on the loading platform, another on a roof, the last man in a tree. Lincoln Borglum, senior man on the site that day, sent the five men to the hospital for observation, but six men ended up spending the night there. Glenn Jones, the man assigned to drive the others to Rapid City, decided to get a good night’s sleep and some painkiller at the hospital.

In the summer, the workers are expected to be at work at 7 a.m. (7:30 in the winter), but Paha Sapa and the other powdermen are usually there by 6:30, since they have to start early in preparing the dynamite charges that will soon be placed in holes being drilled that morning. The first blow of the day will be at noon, while the drillers are off the face having lunch. Paha Sapa knows that “Whiskey Art” Johnson is already up there with his assistant, cutting the dynamite into smaller segments—sixty or seventy short sticks for each shot—and that Paha Sapa’s assistant will be there soon.

Reaching the halfway point on the 506 steps, Paha Sapa looks up at the three heads.

It has been a productive year so far, with more than 15,000 tons of granite removed—enough to pave a four-acre field with granite blocks a foot thick. Much of that rubble came from Washington’s chest, which is taking shape nicely, but they’ve also cleared out many tons from beneath Jefferson’s chin (where he now takes shape in his new spot to Washington’s left, looking out from the Monument) and in roughing out Abraham Lincoln’s forehead, eyebrows, and nose.

The majority of the rubble, though, came from the frenzied work on Thomas Jefferson’s face, which Borglum is rushing to get ready for a possible visit and dedication in late August by no less than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The presidential visit has been rumored for months, but now it seems certain to happen in just over a week—on Sunday, August 30.

Still climbing with the heavy box on his shoulder, Paha Sapa wonders if this should be the time for him to act.

Paha Sapa has no wish to harm President Roosevelt, but he still has every intention of blowing the other three presidents’ heads off the face of the Six Grandfathers. And would it be more symbolic, somehow, if he eradicated these wasichu excresences while the president of the United States sat in his open touring car below?

Paha Sapa knows that Borglum is planning a symbolic blasting as part of President Roosevelt’s dedication ceremony. His son, Lincoln, has already been directed to find the best way to drape the huge American flag, now in storage, over Jefferson’s face, the flag to be swung to one side by the long boom of the pointing machine atop the heads. There is to be a reviewing stand for dignitaries behind where Roosevelt’s car will be parked, and live radio microphones and half a dozen newsreel cameras grinding. If Paha Sapa is successful in triggering charges on all three of the heads that Sunday, no one will be hurt, but the entire world will watch in movie theater newsreels the final destruction of the three heads on what would have been the Monument on Mount Rushmore.

Three heads.

There is part of the problem. Paha Sapa knows all too well Gutzon Borglum’s plan for four heads up there, the last one being that of Theodore Roosevelt, tucked in between Jefferson and Lincoln. The stone experts are already drilling and coring to confirm that the granite there will be of adequate quality for the carving, and though many have protested Borglum’s putting so recent a president up there—and another Republican to boot—Paha Sapa knows how stubborn Borglum is. If the sculptor lives (and perhaps even if he does not, with Lincoln taking over), there will be a Teddy Roosevelt head on Mount Rushmore.

Paha Sapa’s Vision was of four wasichu Great Stone Heads rising out of the Six Grandfathers, four giant stone wasichus shrugging off the soil and trees of the Paha Sapa, and four of these terrible giants looking out and over the destruction of Paha Sapa’s people and of the buffalo and of the Natural Free Human Beings’ way of life.

Does he not have to destroy all four heads to keep this Vision from coming true?

More to the point, Paha Sapa realizes as he approaches the final flights of steps, does he now have time to wait for that fourth head to be carved?

The doctor in Casper said no. A few months, the white-haired doctor said solemnly but with no emotion, just another old Indian sitting on his examining table, perhaps a year if you’re unlucky.

Paha Sapa understood that the “unlucky” referred to the pain and immobilization and incontinence this form of cancer would give him if the dying dragged on.

PAHA SAPA PASSES the wooden landing with a flat bit of graveled soil between the boulders where the men ambushed him each morning for weeks after he was first hired by Borglum five years earlier.

To their credit, they never attacked him all at once. Each morning they’d have another champion to beat the old Indian into submission, to beat him so badly that he would have to quit. One of the larger, more violent miners in the early attacks.

And each morning, Paha Sapa refused to be beaten into submission. He fought back fiercely, with fists and jabs and head butts and kicks to the bigger man’s balls when he could. He sometimes won. More often he lost. But he always took a toll on his assailant, morning after morning. And he was never beaten so badly by the white men’s single champion that he—Paha Sapa—could not lift his drill or crate of explosives and helmet and gear and continue the painful climb toward the powder shack, where he would begin work. And though they broke his nose and blackened his eyes and pulped his lips over those weeks, they never managed to disfigure his face so much that he couldn’t don the filtration mask and go to work.

Finally, Borglum noticed and called all the men together in a meeting outside his studio on Doane Mountain opposite the work site.

—What the goddamned hell is going on?

Silence from the men. Borglum’s usual roar of a voice became an even louder roar, drowning out the compressor that had just started up.

—I’m goddamned serious. I’ve got a powderman who is obviously getting the excrement beaten out of him every day and two dozen other workers with missing teeth and rearranged noses. Now, I need to know what the goddamned hell is going on and I’ll know it right now. There are thousands of miners and workmen and powdermen out of work, right here in South Dakota, who’ll take your jobs in a fast minute, and I’m about fifteen seconds away from giving those jobs to them.

The answer, such as it was, came from someone deep in the press of men.

—It’s the Indian.

—WHAT?

Borglum’s roar this time was so loud that the compressor actually stopped, the operator—the only man not at the meeting—obviously thinking that the machinery had seized up.

—What goddamned Indian? Do you think I’d hire an Indian for this job?

The question was answered by silence and a sullen shuffling.

—Well, you’re goddamned RIGHT I’d hire an Indian if he was the best man for the job—or a nigger, if it came to that—but Billy Slovak is no damned Indian!

Howdy Peterson stepped forward.

—Mr. Borglum… sir. His name ain’t Billy Slovak. On the lists up at the Homestake, and the Holy Terror Mine before that, they had him down as Billy Slow Horse… sir. And he… he looks like an Indian, Mr. Borglum, sir.

Borglum shook his head as if as much in pity as disgust.

—Goddamn it, Peterson. Are you all Norwegian or did a little coon or Cheyenne or wop sneak in there? And who the hell CARES? This man I hired is named Billy Slovak—part Czech or Bohunk or whatever the hell it is, and why should I care?—and he was CHIEF POWDERMAN at the goddamned Homestake Mine when I hired him. Do you know how long powdermen usually last at the Homestake—much less at that Hell Pit that was the Holy Terror? Three months. Three… goddamned… months. Then they either blow themselves up, and half a crew with them, or become total alkies or just lose their nerve and go hunt for work elsewhere. Billy Slovak—and that is his NAME, gentlemen—worked there eleven years without losing his nerve or ever hurting another man or piece of equipment.

The men shuffled and looked at one another and then at the ground again.

—So either this crap stops or your jobs do. I need good powdermen more than I need stupid pugilists. Slovak’s staying—hell, he’s even playing first base on the team when summer comes—and the rest of you can make up your own minds as to whether you want and deserve to stay or not. I hear that finding a good-paying, solid job like this in this goddamned year of our Lord nineteen and thirty-one is a goddamned piece of fucking cake. So gang up on Slovak again—or anyone else I hire—and you can pick up your week’s wages from Denison and get out. Now… either head for your cars or get back to work.

As it turned out, sixty-six-year-old Paha Sapa didn’t play first base that first summer of 1931 or in the summers since. He played shortstop.

PAHA SAPA FINALLY PAUSES to breathe and set down the crate of dynamite and caps and wipe the sweat from his face when he reaches the top and walks over to the powder shed.

Can he be ready in eight days?

He has the explosives—almost two tons of them—stashed away in the falling-down shed and root cellar in the collapsing house he rents in Keystone.

Dynamite is much safer than most civilians imagine. New dynamite, that is. Paha Sapa has trained his new powdermen to understand that new, fresh dynamite can be dropped, kicked, tossed—even burned—with little or no risk of explosion. It takes the little copper-jacketed cylinders of the blasting caps, attached to each stick by a four-foot electric wire, to set off the dynamite proper.

With fresh dynamite, Paha Sapa explains to his nervous new men, it’s the electric detonator cap that is dangerous and that must always be handled with great care. They are touchy things at the best of times, and accidentally closing a circuit or dropping a cap or banging it against something will—even if the cap’s not attached to the dynamite sticks yet—blow off a powderman’s hands or face or belly.

But the nearly two tons of dynamite (and twenty cases of detonator caps) that Paha Sapa has stolen and hidden in his falling-down shed and old root cellar in Keystone is not new dynamite. It was old (and abandoned) when he stole it from the closed-up Holy Terror Mine—named after the owner’s wife—where he’d once worked as chief powderman. The owners of the Holy Terror had held life cheap, and the lives of its powdermen were held the cheapest of all. The owners had carried over dynamite from one season to the next, something absolutely prohibited in any gold or silver or coal mine where safety is a consideration.

Paha Sapa always enjoys showing new powdermen how dynamite sweats—the nitroglycerine leaking through the paper and beading up on the exterior—and how one can take a finger and snap a bead of dynamite sweat against a nearby boulder. The new men always flinch away when that hurled bead explodes against the stone with the sound of a .22 pistol being fired.

Then Paha Sapa explains about the dynamite headaches.

But the old dynamite stacked and stored in his cellar and shed does more than sweat death. The nitroglycerine in most of it has gathered and clumped and crystallized until it’s become so unstable that just shifting the crates—much less moving them in a car or truck or Paha Sapa’s own motorcycle sidecar—would be the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with all six cartridges loaded. (Paha Sapa is tempted to smile when he thinks of President Roosevelt’s caravan of cars on its way up here to the Monument on August 30, the president himself protected by Secret Service men, passing through Keystone and within thirty yards of Paha Sapa’s shed and root cellar, holding enough unstable explosive to blow all of Keystone a thousand feet into the air.)

But, he thinks again, it’s not the president he wishes to harm.

Even if Paha Sapa is able to get the unstable dynamite and the dangerous caps to the top of the mountain in the dark of night, past the few night guards Borglum has posted to watch over the tools and equipment, past the compressor house and hoist house and blacksmith shop and past Borglum’s studio and residence itself—then manages to somehow get the two tons of unstable explosives carried up these same 506 steps he’s just climbed—he’ll still need to drill hundreds of holes into the three faces.

On a regular day such as this one in August of 1936—normal except for the unusually brutal heat—there are already thirty or more men on the work areas of the three faces (and below them, a dozen men now on Washington’s chest), drilling, drilling—the compressors howling, the drill bits screaming—and many more “steel nippers,” workmen rushing up and down the cliff exchanging fresh drills and bits for old, sending the dulled bits down on the tramway to be sharpened at the blacksmith shop across the valley. Soon, Whiskey Art and Paha Sapa and their assistants will be swinging down onto the cliff faces and presidents’ faces to join the drillers there as they load the preset drill holes with their hundreds of charges, then carefully tie the charges into an electrical detonator cord.

It’s the loud, roaring work of scores—sometimes hundreds—of men, just for a minor blow at noon or four p.m., when the workers are off the face, to move a ton or two of stone. To kill the wasichu heads, Paha Sapa will have to do it all at night, with unstable dynamite in hundreds of holes all over the faces to move a hundred times as much stone as a regular blast, and do it all silently, in the dark, and by himself, alone.

Still—that’s what he will have to do if he’s to bring down the three heads already risen from the stone. And he has long since come up with a plan that may give him a chance. But now, between the news of his growing cancer and the confirmation of the date for Roosevelt’s visit for the dedication, Paha Sapa knows he will have to do it by a week from the day after tomorrow, so that the “demonstration blast” in front of President Roosevelt and the gathered dignitaries and cameras will be the end, forever, of the stone wasichus rising from his sacred hills.