The expression of a noble beast's agony is rendered in so life-like a manner that its protruding eyes seem to glaze into the awful stare of death, and instinctively the spectator listens for the stifled whimper and whinnying screams of a wounded creature.
Borglum's splendid statuary, this heroic cast of bronze which so faithfully portrays the destiny of a dumb animal, man's most useful and willing slave, always ready to share its master's fate, even unto death—to my mind is a most eloquent, if silent, argument against all warfare.
But the glory of the monument is its pedestal.
A solid stone, a bed-rock from the cradle of the idol-mountain it was contributed by nature to the memory of one of its noblemen, "Captain William Owen O'Neill," who crowned his life with immortality, suffering a soldier's death.
During the storming of San Juan Hill to anxious friends imploring him not recklessly to expose himself, with smiling lips he gave this message of death's Angel, that mysterious oracle of a Sphinx which from the gaze of mortals veils their ordained doom: "Comrades, sergeant! I thank you for your kindly warning—fear not for me, the Spanish bullet that could kill me is not molded!"—when instantly he fell struck dead—not by a "Spanish" bullet—"no!" but by the bullet fired from a Mauser rifle, "not made in Spain." Not an ordinary stone this Arizona granite rock is entitled to highest honors among the stones of the earth.
By none outclassed in witchery it ranks equally in fame with the Blarneystone of Ireland; old Plymouth Rock does not compare with it, for that derives its prestige only from "Mayflower pilgrims" who accidentally landing at its base merely stepped over it.
Proudly our Arizona stone bears a most precious burden—the tribute of a people who in exalting patriotism honor themselves.
Originally an archaean sea-bottom rock this stone lay submerged in the ocean until during the Jurassic Period, under the lateral pressure of a cooling earthcrust the table-lands and mountain-chains of Arizona rose from the seas.
Then it slumbered through several epochs of geology, representing many millions of years in the bosom of earth, the mother, until at the beginning of the psychozoic era, through erosion or the action of atmospheric influences and nature's chemistry it came to the surface; uncovered and freed from all superimposed stratified rock.
It saw the light of day long before the advent of primitive man; but the giant-flora and fauna of pre-historic time had developed, flourished and vanished while it rested under ground.