Gutzon’s indomitable will carried him from the Idaho ranch to an art school in San Francisco, thence to Paris. He began as both painter and sculptor and was accepted as both by the French salons. In England, critics and royalty heaped honors on him. After painting a series of murals for a big hotel at Leeds and another series for a concert hall at Manchester, he began to abandon the brushes for the chisel, and to turn out statuary in almost every field and almost every imaginable form.
From the first, his works won the highest honors. The Metropolitan Museum bought his “Mares of Diomedes” at once and the French Government promptly purchased a partial replica of it for the Luxembourg Gallery. Commissions rained on him and there was never any repetition in the spirit or treatment of his responses.
There is not space here for even a catalogue of his triumphs. He also wrote much and well. He was an engineer and an inventor, overcoming by his own skill supposedly unconquerable problems involved in the construction of his larger works. He was an orator of eloquence with a practical skill in politics. At times he was a statesman and the close associate of Paderewski and Masaryk in their re-creation of their lost republics. During the first World War he investigated and exposed the causes for a mysterious and dangerous failure in American aircraft manufacture. His career has a strange kinship in its versatility with that of Leonardo da Vinci, and I believe that his name will live as long.
In 1909 he married Mary Montgomery, a distinguished scholar in ancient Oriental languages, and a translator of cuneiform inscriptions. A son and a daughter blessed this union of two great souls.
It was in 1907 that I first met Gutzon Borglum while preparing an article on his work, to which I paid complete homage. This was the beginning of a lifelong friendship of which I wrote him while he was glorifying the South Dakota mountains:
“I have always had an awe and a reverence for you that fought with my love for the simple, jovial, twinkling-eyed friend you always were.”
He answered: “You have said your say about me and it is a wet eye that reads through the letter. You know how vandalism in the name of Civilization raids the tombs of our ancestors and destroys the records of History. One of my motives in this work was to carve these records of our great West-World adventure as high into the heavens as I could find the stone.”
As man and as sculptor he was passionately American and he has not only given to his country monuments of art that equal the greatest of other nations, but he has given artistic expression to the ideals that make America America.
The Sphinx and its temple have only recently been recovered from the sand that submerged them for thousands of years. Yet even now the worst tyrannies and cruelties of the Pharaohs have been revived and paralleled in Europe, just as our gentlest, noblest ideals were to be found co-existing with savagery in ancient Egypt.
I hope, I believe that in 7000 A.D. there will be pilgrimages to Mount Rushmore by Americans still keeping alive the flames of freedom kindled and rekindled by the four heroes Borglum had immortalized, immortalizing himself and his and their ideals along with them.