Give the man room

by Robert J. Casey; Mary Montgomery Borglum

As for our call for medical help, we found our man in the cabin armed. He was stern, fine looking. I admired him greatly and what followed made us lifelong friends. He was an outlaw on the run who had been in some shooting scrape and had received a charge of goose shot in his arm. Father had no anaesthetic for him. I doubt if at the time there was more than a pint of it in the whole state of Nebraska. The wounded man was bleeding terribly, his arm resting on some blood-soaked blankets. A piece of rope, tightly drawn about the elbow, partly stanched the flow. He was alone with two inscrutable Pawnees. After they had washed the arm in warm water, my father turned to me and said, “Gutzon, you will have to help hold his arm.”

The Indians gripped the man’s hand; my job was to keep the lacerations open so that Father could find the shot. We were still working when there was a sharp knock at the door. Sheriff Gregg, with a deputy at his heels, came in and put our patient under arrest. Gregg and Father were friends and Father said, “He stays here till this job is done, Bob.” And we went on doing what we had to do.

The man, whose name was Fielding, was then taken to jail to be held for trial. There I visited him frequently with Father and later alone with the permission of the sheriff who liked me. Fielding was an excellent draughtsman and I brought him red and blue pencils. He loved to draw the American Eagle and the flag as we saw them on the older coins.

Weeks later when his arm was well healed there was a sudden alarm of “Jailbreak!” Fielding and another man had sawed through one of the bars with a hacked table knife. It must have been the work of many days. I prayed that he would escape. But posses went out and caught him as he was crossing the river in an open skiff. Report came back that the sheriff had killed him in midstream with a lucky shot.

Fielding was a kindly man. He told me of his shooting trouble. He’d been wronged, robbed and shot at. Why he broke jail I never knew. He dreaded imprisonment. I shall always feel that he had a great deal to do with awakening my interest in drawing and developing my ability in that direction, although I really had no idea of becoming an artist until I was fifteen. We never know where little unsuspected impulses for good may lead, or what is back of them.

Often in a family of five or six children there is one who does not want to work. He would like to write on birch bark, examine a flower, get a little color on a board or canvas ... and there is an artist. All very simple and natural, but it comes out of the lives and struggles of perceptive men and women who follow these impulses along. I believe music first started when some mother was trying to get her little child to sleep when he was scared to death about something. She found that certain tones were pleasant when she repeated them. And thus the thing that is behind all instrumental music—woman’s voice—brought harmony and sweetness to life.

Not all of Dr. Borglum’s errands had to do with wounded men, and the little boy found that some of the simpler ones were more terrifying. Once they went on a long quest that had something to do with a baby. Gutzon stayed outside the house. He sat on a knoll, looking at the moon across a ravine. Of this incident Gutzon writes:

I had watched it come out of the grass in front of me. It was about three times its usual size as it came above the dull blue horizon.

My father came and I asked him, “What is the moon?” And without waiting for him to answer I told him how beautiful she was and how I loved the moon better than the sun, better than anything in the world. He picked me up and said, “I’ll give her to you if you promise never to take her away from us.”

I wriggled out of his arms and ran toward her. I stumbled, fell, rose up, ran on, began to cry but kept on, faster and faster, Father slowly following.... But the moon was retreating faster than I could move. And then the knowledge came to me—I could not have my moon. I stood weeping my heart out.... That moon has hung in my heaven for well over half a century with the child fable written all over it.... I have never reached it.