The Stone Mountain storm burst in the spring of 1925 and was responsible for a lot of Robinson’s troubles, for the desks of the legislators were shortly piled high with literature sent out by the Stone Mountain Association trying to discredit Borglum. The only result of this warning call was a temporary delay. Senator Norbeck reported that Gutzon was a friend of the President and was known and respected as an artist and a patriot by both senators and congressmen. So the legislators of South Dakota figured that the gentlemen in Atlanta were kindly but mistaken.
Gutzon came back to the Black Hills in the fall of 1925 to look for available granite. He was piloted on a camping trip by Theodore Shumaker, an old bear hunter and former man-hunting sheriff. Before meeting Gutzon he had been well acquainted with Theodore Roosevelt, “Wild Bill” Hickok and “Calamity Jane” Burke.
They entered the Hills near Harney Peak through pathless, rugged, almost impassable timber and tree falls. What Borglum wanted was a granite cliff, four or five hundred feet in height and towering that much above neighboring cliffs. It must lie in such an angle that the main wall would face the southeast, and there should be enough of fairly even, unbroken stone to provide at least an acre of upright surface for carving.
The wall facing southeast was a necessary condition because on it the figures would be cut to face the sun. It looked almost like an impossible requirement.
The party had been two weeks in the open, clambering up and down over seemingly inaccessible mountains, when they suddenly came face to face with Mount Rushmore. Gutzon was too tired to try to scale it in the waning day. But he knew that, barring serious cracks in the rock, this cliff was the one he’d been seeking. They camped in a quiet ravine in the mountain’s shadow, preparing for supper and a comfortable night’s rest.
“This looks like what I want,” said Gutzon. “Where is it?”
One of his guides shook his head. “About due east of Harney Peak,” he said. “But I never saw it before. There’s probably never been a man within miles of this place.”
So the next morning they started to climb and presently came to an entrance to the great dike they hoped to surmount. Wear and tear of wind, water and ice had cut this opening, piercing the cliff to half its depth. The climbers were still 150 feet from the top—the top that became the heads of Lincoln and Roosevelt. The heads of Jefferson and Washington were placed 200 feet farther south and higher.
They surmounted this last perpendicular wall by pyramiding one man on the shoulders of two others and using a lariat over a projecting sliver of rock as a hoist line. With torn hands and broken nails they reached the upper floor and looked down on the mining town of Keystone, about three miles away. The sculptor related his impressions thus:
When I first saw the shoulders of Rushmore I knew instinctively that I was a doomed man. I knew that while the years and I reshaped the mountain, I must be reshaped myself.