One remembers the day when Walter Travis of the Rapid City Journal paid one of his routine calls at Rushmore. Gutzon beamed on him. Travis knew that Gutzon had recently been in a long and futile argument with Rapid City’s administration on the desirability of straightening and decorating Rapid River. But he smiled, too. It was none of his business.
Gutzon pushed out his hand for a hearty greeting. “Welcome, Speedy,” he said. “And how is everything in your backward and objectionable little village?”
“Only a Borglum could say,” answered Travis, “because Borglums never forget.”
People whose contacts with Borglum spread over a long time know that in his own opinion he was indubitably right. But looking back over the years they realize that most of the time he really was right, and for the rest of the time, however reluctantly, he would listen to reason. He wanted to get things done and he had a great impatience with people who stopped him. But no one of his friends who knew his generosity and gentleness ever hinted that his most vocal indignation could be classed as ungovernable temper. Temper, possibly ... but not ungovernable.
He was one of this generation’s most accomplished showmen. He took the jibes of the newspapermen with good grace. And he gave them back the same way. You may remember the matter of Washington’s nose. Some reporter, trying to spur him into a grand speech, asked him if he would call the figures on Rushmore as perfect as they might be. The great sculptor shook his head. “Not today,” he said. “The nose of Washington is an inch too long. It’s better that way, though. We are slowly approaching perfection. It will erode enough to be exactly right in 10,000 years.”
Borglum, possibly, was not the man that a dullard could understand. It is not enough to say that he was a great sculptor—perhaps the greatest of his generation. He had to be many more things to get the Mount Rushmore memorial finished. Looking back over his story one is definitely confused. Should he be given world honors for his art, or for his remarkable aptitude for getting money out of smooth and experienced politicians, or for his incredible knowledge about the weakness of stone, or for his skill as a dynamiter, or for his absolutely unbreakable will? You may take your choice and be partly right. If he had lacked any of these attributes, Rushmore would still be back in a wilderness with dead trees piling up about its base.
Borglum died suddenly on March 6, 1941, in Chicago. He had spoken a few nights before for Dr. Harry Kelly, a friend of many years’ standing, in Park Ridge. He was in severe pain, yet he stood for more than an hour to deliver an impassioned plea for faith in America and the principles of personal liberty on which the government was founded. He was plainly ill at the close. He was taken to a hospital the next day and eventually failed to survive a coronary thrombosis. The years on Rushmore had done his heart no good.
Despite the fact that he was supposed to have been making his fortune in the Black Hills, he died thousands of dollars in debt. It was years before the hospital and doctor bills could be paid. Lincoln Borglum knew what details were still lacking on the almost finished figures on Rushmore. The Commission, with the concurrence of the Park Service, designated him to finish the work. Lincoln refused to make any changes or to carry the work any farther than indicated by his father’s models.
Congress passed a resolution for Gutzon Borglum’s interment in a tomb to be carved in the rock at Mount Rushmore. But Gutzon, some time before his death, had extracted a promise from Lincoln that he should be buried among the flowers in California. His friends, led by Commander E. F. McDonald, Jr., decided with the family that his wishes should be carried out.
So he was buried in a memorial court of honor with the inscription composed by his lifelong friend Rupert Hughes close by him: