Gutzon’s success with the businessmen that day was general. But although he could make mountain carving seem easy to a skeptical opponent, he had more trouble convincing himself. The difficulties began to haunt him day and night. A mural painter facing a vast canvas has a uniform surface on which to lay out his design and balance its parts. Stone Mountain, however, had an irregular, uneven surface, with a huge overhanging bulge which must be harmoniously utilized unless the sculptor wished to convert the side of the mountain into a flat wall before starting his design.
How was he ever going to locate his sketch on the mountain? How could he be at once near enough to outline his figures and at the same time be far enough away to get a proper perspective of the whole and establish right proportions?
How was he to get his workers to their working stations without utter exhaustion? How were they to work at ease, unhampered by constant dread of a sudden fall? How were they ever going to be able to remove enormous amounts of stone without growing old and gray in the process?
His friends begged him not to become involved in so hazardous and fantastic an undertaking. His younger brother Solon, whom he had summoned to the spot in 1915 when the monument was first contemplated, gave the only encouraging suggestion. He said: “You have an advantage here over most sculptors. All you have to do is remove what stone you don’t want.”
Helen Plane and her group had collected about two thousand dollars for their monument to Lee. For the time being Gutzon decided to use that sum for a scaffold and for steps leading down over the side of the cliff to permit an examination of the rock and to make preliminary drawings.
A man by the name of Jesse Tucker happened to be working on the Venable home, and the sculptor became acquainted with him. Gutzon discovered that he had unusual intelligence, ingenuity and resourcefulness—qualities indispensable in this entirely new and different kind of work. He engaged him to construct a flight of steps going down over the face of the mountain from the top.
This was a hazardous undertaking. At its northern end Stone Mountain slopes gradually to the ground level. Horse-drawn vehicles as well as automobiles can reach a point three fifths of the way up with difficulty. The steep side, the side chosen for the carving, is precipitous. The slope starts treacherously easy for some feet from the top and then swiftly changes to a sheer drop of hundreds of feet to the plains of Georgia. A red line shows where the danger begins. Many stories are told of those who have disregarded the line and plunged to their deaths. At one or two points there is a narrow ledge, which occasionally catches a goat or a child who is more lucky.
Mr. Tucker depended largely on Negro labor and was singularly successful in working with it. He is a man who naturally inspires confidence and, by going ahead and showing the men just where and how to step, he soon had them crossing the red line and drilling holes in the rock. Into these holes steel bars were cemented. The woodwork of the stairway was attached to the bars. The first stairway was 480 feet long and ended on a platform ten feet wide with a barrier twenty feet high on the outside.
Conspicuous among Tucker’s Negroes was one called Homer, by whom the Borglums were adopted. He could take a piece of timber four by eight inches and eighteen feet long, lift it from the wagon, put it on his shoulders, carry it to the top of the cliff and down the stairs without dropping it or pausing for breath.
Jesse Tucker proved to be a helpful organizer and superintendent and a faithful friend. He played an important part in all that followed. Over thirty years after this first meeting, the Borglum family was driving through the Florida town in which he lives. Answering a phone call, he came over with his whole family. He refreshed Mrs. Borglum’s memory with many details of work that she had forgotten. He made one memorable remark: “Men didn’t work for Mr. Borglum. They worked with him.” That, possibly, is an explanation of how he was able to carve mountains.