Gutzon remembers his mother (Ida Michelson Borglum) as a great woman, gifted and beautiful. She had one other son, Solon, born on December 22, 1868, the boy to whom Gutzon frequently referred as his little brother.

Not many years after Solon was born, Gutzon recalls, “She left us. I was five. She turned to see me as she lay ill. There were tears in her eyes and she was trembling as she took my hand.... And she told me to take care of little Solon.

“I never forgot it, but I wondered why. I thought she was going to stay with us. She and Father had always been with us. I could not understand....”

Gutzon was a baby. He was at the age when children are said to be only slightly interested in family changes, but he seems to have realized that something had happened.

“By the time I was seven,” he says, “I knew what it meant not to have a mother of my own. I thought I didn’t want to stay around things that reminded me of her any more. So I ran away.”

CHAPTER THREE
ALONE

Gutzon Borglum was seven years old; so the time must have been roughly 1874. In the twelve or thirteen years since James de la Mothe Borglum’s caravan had come to Bear Lake, Idaho, he had been singularly restless. Gutzon had been born in Idaho, Solon a year later in Ogden, Utah. Father Borglum had moved back eastward. He had another wife. He had acquired horses and cows, a home and an office. When Gutzon ran away, home was in Fremont, Nebraska.

The child left suddenly, accompanied only by his dog. He hadn’t thought to provide himself with food. He had heard of Omaha; so he started in that direction. He was three days on the way and had gone what seemed to be miles and miles when the sheriff caught up with him and brought him home. The sheriff dropped him at the Borglum house and went away. Fearful and hungry, Gutzon slept that night in the dog kennel.

Next morning he had a memorable return to the bosom of the family. His father was somewhere out of town, and his grandfather on his mother’s side had come for a visit. The grandfather was a martinet who felt that children should be taught that it is wrong to run away from home. He took charge of Gutzon and Gutzon never forgot him.

“I was only seven,” the sculptor remembered, “but I made up