The men carried buckets of paint and brushes for outlining the picture; but when they started to work they could not tell men from horses nor heads from feet, or where one figure ended and another began. The next day Borglum traced the picture of his model as a line drawing on another plate and that night his aides were able to outline the sketch. Motor trucks of that period were not powerful enough to climb Stone Mountain. Materials needed to construct a stairway from the top down to the carving site were hauled up the foot trail by ox cart. After the stairs were finished, cable, pulley and winch were installed to bring up materials for stairs down to the ground, scaffolding and tools. On June 23, 1923, Borglum led a group of dignitaries over the top of the mountain and down to the platform above the carving site. Gov. E. Lee Trinkle of Virginia made a dedicatory speech through a megaphone to throngs below. Then Borglum had himself lowered by bos’n’s chair and, with a pneumatic drill, punched several holes into the mountain as the official beginning of the carving. [Illustration: Notables at lunch the day before Lee’s birthday in 1924.] [Illustration: Borglum’s carvers at work.] [Illustration: Smoke descends with rock after a powder blast.] From the time he started, Borglum had five years to complete the monument before the end of the 12-year deadline. On January 19, 1924, anniversary of Lee’s birth, 20,000 gathered for the unveiling of General Lee’s head. On the previous day a select party, including the governors of Virginia, Texas and Alabama, had climbed over the mountain and descended the stairs for a dinner at a table set up on the granite shelf in front of the statue. A few months later work on the carving began to slow down. Personality rifts between Borglum and members of the Association widened, and in March, 1925, the sculptor destroyed his models and sketches, and left Georgia. Other artists said the real reason for his tantrums was distortion in the carving—he never could have finished it, and he was trying to hide the blame. Taking a short cut in projecting his sketch onto the mountain had been a fatal mistake. He went to South Dakota and gained lasting fame by carving the Mount Rushmore masterpiece. No sign of Borglum’s work remains at Stone Mountain. However, he made a vital contribution. It is doubtful if any other artist would have had the imagination to visualize such a stupendous monument in such an inaccessible place, or have had the nerve to start carving it. And he accomplished one thing that lasts. He designed the Confederate half-dollar. Congress agreed for the mint to produce five million of these coins, which, with the Association selling them for a dollar apiece, could have financed the carving of the memorial. The next sculptor selected, Augustus Lukeman, was the exact antithesis of his predecessor—a man of few words and apparently no temperament whatever.