Give the man room : $b The story of Gutzon BorglumCasey, Robert J. (Robert Joseph)
General
Give the man room : $b The story of Gutzon Borglum
Casey, Robert J. (Robert Joseph)
Borglum, Gutzon, 1867-1941
James de la Mothe Borglum crossed the line into Idaho and reached Bear
Lake on the road to Oregon. There, literally, he dug in--half the house
in the ground, then sod, then log. That was in 1862--or maybe 1863. John
Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum joined the family there most likely, as his
unfinished autobiography says, in 1867.
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
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF 38TH STREET STUDIO
At the left is “I Have Piped and Ye Have Not Danced” and at the right is
the “Mares of Diomedes.”]
[Illustration: MODEL OF ANGEL’S FACE
This is one of the offending feminine faces.]
my mind that I would get away from there and that I would keep trying
until I succeeded ... and, eventually, that’s what I did.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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