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
Weeks later when his arm was well healed there was a sudden alarm
of “Jailbreak!” Fielding and another man had sawed through one of
the bars with a hacked table knife. It must have been the work of
many days. I prayed that he would escape. But posses went out and
caught him as he was crossing the river in an open skiff. Report
came back that the sheriff had killed him in midstream with a lucky
shot.
Fielding was a kindly man. He told me of his shooting trouble. He’d
been wronged, robbed and shot at. Why he broke jail I never knew.
He dreaded imprisonment. I shall always feel that he had a great
deal to do with awakening my interest in drawing and developing my
ability in that direction, although I really had no idea of
becoming an artist until I was fifteen. We never know where little
unsuspected impulses for good may lead, or what is back of them.
Often in a family of five or six children there is one who does not
want to work. He would like to write on birch bark, examine a
flower, get a little color on a board or canvas ... and there is an
artist. All very simple and natural, but it comes out of the lives
and struggles of perceptive men and women who follow these impulses
along. I believe music first started when some mother was trying to
get her little child to sleep when he was scared to death about
something. She found that certain tones were pleasant when she
repeated them. And thus the thing that is behind all instrumental
music--woman’s voice--brought harmony and sweetness to life.
Not all of Dr. Borglum’s errands had to do with wounded men, and the
little boy found that some of the simpler ones were more terrifying.
Once they went on a long quest that had something to do with a baby.
Gutzon stayed outside the house. He sat on a knoll, looking at the moon
across a ravine. Of this incident Gutzon writes:
I had watched it come out of the grass in front of me. It was about
three times its usual size as it came above the dull blue horizon.
My father came and I asked him, “What is the moon?” And without
waiting for him to answer I told him how beautiful she was and how
I loved the moon better than the sun, better than anything in the
world. He picked me up and said, “I’ll give her to you if you
promise never to take her away from us.”
I wriggled out of his arms and ran toward her. I stumbled, fell,
rose up, ran on, began to cry but kept on, faster and faster,
Father slowly following.... But the moon was retreating faster than
I could move. And then the knowledge came to me--I could not have
my moon. I stood weeping my heart out.... That moon has hung in my
heaven for well over half a century with the child fable written
all over it.... I have never reached it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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