The Fremont, Nebraska, of my boyhood days has gradually reconstructed itself and still lives in my memory with its two little streets and a half. Its quaint old citizens I know are still trading, spinning yarns--the occasional Indian or more, single file, quietly moving about. There are some prairie schooners and the annual one-ring circus. And as I pass the town, as I have done many times, it has always been at night--for which I have been strangely glad. I watch in the dark for all the old ways and byways I know so well, and the dark has always helped me to believe that they are all there just as I left them. Thus far the words of Gutzon Borglum. He ceases to comment on his life in the forbidding period of early youth. He is hopeless about what has gone by and terrified at what lies ahead. But he need not have been. He was alone, a child of the night, only in his imagination. Actually, he was one of the very few human beings of his period who were singularly popular. He might have succeeded at anything he tried. CHAPTER FOUR _CALIFORNIA_ Dr. James de la Mothe Borglum is somewhat difficult to see as he moves briefly and grayly through the background of Gutzon Borglum’s records. But it is quickly obvious that the restless-footed doctor never moved anywhere without being noticed. He assuredly left one heritage to his son: an inquiring, seldom satisfied mind. Eventually this adventurous, nervous, eager spirit settled down in Omaha to a long, useful and almost uneventful life as a general physician. He was much loved and quite successful, but few of the mourners who turned out for his funeral had any idea of his questing past. He had come from Denmark to the settlement called St. Charles-on-Bear-Lake, Idaho. He had moved with his family from there to Fremont and on to Omaha. From Omaha he had moved to Los Angeles and finally back again from Los Angeles to Omaha. His journey to Los Angeles in the middle eighties seems to have been of little importance except that Gutzon was started definitely on his art career. This was the father’s last gift to his son. Ever after, Gutzon was independent and lived his own life. The doctor, in his earnest search for religious truth, found time for the less argumentative features of a good education. He tried to give a firm basis in Greek and Latin classics to his son Solon Hannibal. He sent two other sons, Gutzon and August, to St. Mary’s, a Jesuit college in Kansas. He studied the Sanskrit Vedas and the doctrine of Mormon, and once served as president of the Theosophical Society of Nebraska.