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
The sculptor made a small model of the group in San Antonio in 1926.
When he returned to Rushmore that same year he made an enlarged plaster
model of Washington’s head on a scale of an inch to a foot. By this time
he had determined to make the heads sixty feet high; his previous
thought of thirty-foot heads he found to be completely out of scale with
the mountain. To make sure of the size he had gone down over the face of
the cliff, located the nose line perpendicularly and the eyebrows and
chin horizontally. From those lines he was able to calculate the scale.
For the next several days he crawled about the cliff and valley
studying the points he had marked on the mountain in red paint with a
six-inch brush.
The enlargement of the Washington head was made in an old log cabin more
than two miles away from the cliff of Rushmore. Plans were afoot to
raise money for the vast work, he was told. But that summer, at least,
nobody was able to find it. Gutzon and his family lived until September
in Keystone. Their living quarters were typical of the mining boom that
had cluttered the valley with shacks in the late seventies.
“Compared with the setting of the rest of the project,” said Gutzon,
“they were ultramodern.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
_DEDICATION_
One of the favorite jibes of the scoffers who didn’t think the Shrine of
Democracy would ever amount to more than a big scar on a hill was that
the workmen spent all their time dedicating it Gutzon listened to these
charges gravely and without heat. “People like to go to dedications,” he
said. “And if you don’t get people out here, nobody is going to know
what you’ve got.” In addition to being a top sculptor he was also a good
showman.
One remembers that the enterprise had virtually no friends in the summer
of 1927--certainly no friends with ready money. The citizenry knew about
it. That is to say, the citizenry of the Hill towns knew about it. They
had heard it was buried somewhere out in the _bosque_ near Keystone.
Gutzon Borglum and a couple of aides went up there each day on rented
horses and surveyed and measured. In Keystone Gutzon talked with
representatives of the power company and salesmen from machinery
companies. But certainly nobody was cutting any rock off the surface of
Mount Rushmore.
And then, in one of the most fantastic journeys that the history of the
Presidents records, Calvin Coolidge came out to look at the West. The
White House Correspondents’ Corps has never reached a decision about why
Coolidge chose the Black Hills for his vacation that year. He caught
trout with bait. Somebody should have advised him not to put on Sioux
eagle feathers. He played a weird game of golf on a private course that
was nearly vertical. And the best thought of the Washington press on the
subject was that he was just a New Englander who had learned how to be a
tourist. Now it is permitted to wonder.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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