This story is told to lend an encouraging, believing hand to all lonely, creative souls who are wandering into the uncharted, untraveled wilderness of God’s greater universe, finding through their own understanding new and undreamed worlds; and to those who continue alone to pour into unpeopled space their cry--unafraid, expecting no answer. Courage to stand alone; courage to master, to know, to do alone. Courage to spurn the tradesman’s reward and popularity. Courage to be without great approval, in spite of government, in spite of today’s laws, tomorrow’s threat--every threat--in spite of Heaven. God’s greatest gift to us and His supreme test is courage bestowed only on those He trusts entirely. There are two points in this worthy of attention: his recognition of the need for courage and the stressing of his loneliness. He had the courage. No one in half a century of continuous battling had more. His loneliness must have been in his soul, not literal. With friends and enemies who included a line of Presidents of the United States, senators, congressmen and public officials, artists, writers, singers, politicians, sheriffs, policemen and such, all of them in vast numbers and continuously present throughout the years, he could have been lonely only in his more detached moments. He certainly had a full life. The portions of it unfilled with other people were of his own choosing. In his chronicle he wrote: I should like to begin this story with Eric the Red, the great warlike Dane, driven from Denmark to Norway, from Norway to Iceland, and finally from Iceland. From there he drifted with the tide before the chill winds southward in his Viking ships, dodging the ice in the Atlantic Flow, the cooled Gulf Stream, circling up by Greenland which he claimed and named. Or even better to have been with our fellow Danes who invaded Greece and gave that people their heroic age, left in their bloodstream the blue in the eyes of Pericles, the gold of Helen’s hair, the short nose of Socrates and the one blue eye of Alexander the Great. For I am as certain as I am of anything, that the spirit and the ancient Danish or Borglum blood were with and in the raiders of the Mediterranean who roused the geese in Italy’s imperial city and awoke drunken Rome. The fact that he had lived long enough to write these stirring words probably justifies his admiration for his forebears. He must have sprung from hardy stock. He had come through fifty years, part of it in the parlous times of the new West, where only the good started and only the strong survived. The family of which Gutzon was a part must have had good ancestry. There were nine of them--six of them boys--and they lived as the pioneers did, a routine without much luxury, and all of them rounded out good long lives.