CHAPTER TWO

_THE DIM BEGINNING_

The beginnings of Gutzon Borglum are not easy to trace. Until more than fifty years after his birth nobody seems to have cared where he came from or when. Nobody was much interested in who his parents were or how or where he was brought up. By that time the evidence of his boyhood was far away and hazy.

When in middle age he turned his head toward the Far West he had known shortly after the Civil War he saw a past that was exciting, colorful and glamorous. He was lyrical in talking about it and wrapped up in memories of unbelievably noble inspiration. But the oddest feature of his reminiscence is that, except for his stylistic urge, he never wandered far from historic fact.

Gutzon Borglum was born in a frontier town in Idaho. His early childhood was spent in Fremont, Nebraska, jumping-off place of the covered wagons, haunt of wild Indians. And whatever hints he conveys about Gutzon, he is probably telling the truth. He was never anybody but Gutzon.

He intended, when he sat down to recall his youth, to write an autobiography. But writing an autobiography was just one more task that took its place in a tremendous program of brass casting, airplane design, mountain dressing, sea-wall building, picture projection, boxing promotion, park improvement, old-building restoration, motor-bus operation, horse raising, politics and--every now and then--colossal sculpture. When he died he had written two chapters and several hundred thousand words of notes and journals, an astonishing record, presenting a picture of an old warrior battling for youth against a cynical world.

He said in his introduction:

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.

Gutzon doesn’t seem to be sure about their origins and early development any more than he is sure of his own. He never gave a thought to such things until he was about fifty years old and inquisitive admirers began to ask questions. Somewhat confused, he gave some ill-assorted answers, many of which remain puzzling today. In his notes, for instance, he says that he was born on March 25, 1867. This, according to some evidence given by his brother Solon, seems to be correct. Yet the biographical sketch in _Who’s Who in America_, which he himself wrote, says that he was born in Idaho on March 25, 1871. One must leave it at that.

Borglum was a man of great imagination, and he built up a fine character for the men of the hardy North country from which his ancestors had come. In his mind they came from “the North of Denmark, the land bending eastward under the cruel winds from Greenland and Iceland, the rendezvous of Vikings and high-sea rovers. There we have what are called Black Danes.... They are unquestionably an exchange token from Spain, Rome or Greece.... In our own family of blonds there are always some with fine dark eyes and hair to remind us of our ancestral wanderings.”

The best Borglum’s father did for this family research was to locate a prospective Borglum with Frederick of Sweden in his crusade to the Holy Land. This man seems to have been named Reinhardt. But he saved the prince from a charging goat in the south of France and was given the title _de la Mothe_, “the one of courage.” This forebear returned to Denmark and, Borglum’s father reported, “his arms carry the crusader’s shield in the center.” The founder of the modern branch of De la Mothes was a priest who, in due course, joined Luther and married a nun. Gutzon wrote:

The menfolk became priests, soldiers, adventurers, and I have books left by them in their own scripts. In this black dune, the wind-swept northern part of Denmark, there is an ancient Norman pile called the Borglum Kloster which, in the nineteenth century, was a hunting lodge for the kings and nobles. The De la Mothe family was closely connected with this cloister. On a visit not so long ago I found in the great chapel, buried in its floor, the only memorial tablet to our ancestors extant.

Some years ago, after the unveiling of Gutzon’s statue of Woodrow Wilson in Poznan, he took his wife and two children on a flying visit to Denmark. They arrived in Copenhagen about 8:00 A.M., and by 8:15 Gutzon was a sensation. He was a great sculptor by that time, and he had an international reputation. But the baggage carriers, the cabdrivers and the early passers-by did not know that. He was interesting to them only because he spoke to them unhesitatingly in archaic Danish, the Danish of a hundred years ago. “I learned it at my mother’s knee,” he explains, “and she had learned it in her youth, now a century past.” He was linguistically one with the Danes of 1800. The romantic swashbucklers of crusading times no longer seemed quite so close to him.

The King of Denmark saw the Borglums after their return from Borglum Kloster and “the black duneland of the North.” He sent his chamberlain to the hotel with an invitation because Gutzon, fifteen years before, had made a three-quarter bust of the king’s grandfather. It was proudly displayed on a gilt mantel.

“Is it a good portrait?” asked the sculptor.

The king smiled. “Yes, it is,” he said. “It is a good portrait with just a touch of American vigor.”

His Majesty then presented Gutzon with the Order of the Knights of Danenborg. “Interesting,” the king said as he draped the ribbon about Borglum’s neck, “to think that your people killed one of our kings.”

“I had heard of some disturbance in the old days at Borglum Kloster,” Borglum said. “There was violence....”

“That was it. The king was seized. They took him to a prison and a week later they hanged him. But you, of course, hadn’t much to do with that.”

“No,” admitted Borglum, “I hadn’t. I don’t know what to say.” The king smiled again. “I’ll forgive you,” he said. “You know, Borglum, your people, the Jutlanders, may be said to have saved Denmark. They were the only ones the Swedes could not defeat.”

“That makes me feel better,” declared Gutzon.

But the king seemed not to have heard him. “Yes,” His Majesty went on, “the Swedes took virtually all the country. They overran the villages and cities. They captured Copenhagen. They took everything valuable. But, of course, they never took Jutland. That’s where your people were.”

* * * * *

The financial situation in Denmark in the middle of the nineteenth century was what caused James Borglum, Gutzon’s father, to come to the United States. The markets were bad, the crop yield had been none too good and there was discontent in the family over the probable division of what little would be left of Grandfather Borglum’s estate.

James de la Mothe Borglum at twenty-three was a Latin-and-Greek scholar in his last year as a medical student. He took passage with his sweetheart on a freighter from Esbjerg across the North Sea to London. They were married in London and immediately afterward took passage in a three-masted sailing ship on a voyage from Liverpool to New York. Of this voyage Gutzon writes:

The trip was a nightmare. The ship was dismasted in a violent storm. The passengers helped to clear away the wreckage and drop it overboard. Then with a few spars for masts and sails made out of bedding they gathered wind enough to carry them to the New World. They were six weeks on the way, most of the time at the mercy of the mad sea.

The honeymooners lingered only a day or two in New York. Steam trains took them to Nebraska City on the west bank of the Missouri River. There they joined an expedition of 126 wagons starting out for Oregon.

They were months on the road, rarely traveling more than ten miles a day. The day’s course depended on the distance between water holes. They traveled without incident until they came into the land of the Cheyennes at the confluence of the North and South Platte rivers. The team boss had died. James Borglum, who was an able doctor and popular with the people in the train, was chosen to converse with some visiting Indians. One of them asked permission to examine Borglum’s pistol and shot himself with it. The chief blamed the mishap on the white spokesman because he had owned the pistol. He demanded the surrender of Borglum’s person and was refused. The Indians, loudly muttering, went away.

They spent a restless night, but the expected attack did not come. Toward midnight a band of wild horses rushed into the expedition’s herd of mules, horses and oxen. These animals were well tied and guarded and there was no alarm save for the sudden screaming of a woman. Nothing amiss was discovered until a check was made toward morning and the wife of a teamster was found to be missing. Twenty years later she was found in Montana, the wife of a chief, with grown children. She refused to leave her adopted people or to return to the whites.

James Borglum never forgot the tragedy of this long trip. The desperate hardships came near the end. There was scarcity of everything. It is hard to realize the amount of food consumed by some 450 men, women and children in four months, or the amount of water necessary daily on a dry plain in midsummer to keep horses and oxen on their feet. Borglum used to tell of a small group of voyagers who had joined his party in Wyoming. They had been living on mule harness which they boiled to give salt and “some strength” to the water.

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.”