CHAPTER THREE

_ALONE_

Gutzon Borglum was seven years old; so the time must have been roughly 1874. In the twelve or thirteen years since James de la Mothe Borglum’s caravan had come to Bear Lake, Idaho, he had been singularly restless. Gutzon had been born in Idaho, Solon a year later in Ogden, Utah. Father Borglum had moved back eastward. He had another wife. He had acquired horses and cows, a home and an office. When Gutzon ran away, home was in Fremont, Nebraska.

The child left suddenly, accompanied only by his dog. He hadn’t thought to provide himself with food. He had heard of Omaha; so he started in that direction. He was three days on the way and had gone what seemed to be miles and miles when the sheriff caught up with him and brought him home. The sheriff dropped him at the Borglum house and went away. Fearful and hungry, Gutzon slept that night in the dog kennel.

Next morning he had a memorable return to the bosom of the family. His father was somewhere out of town, and his grandfather on his mother’s side had come for a visit. The grandfather was a martinet who felt that children should be taught that it is wrong to run away from home. He took charge of Gutzon and Gutzon never forgot him.

“I was only seven,” the sculptor remembered, “but I made up

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF 38TH STREET STUDIO

At the left is “I Have Piped and Ye Have Not Danced” and at the right is the “Mares of Diomedes.”]

[Illustration: MODEL OF ANGEL’S FACE

This is one of the offending feminine faces.]

my mind that I would get away from there and that I would keep trying until I succeeded ... and, eventually, that’s what I did.”

For all his muddled childhood, Gutzon loved his father. James Borglum was kind, tolerant and a philosopher. He sensed his son’s unhappiness, even though he would have had trouble explaining it, and a great bond developed between them. The boy went everywhere with him when not in school, even on his sick calls out in the country. Gutzon remembered that they would ride along for miles and miles in sunshine or cold or wet, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, but always in perfect peace.

One afternoon the doctor called to him and asked him to help hitch the horse. Gutzon at the time was a little over eight years old, but he did what he could with the harness and thereafter believed that he had been just as skilled and agile as any professional horse handler.

“I want you to come with me,” his father said. “There is a wounded man out on Rawhide Creek and I may need some help.” And Gutzon saw nothing wrong about that, either.

“We’ll fix him up fine,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have to sew him up.”

“Sure,” said the doctor as he lifted Gutzon into the buggy.

Rawhide Creek was a stream with a sorry reputation. It had taken its name from an English hunter who had turned away from slaughtering buffalo long enough to murder a young squaw. Other squaws had tied him to a cottonwood tree near the creek and skinned him alive. Gutzon recalled in his chronicle:

As for our call for medical help, we found our man in the cabin armed. He was stern, fine looking. I admired him greatly and what followed made us lifelong friends. He was an outlaw on the run who had been in some shooting scrape and had received a charge of goose shot in his arm. Father had no anaesthetic for him. I doubt if at the time there was more than a pint of it in the whole state of Nebraska. The wounded man was bleeding terribly, his arm resting on some blood-soaked blankets. A piece of rope, tightly drawn about the elbow, partly stanched the flow. He was alone with two inscrutable Pawnees. After they had washed the arm in warm water, my father turned to me and said, “Gutzon, you will have to help hold his arm.”

The Indians gripped the man’s hand; my job was to keep the lacerations open so that Father could find the shot. We were still working when there was a sharp knock at the door. Sheriff Gregg, with a deputy at his heels, came in and put our patient under arrest. Gregg and Father were friends and Father said, “He stays here till this job is done, Bob.” And we went on doing what we had to do.

The man, whose name was Fielding, was then taken to jail to be held for trial. There I visited him frequently with Father and later alone with the permission of the sheriff who liked me. Fielding was an excellent draughtsman and I brought him red and blue pencils. He loved to draw the American Eagle and the flag as we saw them on the older coins.

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.

Fremont was a town of bewildering experiences. It was filled with fantastic excitement--Indian alarms, the coming and going of prairie schooners, visits of parties of Cheyenne and Sioux chiefs, gun fights beyond the hills and reports of Indian massacres on the Niobrara. Against all this the simple village life of the Swedes and Danes looked like that of quaint foreigners. Yet there were tragedies among Gutzon’s own people--sickness and death and evil times, thin crops and blizzards, high winds and floods.

There was a brief school life at home, then school life at a distance. Each year when the boy returned he would find that some of his Fremont had vanished. Not exactly _vanished_, he felt; rather, the town had grown and he had grown, and somehow they had parted. The doctor moved his family after years of this to Omaha. There didn’t seem to be much difference.

He had been gone a long time--or so it seemed to him--when he was eighteen years old. The thought came to him that he must see his old playground and playmates, swim in the old Rawhide, go graping or be once more with the boys and girls with whom he had grown up. He bought a train ticket for Fremont and long remembered how he could hardly wait to reach the town.

The train slowed down at the platform and he was off before it stopped. He looked at the crowd of strangers pressing about, and tried to catch a glimpse of a familiar face. At last he found a few ... but very few.

He went into town and to the homes of friends. He found the girls he had known. Their hair was piled high on top of their heads; their dresses were long, their manners awkward. The boys stared at him and didn’t say anything. He couldn’t tell what had happened to these people, and, he realized later, they were puzzled in the same way about him. All of them had grown.

There was no longer any school from which to play hooky, no occasion to hang one’s clothes on a cottonwood and dive into mud from an old stump. Gutzon was now a stranger to all that. And, though he refused to see it, so were these close friends of a few years ago. None of them could understand. He wrote:

I turned like one frightened and hurt and brokenhearted and ran back to the station. There on the platform I sat for hours waiting for any train to get away from Fremont. No--away from the reality that had blotted out my magic world, the world that a boy of from six to twelve lives in. And I have never had the courage to return.

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.