Black Hills (36 page)

—
Slovak! Is there a Billy Slovak here! Slovak!

Paha Sapa had taken the name for mining work thirty years earlier, when he’d moved back to the Hills with baby Robert after Rain’s death, leaving Pine Ridge Reservation with no doubts or regrets. He needed money. The Holy Terror Mine had been open then—a death trap—and was still owned by the man who’d named the mine after his wife, who was indeed a holy terror. But the working conditions in that mine were so terrible—especially for powdermen, who lasted about three months—that the owner, William “Rocky Mountain Frank” Franklin, would hire, they said, even a redskin if the man knew how to set a charge properly.

Paha Sapa didn’t know how to do that, but he learned quickly under one Tarkulich “Big Bill” Slovak, an older immigrant who said that he’d known six words of English when he came to America and started work as a seventeen-year-old powderman in the Brooklyn Bridge caisson under the East River in 1870, five of those words being “Run!” “Get down!” and “Look out!” Paha Sapa survived as Big Bill Slovak’s assistant for thirty-four months, and somehow the name Billy Slow
Horse on the payroll became Billy Slovak, right beneath the older man’s name. Then Big Bill had died in a cave-in (not of his own making), and “Billy Slovak” resigned before the Holy Terror was shut down for the first time in 1903—not for lack of gold, but from insolvency due to all the lawsuits from families of all the miners killed or maimed in accidents there.

But Paha Sapa left that hellhole with memories of Big Bill’s constant monologues about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, with a work card with the name Billy Slovak on it, and with recommendations saying that he was an able powderman.

Borglum and Paha Sapa stood there talking in the roiling dust and smoke and steam and Paha Sapa’s thought was
Why in God’s name did the Homestake owners let you come down here to steal their men?

But they had, and that’s why Borglum was there—he had assumed that this “Billy Slovak” would instantly know who he was and what he was doing in the Hills—and he offered Paha Sapa the job as assistant powderman for four dollars more a month than the sixty-six-year-old Indian was making in the Homestake.

And Paha Sapa saw what he could do to the Four Stone Giants who were emerging from his sacred hills and he agreed on the spot—he would have agreed if Borglum had offered him no pay at all.

And then they shook hands on it.

It was not quite like the
flowing-in-vision
with Crazy Horse, but it was far more like that than the sudden
forward-seeing
visions he’d shared with so many others. Gutzon Borglum’s life and memories did start flowing into Paha Sapa through that handshake, but somehow Borglum seemed to sense that something was happening—perhaps the man had his own vision abilities—and the sculptor jerked his hand away before all of his life, past and future, and all of his secrets, flowed to Paha Sapa the way Crazy Horse’s had.

In the months that followed, when Paha Sapa had the time to open his own defenses to allow Borglum’s memories in, he realized that, unlike with Crazy Horse, there were no future memories there. It would have pleased Paha Sapa if there had been. If Borglum, only two years Paha Sapa’s junior, was going to outlive him—which would be the case if Paha Sapa succeeded in his plan—he could have seen his plan succeed in Borglum’s
future memories, the way he had seen the death of Crazy Horse. Paha Sapa would have seen his own death.

Instead, Borglum’s captured thoughts and memories were all prior to the day the two men met and made physical contact in late January of 1931, and when Paha Sapa had the time and inclination, he picked through the sculptor’s life like a man raking through the ashes of a burned-down home. Even the shards were complex.

Paha Sapa must have been the only man working for Borglum who knew that the woman whom the sculptor claimed as his mother in his already-published autobiography was actually his mother’s older sister. It took some raking for Paha Sapa to understand.

Borglum’s officially listed parents, Jens Møller Haugaard Borglum and Ida Mikkelsen Borglum, had been Danish immigrants. But they were also Mormons who’d made the trip to America with other Danish converts to live and work in the “New Zion” that Mormons were erecting near the Great Salt Lake somewhere in the desert of a territory called Utah. Jens Borglum and his wife, Ida, had gone west with the wagon trains, although they could only afford a pushcart.

A year after they reached Utah, they brought Ida’s younger sister, eighteen-year-old Christina, over from Denmark to join them. As was the custom with the isolated, insulated Mormons at that time, Jens took Christina as his second wife. They moved to Idaho, where, in 1867, young Christina bore her husband a son, John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum. Then, back in Utah, Christina had another son, Solon Hannibal de la Mothe Borglum.

But the railroad was connecting the nation and the railroad passed straight through Ogden, the city where the Borglums lived. And with that connection isolation ended and national outrage at the Mormons’ practice of polygamy poured in. Congress, the newspapers, and an endless stream of newly arrived non-Mormons expressed their outrage over what they considered a barbarous, non-Christian practice.

Jens took his wives and children and headed east on that same railroad. In Omaha, knowing the discrimination that awaited them, Gutzon Borglum’s real mother, Christina, withdrew from the marriage, stayed on briefly as a “housekeeper,” and then left the family to go live with another sister. She later remarried.

Jens Borglum went to the Missouri Medical College, studied homeopathic medicine, changed his name to Dr. James Miller Borglum, and set up a medical practice in Fremont, Nebraska. There young Gutzon grew up in some small confusion, since his and his brother Solon’s official and public mother was actually their aunt.

All this seemed unimportant but fascinated Paha Sapa as he allowed Borglum’s childhood and young-adult memories to filter through in the months after they first met.

The first image that Paha Sapa was struck with was much more recent: the fifty-seven-year-old Borglum in 1924, already a self-proclaimed world-famous sculptor, high on the cliff face of Stone Mountain in Georgia, shoving large working models of General Stonewall Jackson’s and General Robert E. Lee’s heads to smash on boulders far below; the sculptor ordering a worker to take a sledgehammer to the huge twelve-by-twenty-four-foot working model of the seven figures of the famous Confederates (identities of four of them yet to be determined) who were supposed to fill Stone Mountain in what would have been the largest and greatest sculpture in the world.

The damned Georgians weren’t going to fully fund him, they wanted to bring in another sculptor, and he—John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum—would be God-damned to hell if he let those Southern redneck bastards have any of the fruit of his labors there.

Paha Sapa looked at these recent memories as if recalling a vivid, violent dream and watched as Borglum, finished with smashing and burning and destroying everything—working models, plans, maquettes, busts, designs for giant projectors and platforms,
everything
—then ran like a rabbit for North Carolina.

The state of Georgia still had warrants out for the famous sculptor.

So, in the end, Paha Sapa realized those first months of inhabiting some of Borglum’s memories and old thoughts, Crazy Horse and sculptor Gutzon Borglum were very much alike after all. Both had been driven from childhood to achieve some violent greatness. Each saw himself as singled out by the gods for great deeds and accolades. Each had dedicated his life to goals of his ego, even if achieving those goals meant using others, casting them aside, and lying and hurting when necessary.

Borglum had never lifted another man’s scalp or ridden naked through enemy fire, as Crazy Horse had done repeatedly, but Paha Sapa now saw that the sculptor had counted coup in his own way. Many times.

He also could see—thanks to his years talking to Doane Robinson and to the three Jesuits at the little tent school above Deadwood almost sixty years earlier—that while Gutzon Borglum’s heritage was Danish, his attitude toward life was essentially classically Greek. That is, Borglum believed in the
agon:
the Homeric idea that every two things on earth must compete to be compared and then sorted into one of three categories—equal to, less than, or greater than.

Gutzon Borglum was not a man who would settle for anything other than “greater than.”

In the fragments and shards of ego-distorted memory, Paha Sapa saw Borglum as a brash twenty-two-year-old would-be painter who went to Europe and studied under an expatriate American artist named Elizabeth “Liza” Jayne Putnam. Although she was eighteen years older than Borglum and infinitely more sophisticated, he married her, learned from her, and then discarded her and returned to America to create his own studio. Once in New York in 1902, Borglum opened his studio and promptly contracted typhoid fever and had a nervous breakdown.

Borglum’s brother, Solon—the only sibling born from his own real mother, now unacknowledged and only the most distant of memories—was a renowned sculptor, so Borglum decided to become a sculptor. A
better and more famous
sculptor.

Borglum’s discarded wife, Liza, now fifty-two, rushed to America to nurse her younger husband out of his illness and melancholia, but she learned that Borglum had already begun that healing by meeting a young Wellesley graduate, Miss Mary Montgomery, on the boat from Europe. Miss Montgomery—quite young, quite passionate, intensely well-educated and opinionated (but never so much that she contradicted Borglum or his ego)—was to be, of course, the Mrs. Borglum that Paha Sapa and all the other workers at Mount Rushmore knew so well.

Doane Robinson, who had come up with the idea of carving figures into the dolomite spires in the Black Hills to attract tourists, had seen the virile, aggressive, self-confident Gutzon Borglum as the salvation of
his—Doane’s—dream of massive sculptures in the Hills. But over the past five years, as more shards of Borglum’s memory surfaced through the ash for Paha Sapa, he has seen that—especially after the debacle at Stone Mountain in Georgia—the Mount Rushmore project, enlarged and aggrandized as it constantly was by the sculptor, was actually the salvation of Gutzon Borglum.

In 1924, while the Georgia State Police were still hunting for Borglum and just after an innocent Doane Robinson had approached the sculptor (and, perhaps more important, just after Doane Robinson, South Dakota’s Senator Peter Norbeck, and Congressman William Williamson had sponsored a bill appropriating $10,000 toward the project), Borglum was fifty-seven years old. In October of 1927, when the actual drilling on the mountain first began, Borglum was sixty years old. (Paha Sapa had heard that the sculptor, Borglum, had announced that the Washington head would be completed “within a twelvemonth” and that there “would be no dynamite blasting”… that all the carving of the mountain would be done by drill and by chisel. Paha Sapa had smiled at that, thinking of the tens and tens of thousands of tons of granite that would have to be moved just to find carvable stone. He knew even before Borglum did that 98 percent of the work on Mount Rushmore, if the project actually proceeded, would be done by blasting.)

There are hundreds of memories and powerful images that flowed into Paha Sapa that black day deep down in shaft nine of the Homestake Mine, before Borglum sensed some deeper connection in the handshake and abruptly pulled away (but did not rescind his job offer, whatever his temporary uneasiness), some of the memories, of course, explicitly sexual, some felonious, but Paha Sapa tries to avoid these, just as he long ago would have shut his ears to the lusty ramblings of the Custer ghost, if he’d been able to. Despite Paha Sapa’s sacred gift of these visions, he hates intruding on other human beings’ privacy.

Borglum is sixty-nine years old this August day as he rides to the summit of the mountain with the powderman he thinks of as Billy Slovak, just two years younger than Paha Sapa, and thus far three of the four great Heads have emerged from the stone, and these only partially. The sculptor plans to reveal much of their upper bodies and some arms and hands. And Borglum has more ambitious plans for the
mountain—the Entablature, the Hall of Records. Gigantic projects in and of themselves. But Paha Sapa knows that Borglum has no worries about his age or health or about time itself; Borglum, he knows, plans to live forever.

T
HEY REACH THE TOP
and step out of the cage and Borglum strides to where some of the boys have spent the day preparing the framework and armature of the crane that will drape the huge American flag over Jefferson and then lift and swing the flag back to reveal the head. The sculptor is talking, but Paha Sapa keeps walking along the ridgeline, past the crane and Jefferson.

From up here, one can see—feel—how very narrow the ridge of rock is between the blasted-in trough in which three of the four heads are emerging and the unseen wall of the canyon behind this ridge. When—if—the Teddy Roosevelt head is finished, the ledge between the carved face on one side and the vertical drop to the canyon on the other side will be narrow enough that it might make people nervous to stand on it.