Black Hills (9 page)

Paha Sapa knows that Borglum is planning a symbolic blasting as part of President Roosevelt’s dedication ceremony. His son, Lincoln, has already been directed to find the best way to drape the huge American flag, now in storage, over Jefferson’s face, the flag to be swung to one side by the long boom of the pointing machine atop the heads. There is to be a reviewing stand for dignitaries behind where Roosevelt’s car will be parked, and live radio microphones and half a dozen newsreel cameras grinding. If Paha Sapa is successful in triggering charges on all
three
of the heads that Sunday, no one will be hurt, but the entire world will watch in movie theater newsreels the final destruction of the three heads on what would have been the Monument on Mount Rushmore.

Three heads.

There is part of the problem. Paha Sapa knows all too well Gutzon Borglum’s plan for four heads up there, the last one being that of Theodore Roosevelt, tucked in between Jefferson and Lincoln. The stone experts are already drilling and coring to confirm that the granite there will be of adequate quality for the carving, and though many have protested Borglum’s putting so recent a president up there—and another Republican to boot—Paha Sapa knows how stubborn Borglum is. If the sculptor lives (and perhaps even if he does not, with Lincoln taking over), there will be a Teddy Roosevelt head on Mount Rushmore.

Paha Sapa’s Vision was of four
wasichu
Great Stone Heads rising out of the Six Grandfathers,
four
giant stone
wasichus
shrugging off the soil and trees of the Paha Sapa, and
four
of these terrible giants looking out and over the destruction of Paha Sapa’s people and of the buffalo and of the Natural Free Human Beings’ way of life.

Does he not have to destroy all four heads to keep this Vision from coming true?

More to the point, Paha Sapa realizes as he approaches the final flights of steps, does he now have
time
to wait for that fourth head to be carved?

The doctor in Casper said no.
A few months
, the white-haired doctor said solemnly but with no emotion, just another old Indian sitting on his examining table,
perhaps a year if you’re unlucky.

Paha Sapa understood that the “unlucky” referred to the pain and immobilization and incontinence this form of cancer would give him if the dying dragged on.

P
AHA
S
APA PASSES
the wooden landing with a flat bit of graveled soil between the boulders where the men ambushed him each morning for weeks after he was first hired by Borglum five years earlier.

To their credit, they never attacked him all at once. Each morning they’d have another champion to beat the old Indian into submission, to beat him so badly that he would have to quit. One of the larger, more violent miners in the early attacks.

And each morning, Paha Sapa refused to be beaten into submission. He fought back fiercely, with fists and jabs and head butts and kicks to the bigger man’s balls when he could. He sometimes won. More often he lost. But he always took a toll on his assailant, morning after morning. And he was never beaten so badly by the white men’s single champion that he—Paha Sapa—could not lift his drill or crate of explosives and helmet and gear and continue the painful climb toward the powder shack, where he would begin work. And though they broke his nose and blackened his eyes and pulped his lips over those weeks, they never managed to disfigure his face so much that he couldn’t don the filtration mask and go to work.

Finally, Borglum noticed and called all the men together in a meeting outside his studio on Doane Mountain opposite the work site.

—
What the goddamned hell is going on?

Silence from the men. Borglum’s usual roar of a voice became an even louder roar, drowning out the compressor that had just started up.

—
I’m goddamned serious. I’ve got a powderman who is obviously getting the excrement beaten out of him every day and two dozen other workers with missing
teeth and rearranged noses. Now, I need to know what the goddamned hell is going on and I’ll know it right
now.
There are thousands of miners and workmen and powdermen out of work, right here in South Dakota, who’ll take your jobs in a fast minute, and I’m about fifteen seconds away from giving those jobs to them.

The answer, such as it was, came from someone deep in the press of men.

—
It’s the Indian.

—
WHAT?

Borglum’s roar this time was so loud that the compressor actually stopped, the operator—the only man not at the meeting—obviously thinking that the machinery had seized up.

—
What goddamned Indian? Do you think I’d hire an Indian for this job?

The question was answered by silence and a sullen shuffling.

—
Well, you’re goddamned RIGHT I’d hire an Indian if he was the best man for the job—or a nigger, if it came to that—but Billy Slovak is no damned Indian!

Howdy Peterson stepped forward.

—
Mr. Borglum… sir. His name ain’t Billy Slovak. On the lists up at the Homestake, and the Holy Terror Mine before that, they had him down as Billy Slow Horse… sir. And he… he
looks
like an Indian, Mr. Borglum, sir.

Borglum shook his head as if as much in pity as disgust.

—
Goddamn it, Peterson. Are you all Norwegian or did a little coon or Cheyenne or wop sneak in there? And who the hell
CARES?
This man I hired is named Billy Slovak—part Czech or Bohunk or whatever the hell it is, and why should I care?—and he was
CHIEF POWDERMAN
at the goddamned Homestake Mine when I hired him. Do you know how long powdermen usually last at the Homestake—much less at that Hell Pit that was the Holy Terror? Three months. Three… goddamned… months. Then they either blow themselves up, and half a crew with them, or become total alkies or just lose their nerve and go hunt for work elsewhere. Billy Slovak—and that is his
NAME,
gentlemen—worked there
eleven years
without losing his nerve or ever hurting another man or piece of equipment.

The men shuffled and looked at one another and then at the ground again.

—
So either this crap
stops
or your jobs do. I need good powdermen more than I need stupid pugilists. Slovak’s staying—hell, he’s even playing first base on the
team when summer comes—and the rest of you can make up your own minds as to whether you want and deserve to stay or not. I hear that finding a good-paying, solid job like this in this goddamned year of our Lord nineteen and thirty-one is a goddamned piece of fucking cake. So gang up on Slovak again—or anyone else I hire—and you can pick up your week’s wages from Denison and get out. Now… either head for your cars or
get back to work.

As it turned out, sixty-six-year-old Paha Sapa didn’t play first base that first summer of 1931 or in the summers since. He played shortstop.

P
AHA
S
APA FINALLY PAUSES
to breathe and set down the crate of dynamite and caps and wipe the sweat from his face when he reaches the top and walks over to the powder shed.

Can he be ready in eight days?

He has the explosives—almost two tons of them—stashed away in the falling-down shed and root cellar in the collapsing house he rents in Keystone.

Dynamite is much safer than most civilians imagine.
New
dynamite, that is. Paha Sapa has trained his new powdermen to understand that new, fresh dynamite can be dropped, kicked, tossed—even burned—with little or no risk of explosion. It takes the little copper-jacketed cylinders of the blasting caps, attached to each stick by a four-foot electric wire, to set off the dynamite proper.

With fresh dynamite, Paha Sapa explains to his nervous new men, it’s the electric detonator
cap
that is dangerous and that must always be handled with great care. They are touchy things at the best of times, and accidentally closing a circuit or dropping a cap or banging it against something will—even if the cap’s not attached to the dynamite sticks yet—blow off a powderman’s hands or face or belly.

But the nearly two tons of dynamite (and twenty cases of detonator caps) that Paha Sapa has stolen and hidden in his falling-down shed and old root cellar in Keystone is
not
new dynamite. It was old (and abandoned) when he stole it from the closed-up Holy Terror Mine—named after the owner’s wife—where he’d once worked as chief powderman. The owners of the Holy Terror had held life cheap, and the lives of its
powdermen were held the cheapest of all. The owners had carried over dynamite from one season to the next, something absolutely prohibited in any gold or silver or coal mine where safety is a consideration.

Paha Sapa always enjoys showing new powdermen how dynamite sweats—the nitroglycerine leaking through the paper and beading up on the exterior—and how one can take a finger and snap a bead of dynamite sweat against a nearby boulder. The new men always flinch away when that hurled bead explodes against the stone with the sound of a .22 pistol being fired.

Then Paha Sapa explains about the dynamite headaches.

But the old dynamite stacked and stored in his cellar and shed does more than sweat death. The nitroglycerine in most of it has gathered and clumped and crystallized until it’s become so unstable that just shifting the crates—much less moving them in a car or truck or Paha Sapa’s own motorcycle sidecar—would be the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with all six cartridges loaded. (Paha Sapa is tempted to smile when he thinks of President Roosevelt’s caravan of cars on its way up here to the Monument on August 30, the president himself protected by Secret Service men, passing through Keystone and within thirty yards of Paha Sapa’s shed and root cellar, holding enough unstable explosive to blow all of Keystone a thousand feet into the air.)

But, he thinks again, it’s not the president he wishes to harm.

Even if Paha Sapa is able to get the unstable dynamite and the dangerous caps to the top of the mountain in the dark of night, past the few night guards Borglum has posted to watch over the tools and equipment, past the compressor house and hoist house and blacksmith shop and past Borglum’s studio and residence itself—then manages to somehow get the two tons of unstable explosives carried up these same 506 steps he’s just climbed—he’ll still need to drill hundreds of holes into the three faces.

On a regular day such as this one in August of 1936—normal except for the unusually brutal heat—there are already thirty or more men on the work areas of the three faces (and below them, a dozen men now on Washington’s chest), drilling, drilling—the compressors howling, the drill bits screaming—and many more “steel nippers,” workmen rushing up and down the cliff exchanging fresh drills and bits for old,
sending the dulled bits down on the tramway to be sharpened at the blacksmith shop across the valley. Soon, Whiskey Art and Paha Sapa and their assistants will be swinging down onto the cliff faces and presidents’ faces to join the drillers there as they load the preset drill holes with their hundreds of charges, then carefully tie the charges into an electrical detonator cord.

It’s the loud, roaring work of scores—sometimes hundreds—of men, just for a minor blow at noon or four p.m., when the workers are off the face, to move a ton or two of stone. To kill the
wasichu
heads, Paha Sapa will have to do it all at night, with unstable dynamite in hundreds of holes all over the faces to move a hundred times as much stone as a regular blast, and do it all silently, in the dark, and by himself, alone.

Still—that’s what he will have to do if he’s to bring down the three heads already risen from the stone. And he has long since come up with a plan that may give him a chance. But now, between the news of his growing cancer and the confirmation of the date for Roosevelt’s visit for the dedication, Paha Sapa knows he will have to do it by a week from the day after tomorrow, so that the “demonstration blast” in front of President Roosevelt and the gathered dignitaries and cameras will be the end, forever, of the stone
wasichus
rising from his sacred hills.