Black Hills

by Dan Simmons

  The irony of the Lakota ending-discussion statement, the bonding statement that ends argument and planning and any further discussion of an issue, hits him harder than ever. He is betraying all his relatives, Paha Sapa realizes. Every one.

  Suddenly, with a wave of nausea, he also realizes that he will fail in his mission.

  For months, for years, he has planned this final blast—the one that will bring down the heads—but suddenly everything is rushed. He is out of time and out of energy. Just when he needs his strength, the gods are taking it away from him.

  As Borglum drones on about future blasting on the TR site, Paha Sapa reviews his options.

  His plan was to work all this night preparing and transporting the twenty crates of old, unstable dynamite he has stored in his shed in Keystone. Then hide it here on the site somewhere.

  But where? He’s scoured Doane Mountain and all the other areas. He can’t place that many crates of explosive on the face of the mountain two days early—the crates would be detected for sure. There will be fifty men putting in unpaid overtime tomorrow, Saturday, rigging the huge flag that will hang over the Jefferson face for the ceremony, drilling, doing last-minute finishing work, working as Paha Sapa will be to prepare the demonstration charge for Sunday.

  No, the crates have to be transported here tonight, Friday night, and hidden so that they remain out of sight until Saturday night, when—if his energy returns—Paha Sapa can get the dynamite up onto the mountain and out onto the faces and concealed the way he has planned, and rigged and wired to detonators and his master detonators for Sunday’s final blast in full view of the president of the United States and the reporters and the newsreel cameras.

  But he’s found no hiding place that will work. There are no guards, per se, on the Monument site, but various people—including Borglum and his family—live in the cluster of cabins on Doane Mountain. Any arrival of a truck in the middle of the night or starting up of the equipment would be heard at once. And investigated.

  And there is simply no place secret enough to hide the twenty crates of dynamite for the busy Saturday ahead. Paha Sapa has considered the various storage sheds, including the huge one holding the delivered but never-used submarine engines now rusting away there, but the place is too close to Borglum’s and his son’s living quarters.

  Borglum drones on.

  Paha Sapa moves closer to him and stealthily lifts the latch to the tram cage’s door, hiding the motion with the bulk of his body. They are both leaning against that door now.

  Paha Sapa knows how strong Gutzon Borglum is: the strength of the sculptor’s powerful arms and body are second only to the strength of his personality. In his suddenly weakened state, Paha Sapa knows that he could not win a fight or wrestling match with the always wary Wasicun, but all he has to do here is swing open the door with his left hand and throw himself forward against Borglum, sending both him and the sculptor out through the sudden emptiness where the door and fourth wall of the cage had been. They are more than three hundred feet above the valley floor.

  Paha Sapa tenses his muscles. He is sorry now that he has never composed his Death Song. Limps-a-Lot was correct in saying that only arrogant men waited to do this important thing. He could not sing it aloud now, but he could be singing it in his mind as he throws himself against Borglum and as the two fall, entangled, kicking and gouging, all the way to the gray boulder field below.

  Will Borglum curse and fight? wonders Paha Sapa. Will I scream despite myself ?

  He hesitates. The carving of the heads is far along. Paha Sapa knows that Borglum anticipates never actually finishing the Mount Rushmore Monument; he sees himself working on it for another twenty years, twenty-five, thirty, for the rest of his life. But even with the addition of the ill-fated (until now) Entablature project and the Hall of Records in the canyon behind, a job almost equal to the carving of the Four Heads themselves, Paha Sapa knows that Borglum anticipates the bulk of the project being finished before the end of the 1940s.

  Can his son, Lincoln, finish the project? Paha Sapa knows and admires Lincoln, so unlike his father in everything except courage and resolve, and thinks that he might well be up to the task. If the Park Service does not cancel the project for some unforeseen reason. If the federal money does not dry up.

  But it has not dried up—at least permanently—through the worst the Depression has thrown at them so far. Current funding for 1936 and beyond looks strong, stronger than at any time in the project’s shaky history. And this new supervisor, Spotts, is a man who gets things done. And if FDR arrives less than two days from now not only to be present during the dedication of the Jefferson head but to mourn the death of the sculptor behind this grand idea—Paha Sapa can see in his mind’s eye the heads shrouded in black crepe rather than Jefferson covered with an American flag—the president could be so moved that he vows more money to complete the project, including the Hall of Records, ahead of schedule. And Lincoln Borglum would carry on his father’s dream into the 1940s and…

  The Hall of Records.

  Realizing how close he is to falling out with Borglum even without the shove, Paha Sapa secretly slides the door latch back into place.

  Borglum is speaking to him.

  —So let’s go up and have a look.

  The sculptor reaches over his Stetsoned head and tugs down on the chain that releases the brake arm. Then he waves to Edwald far below.

  The cage jerks and sways wildly for a moment and steadies itself only as they begin rising toward the top of the unstarted TR head. If Paha Sapa had not latched the cage door when he did, the swaying alone would have thrown the two of them out.

  They glide through heated air above gouged granite to the summit of the Six Grandfathers.

  PAHA SAPA FIRST SAW GUTZON BORGLUM through billowing clouds of steam and dissipating blasting smoke as the sculptor stepped out of the cage into Mineshaft Number Nine a mile below the surface near the town of Lead. The sculptor had come looking for a powderman listed on the Homestake Mine rolls as Billy Slovak.

  He’d heard about Borglum for years, of course: the man wanted by the entire state of Georgia for single-handedly ruining their Stone Mountain monument; the arrogant SOB who drove his yellow roadster into South Dakota gas stations and expected the attendants to fill the tanks for free simply because he was the Gutzon Borglum; the fanatic who fielded the only baseball team in thirty miles that could take on the Homestake boys—and who treated baseball as a blood sport (in the Black Hills, Paha Sapa knew, baseball had always been a blood sport) but who had his team ally with the Homestake Nine when it came to beating the shit out of the vicious Cee Cee (Civilian Conservation Core) bastards.

  This was the man Paha Sapa had heard and read about who was tearing the heart and guts out of the Six Grandfathers in an arrogant attempt to carve the heads of US presidents into a mountain sacred to nine Indian nations. And Paha Sapa had no doubt whatsoever that this Borglum person never even knew, much less cared, that Indians everywhere, and the majority of South Dakotan white people, for that matter, thought that carving mountains in the Black Hills was a defilement.

  This was the man who stepped out of the steam and blasting smoke, his short, stocky torso backlit by work lights, the thin beam of light from his borrowed mining helmet weak in the fog of dust and smoke and powder, and began bellowing into the endless hole of shaft nine…

  —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 k
new 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, a
nd 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.)