recall where I have been or what has happened. My guess is that I have been wounded, perhaps seriously, although I cannot seem to gain consciousness sufficiently to know whether my body is intact, my limbs still attached. Sometimes I hear people speaking nearby, but I can never quite make out what they are saying. Perhaps I am in some hospital with German nurses. All I know is that I still retain my wits and my memories of you and our love here in this comatic darkness. I hope to God that it is mere sunstroke or concussion, which, as you know, has happened to me before, and that I will fully awaken soon.
You do not want your Autie damaged, your beautiful boy’s slim body inordinately scarred or missing necessary parts. I have promised you… I promised you when I left Fort Lincoln… I have always promised you, during the War, before every campaign out here on the plains… that I will return and that we will be together forever and forever and forever.
Oh, Libbie… Libbie, my darling… my dearest girl, my sweet wife. My love. My life.
6
On the Six Grandfathers
August 1936
5 06 STEPS .
Paha Sapa pauses at the base of the stairway and looks up at the 506 steps he has to climb. They are the same 506 steps he has climbed almost every weekday morning for the past five years. It is 6:45 on a summer morning—Friday, 21 August—and already the sun has turned the air in the valley as hot as it gets here in the Black Hills. The air is filled with the sound of grasshoppers and the butterscotch scent of heated ponderosa pine. Because it’s Friday, Paha Sapa knows, the crew coming down from the top this evening will play their “mountain goating” game—the 506 steps are separated into flights by some forty-five ramps and platforms, and the goal of the cheering workmen will be to “mountain goat” down by leaping from platform to platform without touching any of the fifty or so steps in between. No one has ever done this successfully, Paha Sapa knows, but no one has broken his neck or leg either, so the mountain goating will happen at the end of this long workday as well, the wild leaping accompanied by the shouts and cheers of the hardworking drillmen and hoist men and miners and powdermen released for their weekend.
Paha Sapa looks up at the 506 steps and realizes that he is tired even before beginning the climb.
Of course, he is seventy-one years old this month, but this is not the reason for his fatigue so early in the day. The cancer that Paha Sapa wasdiagnosed with just a month earlier—in Casper, Wyoming, so that no word would reach Borglum or the workers as it might if he’d gone to a doctor in nearby Rapid City—is already eating him from the inside out. He can feel it. It means that he has less time than he had hoped.
But Paha Sapa, even though he carries a forty-pound box of blasting caps and fresh dynamite on his shoulder, does not pause to rest on one of the forty-five ramps or landings on the way up. His strength has always been surprising for a man of his size, and he will not surrender to weakness now until it becomes absolutely necessary. And it is not yet necessary.
Paha Sapa has often heard visitors below estimate the height from the valley floor (where the parking lot and Borglum’s studio are) to the top of the stone heads as “thousands of feet,” but it’s only a little over four hundred feet from the lowest point at the base of the talings of tumbled shards and boulders to the tops of Washington’s and Jefferson’s and (emerging) Lincoln’s heads. Still, that’s the equivalent of climbing the stairs in a forty-story building—something that Paha Sapa has seen in New York—and it takes the men about fifteen minutes to climb to the top of what is now called Mount Rushmore.
Of course, there’s always the aerial tram—that open-topped, small-outhouse-sized box that is whizzing past Paha Sapa as he trudges up another flight of fifty steps—but even the new men know about the time
You do not want your Autie damaged, your beautiful boy’s slim body inordinately scarred or missing necessary parts. I have promised you… I promised you when I left Fort Lincoln… I have always promised you, during the War, before every campaign out here on the plains… that I will return and that we will be together forever and forever and forever.
Oh, Libbie… Libbie, my darling… my dearest girl, my sweet wife. My love. My life.
6
On the Six Grandfathers
August 1936
5 06 STEPS .
Paha Sapa pauses at the base of the stairway and looks up at the 506 steps he has to climb. They are the same 506 steps he has climbed almost every weekday morning for the past five years. It is 6:45 on a summer morning—Friday, 21 August—and already the sun has turned the air in the valley as hot as it gets here in the Black Hills. The air is filled with the sound of grasshoppers and the butterscotch scent of heated ponderosa pine. Because it’s Friday, Paha Sapa knows, the crew coming down from the top this evening will play their “mountain goating” game—the 506 steps are separated into flights by some forty-five ramps and platforms, and the goal of the cheering workmen will be to “mountain goat” down by leaping from platform to platform without touching any of the fifty or so steps in between. No one has ever done this successfully, Paha Sapa knows, but no one has broken his neck or leg either, so the mountain goating will happen at the end of this long workday as well, the wild leaping accompanied by the shouts and cheers of the hardworking drillmen and hoist men and miners and powdermen released for their weekend.
Paha Sapa looks up at the 506 steps and realizes that he is tired even before beginning the climb.
Of course, he is seventy-one years old this month, but this is not the reason for his fatigue so early in the day. The cancer that Paha Sapa wasdiagnosed with just a month earlier—in Casper, Wyoming, so that no word would reach Borglum or the workers as it might if he’d gone to a doctor in nearby Rapid City—is already eating him from the inside out. He can feel it. It means that he has less time than he had hoped.
But Paha Sapa, even though he carries a forty-pound box of blasting caps and fresh dynamite on his shoulder, does not pause to rest on one of the forty-five ramps or landings on the way up. His strength has always been surprising for a man of his size, and he will not surrender to weakness now until it becomes absolutely necessary. And it is not yet necessary.
Paha Sapa has often heard visitors below estimate the height from the valley floor (where the parking lot and Borglum’s studio are) to the top of the stone heads as “thousands of feet,” but it’s only a little over four hundred feet from the lowest point at the base of the talings of tumbled shards and boulders to the tops of Washington’s and Jefferson’s and (emerging) Lincoln’s heads. Still, that’s the equivalent of climbing the stairs in a forty-story building—something that Paha Sapa has seen in New York—and it takes the men about fifteen minutes to climb to the top of what is now called Mount Rushmore.
Of course, there’s always the aerial tram—that open-topped, small-outhouse-sized box that is whizzing past Paha Sapa as he trudges up another flight of fifty steps—but even the new men know about the time
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