by Jim Noles
The Tibetans took quickly to their training—parachuting, radio communications, even the manufacturing of homemade munitions. Eventually, 259 of them would train at Camp Hale.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Greaney said. “After dinner, they would go back to practice Morse code. Really, we used to comment back and forth that we were working with the Tibetans instead of the Central American problem, which was the Bay of Pigs. We knew we were involved in a good program.”
In September 1959, the first eighteen Camp Hale graduates parachuted back into Tibet. Only five would survive, the victims of air attacks the following January on the Tibetans massed around Pem-bar monastery. As the Chinese crushed the revolt at large, resistance fighters turned to staging hit-and-run raids out of Nepal’s Mustang Province, from which they still managed to score a number of impressive intelligence coups for the CIA.
Nevertheless, as the 1960s wore on, the prospects for success in Tibet dimmed. The CIA ended its clandestine airdrops of arms and munitions in 1965; it shut down Camp Hale that same year. The following year, control of the camp reverted to the U.S. Forest Service, in whose hands it remains today. But for those in the know, Camp Hale stands as a reminder that Colorado’s declaration of “Colorful Colorado” on its state quarter was absolutely correct—Colorado and its history are and have been colorful indeed.
39
NORTH DAKOTA
Where the Buffalo
(Still) Roam
The American bison—a.k.a., the buffalo—has a long tradition of appearing on American coinage that dates back to 1913. That year, U.S. Mint facilities in Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco began minting what became known as the Buffalo nickel. On one side the coin features an Indian head; on the other, a buffalo reportedly patterned after a bison named “Black Diamond” that lived in New York City’s Central Park Zoo in the early part of the twentieth century.
The Buffalo nickel, which was generally considered to be among the most aesthetic of American coins, continued its run until 1938.
By Black Diamond’s day, however, it was looking as though the Buffalo nickel might be one of the few places one could still find an American bison—the unfortunate result of America’s westward expansion colliding head-on (sometimes literally) with the woolly beasts.
Although the buffalo is generally thought to be a resident of the Great Plains and the sheltered valleys of the Rocky Mountains, it once roamed a far larger range. In fact, the great mammal once called much of North America home, as is evident in Mark Catesby’s pre- Revolution masterpiece, Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, which includes a drawing of a bison head-butting a locust tree. Buffalo could be found from Alaska and Canada south into Mexico, undertaking great seasonal migrations that could be several miles wide. Some have estimated that as many as 40 million buffalo could, at one time, be found on the Great Plains.
Not surprisingly, the presence of a game animal of the numbers and size (some weighing over 2,000 pounds) made the buffalo popular prey for the Plains Indians. But even the lances, arrows, and bullets of the Plains tribes—which, it could be fairly said, built an entire culture centered on hunting the buffalo—could not rival the impending massacre of the species that would accompany white settlement of the American West.
In the eyes of the pioneers, settlers, ranchers, and the U.S. Army, the buffalo offered a ripe resource at best and a frustrating problem at worst. The army, tasked with provisioning a scattering of isolated forts across the frontier, turned to buffalo hunters to supply meat for their hungry troops. So did the growing number of railroad construction camps. In many ways, this need for buffalo meat marked the beginning of commercial buffalo hunting.
The buffalo was as much of a problem as it was a resource, however, at least as far as the settlers were concerned. The massive buffalo herds made farming and ranching across wide swaths of the Great Plains impossible. The massive migration of the herds blocked wagon train and railroad traffic for days at a time.
“We saw them in frightful droves as far as the eye could reach; appearing at a distance as if the ground itself was moving like a sea,” one emigrant traveling along the Platte River wrote. “Buffalo extended the whole length of our afternoon’s travel, not in hundreds, but in solid phalanx. I estimated two million,” another added.
Those same herds served as a mobile commissary for those Indian tribes unwilling to accept life on reservations. In fact, the strategic significance of the buffalo herds was such that General Philip Sheridan once remarked, “Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is exterminated, as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance.”
The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 not only divided the Plains buffalo into what was loosely characterized as a northern and southern herd but also provided an industrialized vehicle for what became known as “the great slaughter.” Thanks to the Union Pacific, it became possible to profitably ship hides back to the East, where a variety of uses developed for the buffalo. Buffalo robes were used as coats and lap robes for people riding in sleighs and carriages. Buffalo hides made durable drive belts for industrial machines. Buffalo bones were ground into fertilizer; their tongues were considered high cuisine in fine restaurants.
Spurred by such demand, large-scale hunting of the southern herd began in 1874; it was all over in four years. In the north, the great hunts began in 1880 and were over by 1884. Shipment inventories from those days tell a sobering tale of the intensity of the carnage. In 1882, hunters shipped 200,000 hides out of the Dakota Territory. The following year, the number was down to 40,000, and in 1884, only one carload was shipped east. Even more disturbingly, some estimated that for every two hides shipped, three were lost on the range.
Such productivity, if one can call it that, depended upon a hardy breed of man—willing to endure punishing weather, hostile Indians, and the ugly reality of hours of backbreaking work to skin his prey. Precise numbers are not known, but some estimate that as many as 5,000 hunters and skinners worked the buffalo’s northern range in 1882.
A typical hunting operation would number four men (two hunters, a cook, and a skinner) on a three-month hunt. They operated out of two light wagons—one to haul the provisions and camping equipment, the other to carry bedding, a grindstone, ammunition, and extra guns. One calculation reports the ammunition required for an expedition included 250 pounds of lead to be molded into .50-inch bullets, 4,000 primers, and three twenty-five- pound cans of powder.
Most of the time, a day’s hunt followed a relatively uniform plan of attack. After locating the herd in the morning, the hunters would single out a small group to target. Approaching from downwind, the hunters would attempt, through careful shooting, to create what they called a “stand” of buffalo by first carefully picking off the animals on the perimeter of the group. The buffalo, with their notoriously poor eyesight and penchant for traveling into the wind, made the hunters’ jobs at this stage relatively easy. In fact, faced with so many targets, the hunters had to take care not to overheat their rifle barrels by firing too rapidly or too often.
As the hunters worked their way through the stand, careful shooting was important—the goal was to drop each buffalo with one shot. Otherwise, a wounded animal would spook the rest of the buffalo and the stand would disintegrate. Eventually, of course, the buffalo would sense their danger and the survivors would bolt, leaving the hunters to trail behind and shoot down the remainder one at a time. A good hunter would shoot as many as 100 buffalo in an hour or two. By the end of the season, he would have killed from 1,000 to 2,000. William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody was among the most successful buffalo hunters, reportedly killing 4,128 buffalo in an eighteen-month stretch.
Trailing the hunters came the skinners. They removed the buffalo hides from the carcasses with skinning knives and a forked dragging contraption rigged to their wagon’s rear axle, loaded the hides onto the wagons, and brought them back to camp. Ther
e they stretched, staked, dried, and piled the hides over the course of several days.
As they cured the hides, the skinners would pile them into four categories: bull hides, cow hides, robe hides, and kip hides (hides from younger animals). Bull hides fetched the highest prices—between $2.00 and $3.00 per bull hide—from the traders who came out to the camps, bought the hides, and arranged for their shipment east. It was good money in an era when a typical laborer was lucky to earn a dollar a day and when an army private barely made $13 a month.
Eventually, the massacre was such that a pioneer traveling along the Platte River could write of “the valley of the Platte for 200 miles; dotted with skeletons of buffalos.” “Such a waste of the creatures God had made for man seems wicked,” he added, “but every emigrant seems to wish to signalize himself by killing a buffalo.”
By the mid-1880s, the damage was done, with barely 1,200 to 2,000 buffalo surviving in the United States. And although their numbers would eventually rebound as a result of federal protection, they would never reach the gargantuan proportions of that earlier era. For many Americans, therefore, the closest that they will ever come to a buffalo may be on the reverse of North Dakota’s 664.8 million state quarters, first issued on August 28, 2006.
In North Dakota itself, the best bet for seeing a wild buffalo is in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, located in the same Badlands depicted in the background of North Dakota’s quarter. Today, the park is home to more than 400 wild buffalo, the offspring of a herd reintroduced to the Badlands in 1956.
40
SOUTH DAKOTA
“What Matter of Men
They Were”
In 1885, investors dispatched a New York attorney named Charles E. Rushmore to the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory to check legal titles on properties associated with a promising new tin mine in the area. One day, on his way back to the town of Pine Camp, Rushmore asked his guide, Bill Challis, the name of a 5,725-foot granite peak rising above what would one day be Harney National Forest.
“Never had a name,” Challis replied laconically, “but from now on we’ll call it Rushmore.”
Little did the attorney know the contribution his simple question would one day make to his nation’s cultural history.
Four decades later, on August 20, 1924, Doane Robinson, the superintendent of South Dakota’s Department of History, typed a letter to the sculptor Gutzon Borglum. At the time, Borglum was trying to complete his work on Georgia’s Stone Mountain, although disagreements with the project’s backers threatened to derail the effort. Perhaps aware of the problems, Robinson offered Borglum a straightforward proposition.
In the vicinity of Harney Peak, in the Black Hills of South Dakota are opportunities for heroic sculpture of unusual character. Would it be possible for you to design and supervise a massive sculpture there? The proposal has not passed beyond the mere suggestion, but if it be possible for you to undertake the matter I feel quite sure we could arrange to finance such an enterprise. (Taliaferro 2002, 54)
Upon receiving Robinson’s letter, the fifty-eight-year-old Borglum, who had returned to his home in Stamford, Connecticut, responded immediately. “Your letter forwarded to me from Stone Mountain,” he telegrammed. “Very much interested in your proposal. Great scheme you have; hold to it; the North will welcome it. Am two years ahead in my Southern work. Can get to Black Hills during September.”
Borglum, an Idaho-born sculptor of Danish immigrant parents, had at the time already earned an international reputation. After studying for two years in France and befriending the great French sculptor Auguste Rodin, he had returned to the United States and set to work creating what he called “American art.” His works eventually included the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Mares of Diomedes, the sculpture of General Phil Sheridan in Washington, D. C., and the marble bust of Lincoln that today sits in the Capitol Rotunda.
Less successful, however, was Borglum’s work at Georgia’s Stone Mountain. Although his initial carving of Robert E. Lee was so lifelike that it reportedly moved surviving veterans to tears when it was unveiled in 1924, business disagreements with the project’s backers led to his abrupt dismissal. Borglum destroyed his models; the Georgians swore out a warrant for his arrest. Borglum fled to Stamford; the Georgians eventually removed Borglum’s original work from the mountain altogether.
Still wanting to steer clear of Georgia, Borglum left Stamford for North Dakota on September 24, 1924, with his twelve-year-old son, Lincoln Borglum, in tow. The two met Robinson and agreed in principle to undertake a “heroic sculpture.” Originally, however, Robinson showed Borglum the Gothic cathedral-like granite spires of South Dakota’s so-called Needles area. It was there that Robinson had envisioned carving the images of American Indians and explorers on the Needles spires, an idea that, not surprisingly, sparked firm opposition. “Man makes statues,” one local conservationist scoffed, “but God made the Needles.”
Fortunately, Borglum determined that the Needles would not suffice for his sculpting needs. Equally fortunately, on a visit the following August, he and his son came upon Mount Rushmore. Looking at its soaring granite face, Borglum knew he had found what he needed.
With a site selected, all Robinson and Borglum needed was the federal and state legislation to authorize the work and the funding to make it happen, which was (forgive the pun) an equally tall order. Senator Peter Norbeck and Congressman William Williamson threw their legislative weight behind the project, with Williamson in particular playing a key role. He convinced President Calvin Coolidge to visit the Black Hills in the summer of 1927, a visit that paid handsome dividends when Coolidge agreed to provide federal funding to support the project, the cost of which eventually totaled $989,992.32.
On October 4, 1927, Borglum set to work, motivated by an almost spiritual drive to create what would one day be called a “Shrine of Democracy.” “A monument’s dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events commemorated,” he declared. “Let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the words of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what matter of men they were. Then breathe a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and the rain alone shall wear them away.”
Borglum’s sculpture was, however, as much a massive construction project as it was an artistic endeavor. Over the course of the project, he employed nearly 400 men and women, typically paying them $8.00 a day. For many, it was work of a kind they had never seen before and would never again. Enduring conditions that ranged from bitterly cold and windy to blazingly hot, jackhammer operators and dynamite powdermen would climb 700 stairs to the top of the mountain and punch in on the site’s time clock. Then, relying on 3/8-inch-thick steel cables, they would be lowered by hand-cranked winches over the front of the 500-foot face of the mountain in a “bosun chair.”
While working on Stone Mountain, Borglum had learned the technique of utilizing dynamite for even relatively precise carving work in granite and, at Mount Rushmore, he carved 90 percent of the sculpture using dynamite. Dangling from the mountain’s ledges, powdermen would cut and set charges of dynamite of specific sizes to remove precise amounts of rock until only three to six inches of rock was left. With the final carving surface revealed, the drillers and assistant carvers would drill closely placed holes into the granite in a process known as honeycombing. Once weakened by the holes, the rock could often be removed by hand.
After the honeycombing, the workers smoothed the surface of the faces with a hand facer or bumper tool to create a surface as smooth as a sidewalk. All the while, Borglum and, in the project’s final two years, his son, Lincoln, guided the work—sometimes hanging in bosun chairs themselves to join their workers.
As such work unfolded, adequate communications were essential for both accuracy and safety. Accordingly, the work crews relied on “call boys,” who perched on the edge of the mountain to shout the necessary messages back and forth. Apparently, the system worked—over the cour
se of fourteen years of construction, not a single fatality occurred. It was a feat that easily surpassed other construction projects of the era. The contemporaneous construction of the Hoover Dam, for example, claimed 96 lives.
Even Borglum’s best efforts, however, could not prevent one misstep. He started the figure of Thomas Jefferson on Washington’s right side. After eighteen months of carving, Borglum changed course and ordered Jefferson’s visage to be dynamited off the mountain. In the end, Jefferson appeared on Washington’s left, followed in order by Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
By March 1941, Borglum’s project was nearing completion after nearly fourteen years of work. In that time, the sculptor had worked tirelessly not only on the mountain but in the halls of government to ensure adequate funding—particularly during the depths of the Great Depression. Tragically, he never lived to see his dream’s completion. On March 6, 1941, Borglum died following surgery in Chicago.
In the wake of his father’s passing, Lincoln Borglum carried on the work and, on October 31, 1941, Mount Rushmore National Memorial was completed. But one piece of Borglum’s vision remained unfulfilled. Borglum wanted to create a “Hall of Records,” a large repository carved into the side of the canyon behind the carving of the presidents, to tell the story of Mount Rushmore and of America. Work was stopped in 1939 (and never resumed) because of the threat of losing all funding if the money was not used on the carving of the faces as had been intended.
Thanks to South Dakota’s 510.8 million state quarters, however, the tale of Borglum’s “heroic sculpture” continues to be told. In addition to Mount Rushmore, the South Dakota quarter is bordered by heads of wheat and features a Chinese ring-necked pheasant in flight above the memorial. Other design concepts considered during the quarter’s final selection process were “Mount Rushmore National Monument,” featuring a three-quarter view of the famous mountain carving; “American Bison,” depicting the classic animal symbol of the West; “Chinese Ring-necked Pheasant,” featuring an image of the state bird in flight; and “Mount Rushmore and Bison,” which placed an American bison in the foreground and Mount Rushmore in the background.