I was born in St. Charles, Idaho on March 25, 1867, and at the age of seven moved to Nebraska. My father was a Danish Latter-Day Saint who practiced plural marriage in backwater Idaho. I spent time in Paris, training under the watchful eye of Aguste Rodin.

I carved big things my whole life. My sculpture of Abe Lincoln’s head can be found in the Capitol Rotunda and was carved from six tons of granite. In 1908, I won a contest to carve a statue of General Philip Sheridan in Chicago.

In 1915, the Daughters of the Confederacy hired me to carve a 70-foot statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee into the site of Stone Mountain, Georgia, a project financed by the Ku Klux Klan. It didn’t take me long to realize that Lee would look like a postage stamp on the side of Stone Mountain and so I convinced them to include Jefferson Davis, and ‘Stonewall’ Jackson riding around the mountain, followed by a legion of artillery troops.
After a delay caused by World War I, I began work on this unprecedented monument. After finishing the detailed model of the carving, I was unable to trace my ideas onto the massive area onto which I was working, until I developed a gigantic magic lantern to project the image onto the side of the mountain. I was so damn clever back then.

Carving officially began on June 23, 1923 Lee’s head was unveiled on Lee’s birthday January 19, 1924. It was magnificent, but I started bickering with the old bags in the DAC soon thereafter (although I never had much trouble with the fellas in the KKK). Eventually, I gave up on the project, smashed my model, and left. My work was cleared and Augustus Lukeman completed a similar project.

The good news is that the sculpting bug had bit me and I was anxious to try another large-scale piece. That’s how I ended up in South Dakota.

Doane Robinson came up with the idea for Mount Rushmore and initially suggested that it include Washington and Lincoln. But because the monument sat in the center of lands that we, how shall I say, acquired from the Indians, we decided to include Jefferson, too. Afterall, Jefferson was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase and for the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and without him, we wouldn’t own the hills. Some say that Teddy Roosevelt was added as an acknowledgement of Manifest Destiny, but to be honest, I thought we needed another face up there and knew that if we put up a monument to T.R., it would really tick off North Dakota.

Much of the work at Mount Rushmore was overseen by my son Lincoln while I was traveling the country raising funds for Mount Rushmore. Lincoln finished the season after I died in Chicago in 1941 after complications from surgery. Lincoln cleaned up the work a little, but left it the way I did, which is to say, “marvelous”.

I am buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale in the Memorial Court of Honor. My dear wife, Mary Montgomery Williams Borglum, is interred alongside me.