The son of Danish-American immigrants, Gutzon Borglum was born in 1867 in St. Charles in what was then Idaho Territory. Borglum was a child of Mormon polygamy. His father, Jens Møller Haugaard Børglum (1839–1909), had two wives when he lived in Idaho: Gutzon's mother, Christina Mikkelsen Borglum (1847–1871) and Gutzon's mother's sister Ida, who was Jens's first wife.
He studied art in San Francisco and continued his work in Paris from 1890 to 1893, where he became imbued with the fluid style of Rodin.
In 1901 he returned to New York. His sculpture ranges from the equestrian Sheridan in Chicago to the apostles outside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York, but his greatest achievement was in colossal sculpture. His colossal head of Lincoln, in Washington, D. C. , and his abortive project of portraits of Confederate leaders, on Stone Mountain, prepared him for his magnum opus at Mount Rushmore. Here, on a federal commission, he undertook to carve portraits of Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt from living rock. He died March 6, 1941, in Chicago before this work was fully completed, and it was finished by his son.
He is best known for his colossal sculpture of the faces of four U. S. presidents on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. He was associated with other public works of art, including a bust of Abraham Lincoln exhibited in the White House by Theodore Roosevelt and now held in the United States Capitol Crypt in Washington, D. C. .
Borglum was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He was one of the six knights who sat on the Imperial Koncilium in 1923, which transferred leadership of the Ku Klux Klan from Imperial Wizard Colonel Simmons to Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans.
