Ends of the Earth Club Ends of the Earth Club The Ends of the Earth Club was a group of artists and explorers founded in 1903. Its members included Mark Twain, General John Pershing, Admiral Robert Peary, Gutzon Borglum (the sculptor of Mt. Rushmore), Herbert Adams Gibbons (a Princeton professor and journalist), and more than 100 other prominent businessmen and academics located, primarily, in the northeastern United States. The group's honorary president was the British adventurer and writer, Rudyard Kipling. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the group held an annual dinner at the Savoy Hotel in New York, where its members
Gutzon Borglum a high-relief frieze of Lee, Jefferson Davis, and 'Stonewall' Jackson riding around the mountain, followed by a legion of artillery troops. Borglum agreed to include a Ku Klux Klan altar in his plans for the memorial to acknowledge a request of Helen Plane in 1915, who wrote to him: "I feel it is due to the KKK that saved us from Negro domination and carpetbag rule, that it be immortalized on Stone Mountain". After a delay caused by World War I, Borglum and the newly chartered Stone Mountain Confederate Monumental Association set to work on this unexampled monument, the size