[3] In June 1936, the TWU Board of Regents passed a motion requesting that the Texas Centennial Commission "erect a Memorial Chapel to Pioneer Women on the campus instead of the Statue as proposed at the present time."

She was to win three of them (memorials to Moses Austin, Isaac and Frances Van Zandt and First Shot Fired For Texas Independence monument) but she was not able to garner the Pioneer Woman statue.

It is not yet clear how many plaster models were submitted, but a "jury of professionals" unanimously chose the one submitted by William Zorach, a sculptor from New York, which included not just a settler woman, or a woman and child as did Tauch's model, but the entire family: mother, father, son and daughter.

Upon learning of the commission's decision, Tauch "wasted no time telephoning and writing letters to many friends throughout the state to report the incident.

One astute observer noted the woman had no wedding ring .... while a chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas declared it, 'the greatest insult that could be offered to these women who believed and practiced the virtue of modesty' .

Richard Foster Howard, then director of the Dallas Museum of Art, defended Zorach[9] and the sculptor went so far as to revise his model so that the figures were clothed,[10] but the damage had been done.

[12] At some point in the carving process, someone, either Friedlander or the Piccirilli carvers, became concerned that the statue's right hand and her right thumb and forefinger might be too weak to be self-supporting, so a small block of marble was left to add strength.

For the base of the statue, the Dean of Women, Jessie H. Humphries, composed the following inscription: "Marking a trail in a pathless wilderness pressing forward with unswerving courage she met each untried situation with a resourcefulness equal to the need.

With delicate spiritual sensitiveness she illuminated the dullness of routine and the loneliness of isolation with beauty and with life abundant and with all she lived with casual unawareness of her value to civilization.