He was awarded the Croix de Guerre by France[2] for his work with Les Foyers du Soldat service clubs during World War I.

Having shown little interest in formal schooling, the younger son spent his teens working on his father’s ranch near Fremont, Nebraska.

He showed a talent for drawing horses, and his careful studies of their movements prompted Gutzon to encourage Solon to pursue art as a profession.

A personality clash with Gutzon’s first wife Lisa however, forced Solon to move on; he went to Los Angeles, where he painted portraits and to Santa Ana, California, where he taught art privately.

[16] During World War I, Borglum was in France, serving as secretary of the YMCA, and then taught sculpture at the American Expeditionary Forces Art Training Center in Bellevue (Hauts-de-Seine) [fr], Seine-et-Oise,[17] outside Paris.

[23] His legacy was carried on by his wife Emma until her death in 1934, at which point his daughter Monica and her husband, A. Mervyn Davies,[24] oversaw the exhibition of his artwork.

Borglum received several major public commissions, including an equestrian monument of General John Brown Gordon for the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta (1907), one of Rough Rider Buckey O'Neill for the plaza in front of the courthouse in Prescott, Arizona (1907), and The Pioneer, which was erected in the Court of Honor at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco (1915).

His sculpture Buffalo and Bears is in Leonard Gordon Park in the city's Heights section[29] In 1974 a group of the sculptor's descendants gave twenty bronzes, marbles, original plasters, portfolios of drawings and paintings to the New Britain Museum of American Art.

Borglum sculpted a larger than life bronze equestrian statue for the Bucky O'Neill Monument, Rough Rider at the Yavapai County Court House Plaza in Prescott, Arizona.

[31] Borglum's pieces can be found at the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming, including Evening, a depiction of a cowboy leaning against his unsaddled horse at the end of the day.