Mount Rushmore: The Remarkable Story Behind America's Mountain Monument
Mount Rushmore: The Remarkable Story Behind America's Mountain Monument
It rises 5,725 feet above sea level in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and the faces carved into its granite are 60 feet tall — so large that if the figures had full bodies, they would stand 465 feet high. Mount Rushmore is one of the most recognizable images in the world, as much a symbol of America as the Statue of Liberty or the Stars and Stripes. But relatively few people know the full story of how it came to be, why those four presidents were chosen, or the extraordinary human effort that transformed raw mountain into a national shrine.
The story of Mount Rushmore is a story about ambition, determination, controversy, and the very American belief that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing on a scale that takes your breath away.
The Idea: Bringing Tourists to the Badlands
The project began not as a grand national vision but as a straightforward attempt to attract tourism to South Dakota. State historian Doane Robinson had been looking for a way to bring visitors to the relatively remote Black Hills region. In 1923, he had an idea: why not carve giant statues into the rocky spires of the Needles — dramatic granite formations in the Black Hills — depicting heroes of the American West like Lewis and Clark, Buffalo Bill Cody, and the Sioux chief Red Cloud?
To execute this vision, Robinson reached out to Gutzon Borglum, a sculptor who had already demonstrated that he could work at monumental scale. Borglum had been working on a Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Georgia, carving enormous figures of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis into the mountain's face. He was, by any measure, a man who thought big.
Borglum was interested, but he had his own ideas. The Needles spires were too narrow and fragile for serious carving. And the subject matter — regional figures, frontier heroes — was too small for what Borglum envisioned. If America was going to carve something into a mountain, it should be something that would last 10,000 years and mean something to the entire nation. It should be the presidents who had done the most to shape the American story.
Choosing the Four
Borglum settled on four presidents, each representing a different aspect of America's history and character. His choices were deliberate and defensible, though not without controversy.
George Washington was the obvious first choice — the father of the country, the general who won the Revolution, the president who established the precedents that still define the office. Without Washington, there might be no United States to celebrate.
Thomas Jefferson represented the nation's founding ideals. The author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson articulated the philosophical principles — equality, liberty, the rights of the individual — that America aspired to embody. He also doubled the size of the nation with the Louisiana Purchase, securing the vast interior of the continent for American expansion.
Abraham Lincoln represented the nation's preservation and moral growth. He held the Union together through the Civil War, ended slavery, and redefined American democracy as a government "of the people, by the people, for the people." Without Lincoln, the United States as we know it would not exist.
Theodore Roosevelt was the most controversial choice — he had been dead for less than a decade when carving began, and some felt it was too soon. But Borglum admired Roosevelt deeply and argued that he represented the development of 20th-century America: the conservation of natural resources, the construction of the Panama Canal that connected two oceans, the trust-busting that reined in the excesses of industrial capitalism, and the establishment of the United States as a genuine world power.
Together, the four presidents span the arc of American history from its founding to its emergence as a modern nation — birth, growth, preservation, and development.
The Construction: Dynamite and Chisels
Construction began on October 4, 1927, with a dedication ceremony attended by President Calvin Coolidge. The work that followed was as remarkable as the vision that inspired it.
About 400 workers participated in the carving over the project's 14 years. The primary tool was dynamite — nearly 450,000 tons of rock were blasted away in the course of the project. Borglum used a system he called "honeycombing," drilling closely spaced holes to within a few inches of the final surface, then allowing workers with smaller pneumatic drills and chisels to remove the remaining rock in thin layers. The process required extraordinary precision — one miscalculation with a dynamite charge could destroy months of work.
Workers were lowered down the mountain face in small metal seats called "bosun chairs," dangling on cables hundreds of feet above the ground. They drilled, chiseled, and blasted in all kinds of weather. Remarkably, despite the dangerous conditions, no worker died during the construction of Mount Rushmore — a testament to Borglum's safety-conscious management.
The work was chronically underfunded. Congress authorized the project but was often slow to appropriate money, and several times construction halted entirely when funds ran out. Borglum spent years writing letters, lobbying congressmen, and cultivating political allies to keep the money flowing. The Great Depression made everything harder. Through it all, the mountain slowly took shape.
Jefferson's Nose: The Biggest Mistake in Monumental Sculpture
The carving of Mount Rushmore was not without its setbacks. The most dramatic was the near-destruction of the Jefferson figure. Borglum had originally planned to place Jefferson to Washington's right (from the viewer's perspective). After several years of work on that side, the granite was found to be unsuitable — too fractured and soft to hold the detailed carving. The partially completed Jefferson face had to be dynamited away, and the figure started over on Washington's left side. Today's Jefferson is about 20 feet further back and to the left of Washington as a result.
An Unfinished Monument
Gutzon Borglum died on March 6, 1941, at age 74, before the monument was fully complete. His son Lincoln Borglum continued the work until October 31, 1941, when funds were exhausted. Construction was never resumed — partly because of World War II and partly because what existed was judged to be essentially complete as a monument, even if it fell short of Borglum's original vision.
That original vision was considerably more ambitious than what exists today. Borglum had planned an entablature — a massive inscription recording the history of the United States in the stone of the mountain. He had also planned a "Hall of Records" behind the carved faces, a chamber in the mountain that would house the most important documents of American history. The access tunnel was drilled 70 feet into the mountain, but the chamber was never completed. In 1998, a titanium vault was placed in the tunnel containing enamel panels with the text of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other documents. It is sealed behind a granite capstone.
Controversy and Context
Mount Rushmore stands on land that was considered sacred by the Lakota Sioux and was guaranteed to them by the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 before being seized by the United States government following the discovery of gold. Native American activists have long pointed out this history, and the monument remains controversial in that context. The Crazy Horse Memorial, a privately funded mountain carving begun in 1948 on nearby land, represents an attempt to honor a Lakota hero on a comparable scale.
Understanding this context doesn't diminish the achievement of Mount Rushmore — but it adds the complexity that all honest accounts of American history must acknowledge. America's story contains both extraordinary ideals and painful contradictions, and the fullest understanding of it requires grappling with both.
Two Million Visitors, One Enduring Symbol
Today, Mount Rushmore receives approximately two million visitors a year. They come from every state and dozens of countries to stand before those 60-foot faces and feel, perhaps, a small sense of the vast ambition that built them. Whatever one thinks of its history, Mount Rushmore succeeds at what Borglum intended: it is genuinely awe-inspiring, a monument that makes the viewer feel both humbled and proud to be part of the American story.
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