Mount Rushmore

The memorial sits on a granite face of the Black Hills, the easternmost extension of the Rocky Mountains, in Pennington County, South Dakota. Borglum chose each president to stand for an idea: Washington the birth of the United States, Jefferson its growth (through the Declaration of Independence and the Louisiana Purchase), Theodore Roosevelt its development, and Lincoln its preservation. The National Park Service calls the memorial a symbol of freedom and hope; others see in it colonialism and racism.

The name Black Hills comes from the Lakota Paha Sapa, “hills of black.” By the late 1700s the Lakota controlled the region after defeating the Cheyenne, and religious ceremonies were held there every year. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie recognized the Black Hills as Lakota territory, but the discovery of gold in 1874 drew prospectors and settlers who violated the treaty. The Lakota and Northern Cheyenne fought back in the Great Sioux War of 1876, which included the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but many Lakota were forced onto reservations by the end of the 1800s.

In the 1920s South Dakota’s state historian, Doane Robinson, proposed a mountain carving to attract tourists; the first idea was to carve Native Americans and pioneers on granite spires called the Needles. Borglum, fresh from a bitter break with the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Georgia, chose instead a cliff the Lakota called the Six Grandfathers — a choice, the Park Service says, that “completely disregarded” the site’s cultural significance — and the subject became four presidents. Carving began in 1927, with President Calvin Coolidge’s support bringing federal funding. Workers used dynamite to remove about 90 percent of the rock. Borglum died in March 1941, and his son Lincoln oversaw the final work, completed on October 31, 1941.

In the 1970s the American Indian Movement held demonstrations at Mount Rushmore, demanding recognition of tribal sovereignty and the restoration of treaty rights.