Mount Rushmore

Mount Rushmore looks finished. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln stare out from a granite mountainside in South Dakota, their faces so familiar that it is difficult to imagine the monument looking any other way.

Its sculptor imagined quite a bit more. The presidents were supposed to be carved down to their waists, and behind the faces he planned a chamber that would explain the monument to people thousands of years in the future.

The idea began with a more immediate concern: South Dakota wanted more tourists. Before Mount Rushmore became a national shrine to four presidents, it began with a fairly practical idea of state promotion.

In 1923, state historian Doane Robinson proposed enormous carvings of figures from the American West among the granite formations known as the Needles. Native American leaders, explorers and other figures of the frontier would give travelers another reason to visit the Black Hills.

Then the idea grew.

In 1924, Robinson approached Gutzon Borglum, a nationally prominent sculptor who was already attempting something extraordinary: carving a massive Confederate memorial directly into the face of Stone Mountain, Georgia. Borglum knew something about turning mountains into sculpture. He also knew something about controversy.

His relationship with the businessmen overseeing Stone Mountain had become increasingly bitter. After they fired him in 1925, Borglum destroyed his models, insisting that he was protecting his design. The memorial association considered the models its property and had a warrant issued for his arrest. Borglum immediately left Georgia for North Carolina, beyond the immediate reach of Georgia authorities.

Georgia then tried to bring him back. Authorities pursued extradition in North Carolina, but the effort failed after Borglum challenged it in court and North Carolina officials resisted sending him back. The warrant effectively went nowhere.

It sounds like the sort of episode that might end a major public career. It did not.

Within a few years, Borglum was openly working in South Dakota, dealing with members of Congress, courting presidents and Cabinet officials, and securing federal support for an even more ambitious mountain carving. His departure from Stone Mountain had, in fact, freed him to concentrate on Mount Rushmore. The episode provides a small glimpse of a different political and legal landscape: a serious state-level dispute and an arrest warrant did not automatically prevent someone from moving elsewhere, remaining a prominent public figure and working with the federal government.

Borglum liked Robinson’s idea, but wanted something larger in meaning. He also found the Needles unsuitable and eventually selected Mount Rushmore instead.

The Western figures gave way to four presidents. In Borglum’s telling, Washington represented the country’s birth, Jefferson its growth, Roosevelt its development and Lincoln its preservation.

A regional tourist attraction was becoming something far more ambitious: a history of the United States, written in faces.

The mountain, however, already belonged to a much older story.

Known to the Lakota, one of the peoples of the Sioux Nation, as Six Grandfathers, it stood within the sacred Black Hills. The United States had recognized those hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, promising the land for the Sioux’s “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation.” After gold was discovered in the Black Hills in the 1870s, prospectors entered the territory despite the treaty, and the United States confiscated the land in 1877.

More than a century later, the Supreme Court upheld compensation for the taking in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians. The dispute, however, did not disappear with a monetary judgment. The Black Hills remain the subject of a continuing dispute between the Sioux Nation and the United States.

The mountain’s later name illustrates the collision of those histories on a smaller scale.

Charles E. Rushmore was a New York lawyer who traveled to the Black Hills on mining business during the 1880s. In a 1925 letter to Robinson, he recalled asking the men traveling with him what the mountain was called. They told him it had no name.

One then declared, “We will name it now, and name it Rushmore Peak.”

The mountain did, of course, already have a name within Lakota tradition. What Rushmore encountered was not an unnamed mountain so much as a mountain whose existing history lay outside the world his companions recognized. Even so, it was the newer name that entered official use and eventually became inseparable from the monument itself.

The newer name won out. In 1930, three years after carving began, the United States Geographic Board formally recognized the name Mount Rushmore. Rushmore himself had contributed $5,000 to the project in 1927—a substantial private donation at the time—although federal funding would ultimately cover most of the monument’s cost.

Carving began on October 4, 1927.

Over the next fourteen years, nearly 400 workers helped turn the mountainside into a monument. Many spent their days suspended over a rock face roughly 500 feet high, sitting in bosun chairs held by steel cables, with steep granite and broken rock below as they drilled into the mountain.

Getting them into position was a job in itself. Workers were raised and lowered from the top of the mountain by hand-cranked winches. If the winches moved too quickly, the men in the chairs could be painfully dragged against the rock.

To help prevent that, young men and boys known as “call boys” were stationed near the edge of the mountain, some as young as 17. From there, they relayed instructions between the workers hanging hundreds of feet below and the crews operating the winches above.

And then there was the dynamite.

Roughly 90 percent of Mount Rushmore was shaped with explosives. Crews drilled holes into the granite, packed them with carefully measured charges and cleared the workers from the face before the blasts. Dynamite removed the large sections of rock; drilling, chipping and smoothing brought out the presidents underneath.

For all the obvious danger, one fact is almost difficult to believe: no worker died during the fourteen years of construction.

Even the arrangement of the faces changed as the work progressed.

Jefferson was initially being carved on the opposite side of Washington, but flaws in the rock forced a change of plans. The partially carved face was blasted away, and Jefferson was started again on the other side.

For a monument that now seems almost inevitable, quite a bit of it was improvised.

Borglum also wanted words to accompany the portraits. He planned a huge inscription describing American history, called the Entablature, with three-foot-high letters carved into the mountain. But the changing arrangement of the presidents consumed its intended space, and Borglum concluded that the words would be difficult to read from below.

The mountain would need another way to explain itself.

His answer was the Hall of Records, a chamber in the canyon behind the presidential faces. A grand granite stairway would lead to an entrance topped by a bronze eagle. Inside, Borglum envisioned cabinets containing documents such as the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, alongside busts and records of American achievements.

Borglum was thinking beyond the visitors standing below. He wanted an explanation that could survive into a future when people might still see the faces but no longer know who they represented, what country had carved them or why anyone had gone to such extraordinary trouble.

In July 1938, Borglum’s ambitions moved behind the faces, where workers began blasting his Hall of Records into the mountain.

Congress, however, was paying for presidents.

In 1939, it threatened to cut off funding unless the available money went toward finishing the sculpture itself. The grand staircase, bronze eagle and roomful of American history would have to wait. Borglum reluctantly stopped work, leaving behind a raw passage blasted about seventy feet into the granite—a dark, unfinished corridor with rough walls, more cave than grand hall, ending abruptly inside the mountain.

Borglum never got the chance to return to his grander plans. In early 1941, he was hospitalized in Chicago for surgery but continued following Mount Rushmore’s funding battles from his hospital bed. His wife, Mary, assured associates that he appeared to be recovering.

Then, on March 6, he died suddenly, several days before his seventy-fourth birthday. He never saw the mountain again.

His son, Lincoln Borglum, took over responsibility for the sculpture. But without his father driving the project—and with funding increasingly limited as the United States edged closer to war—the original vision was effectively over. On October 31, 1941, the final drilling ended and Mount Rushmore was declared a completed project.

Complete, however, depended on what one meant by the word.

The entire undertaking had cost $989,992.32—roughly $22 million in 2026 dollars. Even in today’s dollars, that is a surprisingly modest price for fourteen years of work on the side of a mountain—an enormous canvas by any measure.

For all that had been accomplished, much of Borglum’s vision remained unrealized. The full torsos were never carved, the enormous inscription had been abandoned, and the grand hall remained little more than an excavation. Beneath the presidents, the broad slope of broken rock still holds debris removed during the carving.

One part of the plan eventually received a modest fulfillment.

In 1998, a repository was placed in the floor of the unfinished Hall of Records entrance: a teakwood box inside a titanium vault, covered by a granite capstone. Sixteen porcelain enamel panels recorded the monument’s history, its creator and the reasons for choosing the four presidents.

The repository was intended for people in the distant future. The chamber remains closed to ordinary visitors, who continue to see the familiar faces and the mountain beneath them.

Borglum worried that future generations might forget what Mount Rushmore meant.

Today, we recognize the monument instantly—and rarely realize how much of the monument he imagined is missing.