Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills of Dakota
Dispatch XIV
A Vagabond Adventure
Continent # 1: North America
The Surprising Origins of Mount Rushmore
Day 50 - November 14, 2021
In 1924 historian Doane Robinson asked famed sculptor John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum to visit a site in the Black Hills of South Dakota to see if he would be willing to create a series of monumental sculptures depicting great heroes of the American West. The inspiration was a place called the Needles, where breathtaking spires of granite rise in the mountains (we’ll visit these later). Robinson had broken down on the dirt road that wound through the mountains, and while awaiting help, imagined shaping the images of Lewis and Clark, their expedition guide Sacagawea, Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Oglala Lakota chief Crazy Horse into the rocks. It didn’t work out that way.
Borglum agreed to the project, but required two fundamental amendments before he would undertake it. First, he changed the location to Mount Rushmore (also known as "The Six Grandfathers" or Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe in the Lakota language) several miles away from the Needles. He felt the rock there was too brittle to be properly sculpted. Second, he argued that the project should feature four American presidents rather than the explorers and native Americans Robinson initially suggested. They would have broader appeal, he argued, and, after all, wasn’t the idea of the whole endeavor to lure tourists to this part of the country?
The project was to represent "not only the wild grandeur of its local geography but also the triumph of western civilization over that geography through its anthropomorphic representation." The Lakota Sioux, as well as other tribes, who had been living in this part of the world for millennia held a very different point of view. For them the sculpture "came to epitomize the loss of their sacred lands and the injustices they've suffered under the U.S. government." And why not? Under the Treaty of 1868, the U.S. government had promised the entirety of the Black Hills, including the Six Grandfathers, to the Sioux "so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase." But when gold was discovered in those mountains in 1874, settlers and prospectors overran the area, and the federal government forced the Sioux to give up the land.
The Treaty of 1868. But the Discovery of Gold Resulted in the Treaty Being Dismantled
(Bettmann Archives/Getty Images)
Work Begins
That gave Borglum and those behind the project a free hand, almost fifty years later, to seek funding and begin work, and in 1927, with 400 workers in tow, Borglum began dynamiting the rock and “honey-combing” the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Washington was to represent the nation's birth, Jefferson its growth, Roosevelt its development and Lincoln its preservation. The presidents rise 60 feet from their chins to the tops of their heads—that’s more than the height of a six story building. Today three million people a year come to gaze upon them.
Despite the wrongs of the US government in its handling of the sacred grounds of the Sioux, the monument itself is indisputably remarkable and I was surprisingly moved when I first walked through the entrance and saw those images. I’m not sure how anyone who has grown up in the United States couldn’t feel moved. I had seen these men so many times in paintings and pictures, and had read about them so often over the years. And there they stood on this mountain, immense and stately. Though thoroughly flawed, like all of us, they had accomplished more than I could ever hope to.
I don’t know if Native Americans and the department of the interior can resolve its differences. It seems like a difficult problem to iron out. On the one hand, it wouldn’t seem to do much good to obliterate the presidential visages, yet it seems entirely wrong that a place so important to another culture should become a monument to white men. The Lakota long ago called the land surrounding Mount Rushmore “The Heart of Everything That Is,” and the tribes of the Shoshone, Salish, Kootenai Crow, Mandan and Arikara have lived in these lands far longer than the white man. In 1980 the federal government offered to compensate Native Americans for their loss with a payment of $105 million, but the Sioux said no. I feel that says something about their moral values.
I pondered this as Cyndy and I walked the pathways along and below the great edifice, wondering how human beings manage to imagine and then engineer these sorts of immensities. I thought maybe there might be a way to turn time back and undo past wrongs, but couldn’t work out how that could be done. I suspect we can only attempt to come clean about our mistakes, and resolve not to repeat them in the future. Some days I think we’re making progress, and then there are days when I’m not so sure. A time machine might be useful.
After our explorations outside, we visited the museum located at the memorial’s entrance. There I learned that Borglum had developed a clever system for creating huge images with remarkable precision. He first created a large sculpture of the players with his own hand. We know now that version was different than one we see on the mountain. The original featured the men with Jefferson first and then Washington, Roosevelt and Lincoln, standing as if in the mountain from the waist up.
The Scaled Version of the Original Concept (Photo - Wikimedia Commons)
These sculptures were 1/12th the intended size of the final versions. Each was measured exactly and then Borglum and his team (including his son Lincoln, named for his favorite president) used a “pointing” system to precisely measure where major aspects of each face and body would be located based on the smaller sculpture’s features - forehead, nose, eyes, chin.
Photos of the Six Grandfathers before construction and then the mountain early on before unstable rock required that Jefferson be moved to the right of Washington. (Photos - Wikimedia Commons)
Once the measurements and locations were precisely set, 450,000 tons of rock were blasted away with dynamite, wedges and hammers. Then the finer work began to shape the men’s faces. This Borglund did with small jackhammers and drill bits. Still to say these details were “fine” isn’t precisely true. Each of the eyes of the four presidents is 11 feet wide and their mouths are 18 feet wide. Even the irises are measured in feet. Yet they all look remarkably realistic.
The Four Presidents of Mount Rushmore (Photo - Chip Walter)
Before we departed the memorial, I wanted to visit the restaurant to see if it was the same as the one where Alfred Hitchcock had filmed a pivotal scene in the North By Northwest (one of my favorite movies and considered by many one of the great movies of all time). In the scene, Eva Marie Saint “murders” Cary Grant before the dramatic climax on the face of the monument itself. I felt for days we had been following Grant’s famous itinerary in the the movie - New York to Chicago, then the cornfields of Illinois, Rapid City, South Dakota and finally Mt. Rushmore itself.
We quickly found that the previous (and much nicer) restaurant featured in the movie was now gone. A woman who worked there explained everything from the entrance to the museum to the restaurant had been updated years ago. She was slender with an Irish face, and a font of information because for 14 years she had been a Park Ranger at the memorial. Now she worked at the restaurant part time simply because she loved the place. While we ate, she told us said there was a little known mistake in the North By Northwest murder scene when Eva Marie Saint shoots Grant (with a blank). If you look closely at the scene, she said, you’ll notice a little boy wince right before the gun is fired. He knew from previous takes what was about to happen, you see, and gave it away. (I checked, and sure enough, it’s true, but I never noticed the mistake even though I’ve seen the movie at least dozen times.) Hitchcock left the scene as is.
Megan had made some interesting excursions to places around the monument, it turns out. Ones that few get to visit: the very top of the mountain, for example, where you get a backend view of George Washington’s head, and the little known Hall of Records that Gutzmon Borglum envisioned as a repository for all things American.
“You know about the Hall of Records, right?” Asked Megan.
I didn’t and neither did Cyndy.
“A Great Room At Least 90 x 110 Feet Should Be Cut”
Apparently, Borglum had first planned to place an inscription in the mountain where Lincoln now stood that would describe the purpose of the sculptures, but that spot was eliminated when Jefferson’s head had to be moved to Washington’s right. Having lost the inscription, Borglum now imagined something even more ambitious. “There should be a great stairway of stone cut from local rock on the cast facade, easy to ascend and back of the sculpture into the mountain itself - a great room, at least "90 x 110 feet should be cut," Borglum wrote. "Into this room the records of what our people aspired to and what they have accomplished should be collected and preserved and on the walls of this westward movement to the Pacific; its presidents; how the Memorial was built, and frankly, why, I have prepared the design for these."
Technical problems and the war frustrated Borglum’s dream, and the hall was never completed, but his hope of providing a permanent record for future generations was partially fulfilled in August 9, 1998 when porcelain enamel panels were deposited in a vault in the existing hall that the sculptor had begun to create. According to the National Park Service, “a repository of records was placed in the floor of the hall entry. This repository consists of a teakwood box, inside a titanium vault, covered by a granite capstone.”
Megan said, “I got to go into that hall and I think have a couple of pictures.” She pulled out her phone and began to punch at it with her index finger. I asked if she’d consider sending copies and she said she’d be happy to, if she could locate them. Luckily for us, she did— two pictures: one of the partially completed hall. That’s her son Matthew in the picture beside the teakwood box, sitting beside the black marble capstone, where the purpose of the hall is written in Borglum’s own words.
We thanked Megan, and asked her to stay in touch, and then prepared to wind our way through the Black Hills to another famous memorial: Crazy Horse, about a half hour’s drive away, this one devoted exclusively to Native Americans. That comes next …
This is a series about a Vagabond Adventure - author and National Geographic Explorer Chip Walter and his wife Cyndy’s personal journey to explore all seven continents, all seven seas and 100+ countries, never traveling by jet.
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As of this Dispatch …
We have travelled 4600 miles, across four ferries, on five trains, visiting three World Heritage Sites, through 13 states, three National Parks and memorials, and three Canadian provinces, in 26 different beds, and seen more different kinds of hotel keys than there are prairie dogs on South Dakota’s Badlands.