Mount Rushmore

A granite mountainside carved with 18-metre faces of four U.S. presidents.

The sculptor Gutzon Borglum chose the four presidents to stand for the birth, growth, development and protection of the United States. Work ran from 1927 to 1941, and today more than two million people visit every year. The mountain is also sacred land for the Lakota people, who call it Six Grandfathers, and the land was taken from the Sioux Nation in the 1870s. That history is still argued about today, so the memorial is both a famous national symbol and a place that reminds people of broken promises.

How it was carved

About 400 workers carved the mountain over 14 years. Each day they climbed hundreds of stairs to the top, then were lowered down the cliff on steel cables while sitting in small seats called bosun chairs. Around 90 percent of the rock was removed with carefully measured blasts of dynamite. When only a few centimetres of stone were left, workers drilled rows of holes very close together, a method called honeycombing, so the thin rock could be chipped away by hand. In total about 410,000 tonnes of rock came off the mountain, and not a single worker died.

History

The idea came from Doane Robinson, a South Dakota historian who wanted a big carving to bring visitors to the state. He first imagined heroes of the American West, but Borglum argued for presidents so the monument would speak to the whole country. Jefferson was first started on the other side of Washington, but the rock there was cracked, so that carving was blasted off and begun again on the right. Borglum died in March 1941, and his son Lincoln Borglum finished the work. The plan was to carve each president down to the waist, but the money ran out, so work stopped on 31 October 1941.

The mountain and its people

Long before the carving, the Lakota and other Plains nations held the Black Hills sacred. An 1868 treaty promised the area to the Lakota, but after gold was found the United States took it over in 1877. In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the land had been taken unfairly and awarded money, but the Sioux have refused the payment because they want the land back. Elsewhere in the Black Hills, a huge carving of the Lakota leader Crazy Horse is still being built, partly as a response to Mount Rushmore.

On the globe

The model shows a granite mountainside in South Dakota with the four carved presidential faces side by side. Zoom in to compare the faces and spot which president is which.