The Sacred Mountain Before Mount Rushmore: The Six Grandfathers and the Lakota Black Hills
Nicholas Black Elk stood at the foot of the mountain in 1936 and watched men blast the face off a god. He was an aging Oglala Lakota holy man by then, and the granite peak above him carried a name that came from his own boyhood. As a child in 1873, Black Elk had experienced a great vision of six sacred grandfathers — the spirits of west, east, north, south, the sky above, and the earth below — and the Lakota came to associate that vision with this very mountain. They called it Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, the Six Grandfathers. Now Black Elk watched it disappear under dynamite, one charge at a time, while a sculptor 500 feet up reshaped it into the faces of the men whose nation had taken everything from his.
The Black Hills were not scenery to the Lakota. Paha Sapa was the spiritual center of the world, a place of prayer and ceremony, the heart of everything that is. The United States had recognized this in writing. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie set the entire region aside for the "absolute and undisturbed use and occupation" of the Sioux and forbade any cession without three-quarters of the tribe's adult men agreeing to it. Gold confirmed by Custer's 1874 expedition broke that promise within a decade, and by 1877 Congress had seized the Hills outright. Mount Rushmore is what the United States built on top of the theft, and the deepest darkness of the place is not violence. It is erasure — the deliberate carving of one nation's founding myth into the most sacred site of the people it destroyed, until the postcard replaced the memory.
How a Tourist Stunt Became Mount Rushmore
Doane Robinson's Plan to Lure Tourists to South Dakota
Mount Rushmore was invented to sell train tickets. In 1923, Doane Robinson, the state historian of South Dakota, was looking for a way to pull travelers off the rail lines and into the Black Hills, and he landed on a simple insight that has aged badly. "Tourists soon get fed up on scenery," he said, "unless it has something of special interest connected with it to make it impressive." His fix was to carve colossal figures into the granite spires called the Needles — and his first cast of characters was local: Lewis and Clark, their guide Sacagawea, the Oglala leaders Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, the showman Buffalo Bill Cody. A monument to the West, in the West, drawing tourists west.
The plan that built the mountain bore almost no resemblance to that. Robinson recruited a sculptor, and the sculptor took the project somewhere far larger and far darker than a regional tourist draw.
Gutzon Borglum, the Klan, and the Road from Stone Mountain
Gutzon Borglum arrived in the Black Hills with a Confederate monument and a Klan affiliation already on his résumé. Before South Dakota, he had been the sculptor of the enormous Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain in Georgia — a project sponsored by a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, with which Borglum had aligned himself politically. He was eventually fired from Stone Mountain after bitter disputes, smashed his own models, and fled the state. He brought to Rushmore the same appetite for scale and the same politics.
Borglum rejected Robinson's lineup of Western figures as too small, too local. He wanted a monument "national in scope," and he wanted presidents. He settled on George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt — chosen, in the official telling, to represent the nation's birth, growth, preservation, and development. The irony sits in the granite itself. Washington and Jefferson held people in slavery. Lincoln approved the hanging of 38 Dakota men in 1862, the largest mass execution in American history. Roosevelt, years before his presidency, had said of Native Americans that he wouldn't go so far as to call the only good Indians the dead ones — "but I believe nine out of ten are." These were the four faces a Klan-tied sculptor chose to carve into a Lakota holy mountain, and Borglum was explicit that his subject was the "founding, expansion and preservation" of the United States. The dispossession was not a side effect of the monument. It was the theme.
Carving Mount Rushmore: 14 Years of Dynamite, Drills, and Danger
Blasting Four Presidents into the Granite
Construction began on October 4, 1927, and ran for fourteen years. Borglum chose the Rushmore cliff over Robinson's Needles partly because its southeast face caught sun all day and its granite was sounder, and he attacked it with explosives rather than chisels. Roughly 90 percent of the 450,000 tons of rock removed from the mountain came off with dynamite. A munitions expert marked the drill holes; "powdermen" set charges timed to detonate only after the crews had cleared the face. What the dynamite left rough, jackhammers and hand tools refined down to the final inches of a presidential eyelid.
The granite did not always cooperate. Borglum's crews were partway into carving Jefferson beside Washington when the rock there proved too weak to hold a face. They blasted the half-finished Jefferson off the mountain entirely and started him over on Washington's other side — a several-year detour erased in an afternoon of explosives, which is why the faces sit in the order they do.
The Workers Who Carved the Mountain and the Dust That Followed Them
The men who built Mount Rushmore worked dangling from leather harnesses 500 feet above the valley floor. About 400 of them — drillers, dynamite men, scaffolders, many of them out-of-work miners during the Depression — were lowered down the cliff face on steel cables in bosun's chairs, drilling and bumping the granite while the wind pushed them around. The conditions were as brutal as the era's safety standards were thin. The noise was constant enough that, by some accounts, half the crew went partially deaf.
The remarkable, repeated boast about Mount Rushmore is that not one worker died during its construction — fourteen years, 700 tons of dynamite, men hanging off a cliff, and no fatal fall or blast. The boast is true and it is also incomplete. The danger that killed Rushmore's workers was invisible and slow. Drilling granite filled the air with fine silica dust, and the men breathed it for years. Many of them later developed silicosis, the lung disease that scars the tissue until it can no longer move air, and they died of it back home, long after the cheering and the dedications, in numbers the triumphant version of the story tends to leave out. The mountain did not kill them where the cameras could see. It killed them later, quietly, in their own beds.
The Unfinished Monument and the Death of Its Sculptor
Mount Rushmore was never finished. Borglum's ambitions ran far past four heads: he planned to carve the presidents from the waist up, to inscribe a giant "Entablature" telling the story of the United States beside them, and to blast a vast Hall of Records into the canyon behind Lincoln's head — a chamber reached by a grand granite staircase, meant to hold the nation's founding documents for the ages. Funding strangled all of it. The Depression and then the approach of the Second World War drained the money, and the grand chamber was left as a shallow, unfinished tunnel.
Borglum did not live to see the end. He died in March 1941, and his son Lincoln Borglum took over and brought the work to a close. On October 31, 1941, with the country months from entering the war, the carving simply stopped. Only Washington's figure shows any detail below the chin. The other three trail off into raw mountain. The Shrine of Democracy is, in the most literal sense, a fragment of what its maker intended — a colossal, half-built monument abandoned mid-sentence.
Mount Rushmore Today: Protest, the Black Hills Claim, and Crazy Horse
The 1980 Supreme Court Ruling and the Land the Lakota Still Demand
The legal verdict on Mount Rushmore's mountain is unambiguous. In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the 1877 seizure of the Black Hills was an illegal taking, citing a lower court's conclusion that "a more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history." The Court ordered compensation. The Lakota refused to take it, and they have kept refusing for over four decades. The original award has grown with interest to well over a billion dollars, and it sits untouched in the federal treasury, because the Sioux do not want the money. They want the Hills back.
The refusal has been loud as well as legal. In 1971, members of the American Indian Movement occupied the monument and renamed it "Mount Crazy Horse," and the Lakota holy man John Fire Lame Deer planted a prayer staff on the summit, declaring it a symbolic shroud over the presidents' faces that would stay until the Black Hills treaties were honored. The same broken treaty that armed the Deadwood gold rush and ended in slaughter at Wounded Knee runs directly under Rushmore's parking lot. The four faces gaze out over land their government's own highest court admits was stolen.
The Crazy Horse Memorial and the Counter-Monument in the Same Hills
A second mountain in the Black Hills is being carved as an answer to the first. The Crazy Horse Memorial, begun in 1948 by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski at the invitation of Lakota elders, is intended to depict the Oglala war leader Crazy Horse on horseback, arm outstretched over his homeland. If finished, it would dwarf Mount Rushmore, the largest sculpture on Earth. It has been under construction for over 75 years and only the face is complete. The project is privately funded, run by a foundation, and genuinely contested among Native people — some see it as a fitting reply to Rushmore, others as one more outsider blasting a sacred mountain to make a point. Two carved mountains now face each other across the same stolen Hills, both unfinished, both arguments about who gets to leave their mark on holy ground.
The Atlas Entry: Visiting Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore is one of the easiest dark-history sites in America to reach and one of the hardest to read honestly. It sits near Keystone, South Dakota, about a half-hour from Rapid City, and roughly three million people come every year. Entry to the memorial is free; the only charge is around ten dollars to park. The half-mile Presidential Trail loops directly beneath the faces — close enough to see Borglum's drill marks in the granite — and the Sculptor's Studio still holds his scale model and the original tools. The faces are best seen in early morning or late afternoon light, when the sun rakes across the carving. The site presents itself, relentlessly, as patriotism.
The harder experience is to stand on the Presidential Trail and hold both things at once. The route now passes a Lakota Heritage Village, and the park has slowly made more room for the mountain's older name and meaning, but the monument's center of gravity remains the four presidents and the founding story they were chosen to tell. What that story is carved into is the Six Grandfathers — a mountain sacred to the Lakota, seized in violation of a treaty, defaced by a Klan-affiliated sculptor, and ruled stolen by the Supreme Court of the country that did it. The granite erodes about an inch every ten thousand years, so the faces will outlast almost everything, including the argument about whether they should be there. The honest way to visit is to admire the audacity of the carving and refuse to pretend the mountain was empty before the dynamite arrived. It had a name. It still does.
Frequently Asked Questions About Mount Rushmore
What was Mount Rushmore called before it was carved?
The Lakota called the mountain Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, the Six Grandfathers, a sacred site associated with the holy man Black Elk's 1873 vision of the six sacred directions. It was renamed Mount Rushmore in 1930 after Charles Rushmore, a New York lawyer who had visited the Black Hills on business in the 1880s and donated $5,000 toward the carving. The Black Hills as a whole, Paha Sapa, were the spiritual center of the Lakota world long before any presidents were carved into them.
Who carved Mount Rushmore and was he in the KKK?
The monument was designed and led by sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who worked on it from 1927 until his death in 1941; his son Lincoln finished it. Before Rushmore, Borglum sculpted the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Georgia, a project sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan, and he aligned himself with Klan politics during that period. He was eventually fired from the Stone Mountain project after disputes with its backers.
Did anyone die building Mount Rushmore?
No worker died during the 14 years of construction, despite the use of more than 700 tons of dynamite and crews working in harnesses 500 feet up the cliff. Many workers later developed silicosis, a fatal lung disease caused by inhaling the fine silica dust thrown off while drilling granite. The often-repeated claim of zero deaths refers only to the construction period itself, not the long-term toll.
Why do the Lakota refuse the money for the Black Hills?
In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the U.S. had illegally seized the Black Hills in 1877 and ordered compensation. The Lakota have refused to accept the award because cashing it would legally extinguish their claim to the land itself, which they consider sacred and not for sale. The unclaimed sum, with interest, has grown to well over a billion dollars and remains untouched in the federal treasury.
Is Mount Rushmore finished?
No. Gutzon Borglum intended to carve the presidents from the waist up, add a large inscription telling U.S. history, and build a "Hall of Records" chamber behind Lincoln's head to store national documents. Funding shortages during the Depression and the approach of World War II ended the work on October 31, 1941. Only Washington's figure shows detail below the chin.
What is the Crazy Horse Memorial near Mount Rushmore?
The Crazy Horse Memorial is a separate, much larger sculpture being carved into another Black Hills mountain, begun in 1948 by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski at the invitation of Lakota elders as a response to Mount Rushmore. It is intended to depict the Oglala leader Crazy Horse on horseback and, if completed, would be the largest sculpture in the world. After more than 75 years, only the face is finished, and the project remains debated among Native people.
Sources
United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 — U.S. Supreme Court (1980)
Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) — National Archives / U.S. Government
The Workers — Mount Rushmore National Memorial, National Park Service
Black Elk Speaks — John G. Neihardt (1932)
Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore — John Taliaferro (2002)
Mount Rushmore's Six Grandfathers and Four Presidents — Eos / American Geophysical Union (2021)
Gutzon Borglum: His Life and Work — Howard Shaff and Audrey Karl Shaff (1985)
The Heartbreaking, Controversial History of Mount Rushmore — History News Network (2020)
Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered — Jesse Larner (2002)
Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation Records — Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation
