Mount Rushmore history: why four presidents were carved into the Black Hills, how Borglum did it with dynamite, the Lakota claim, and the unfinished mountain

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Mount Rushmore, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, carries the heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, each about 60 feet (18 m) high, carved into a granite cliff between 1927 and 1941 by the sculptor Gutzon Borglum and about 400 workers, who removed 450,000 tons of rock, 90 per cent of it with dynamite, without a single death; it was begun as a scheme to bring tourists to South Dakota, paid for mostly by the federal government at just under a million dollars, and stopped unfinished when Borglum died and the money ended in the year the United States entered the war. The mountain was the Six Grandfathers to the Lakota, in the Black Hills guaranteed to them by the treaty of 1868 and taken after gold was found in 1874, which the Supreme Court found in 1980 to have been an illegal taking; the Lakota have refused the compensation and the memorial remains disputed. Below: the idea and the sculptor, the four presidents, the mountain and its owners, how the carving was done, the changes and the unfinished parts, the numbers, visiting, and the arguments, with the presidents' own buildings in who designed the White House and Capitol.

The idea and the sculptor

In 1923 Doane Robinson, the state historian of South Dakota, proposed carving the Needles, granite pinnacles in the Black Hills, into figures of western heroes, Lewis and Clark, Buffalo Bill, Red Cloud, to draw motorists to a state that had nothing to stop them; he wrote to Gutzon Borglum, who was then carving a monument to the Confederacy on Stone Mountain in Georgia for the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan, which had revived on the mountain in 1915 and whose leaders he had joined, and who had just been dismissed from that job in a quarrel and had smashed his models. Borglum, born in Idaho to Danish Mormon immigrants, trained in Paris, a sculptor of the Lincoln bust in the Capitol, arrived in 1924, rejected the Needles as too thin and the western heroes as too local, and proposed a national monument of presidents on a south-facing cliff called Mount Rushmore, after a New York lawyer, Charles Rushmore, who had checked mining claims there in 1885; Senator Peter Norbeck and Congressman William Williamson got federal money, President Coolidge, summering in the Black Hills in 1927, dedicated it on 10 August, and Borglum began drilling in October. Mount Rushmore.

Why these four presidents

Borglum chose them to tell the story of the country's first 150 years: Washington for the founding and independence, Jefferson for the Declaration and the Louisiana Purchase that doubled the nation and brought in the land the mountain stands on, Lincoln for the preservation of the Union and the end of slavery, and Theodore Roosevelt, dead only eight years and Borglum's friend, for the growth of the country into a world power, the Panama Canal and the conservation of the West, including the national parks; Coolidge insisted on two Republicans and one Democrat and Roosevelt was the contested choice. Borglum's plan was to show them to the waist, with an inscription of the nation's history in letters three feet high beside them, the "Entablature", which Coolidge was to write and which was dropped when Borglum edited the president's text and the space was needed for Lincoln, and a Hall of Records behind the heads holding the founding documents.

The mountain and the Lakota

The Black Hills, Paha Sapa, are the sacred centre of the Lakota world, where their creation stories are set, and the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 recognised them as part of the Great Sioux Reservation "for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation" of the Sioux forever; in 1874 an expedition under George Custer found gold in the hills, miners poured in, the army did not stop them, and after the Sioux war of 1876–77 Congress took the hills by an act of 1877 signed by a tenth of the adult men the treaty required. The mountain was Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, the Six Grandfathers, the sacred directions, to the Lakota; the memorial's carvers included Lakota men, and the Lakota chief Henry Standing Bear, a friend of Borglum's, asked the sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski in 1939 to carve a memorial to Crazy Horse nearby "so the white man will know the red man has great heroes too", which has been under way since 1948 seventeen miles away. In 1980 the Supreme Court held in United States v. Sioux Nation that the taking of 1877 was illegal and awarded 102 million dollars; the Sioux refused the money, which with interest exceeds two billion dollars in a trust, and ask for the land. The memorial was occupied by American Indian Movement protesters in 1970 and 1971, and the argument over it continues.

How the carving was done, 1927–1941

• The models. Borglum modelled the heads in plaster at one-twelfth scale in his studio at the foot of the mountain, and transferred the points to the rock with a "pointing machine": a horizontal bar on a pivot on top of each head, with a plumb line, so that a measurement on the model of angle, distance and depth could be multiplied by twelve on the mountain and marked with paint.
• Dynamite. About 90 per cent of the 450,000 tons of rock was removed by blasting, in charges placed to leave the surface within three to six inches of the final face; the powder men became skilled enough to shape the rough features of a nose or a lip with charges.
• Drilling and honeycombing. Drillers hanging in leather bosun's chairs from cables winched from the top drilled closely spaced holes into the remaining rock, "honeycombing", so that it could be knocked off with hammers and wedges; the pneumatic drills were powered by compressors at the base and the men hung all day at 500 feet.
• Finishing. The final surface was smoothed with air hammers and hand tools, "bumping", to a finish as smooth as a sidewalk, on which the sculptor drew the pupils of the eyes as a shaft of granite left standing in a hollow, which reads from a distance as a glint of light.
• The workers. About 400 over the years, 30 to 40 at a time, local miners, ranchers and lumbermen, at 8 dollars a day for skilled men, climbing 700 steps to the top every morning; the work stopped every winter and whenever the money ran out, so that fourteen years contained about six and a half of carving. No one was killed; a few were hurt, and silicosis later took some.
• Money. 989,992 dollars in all, 836,000 of it federal, in appropriations that Borglum extracted from Congress year by year with Norbeck's help through the Depression, when the project was sometimes weeks from closing.

Changes and the unfinished mountain

Washington's head was the first, dedicated on 4 July 1930; Jefferson was begun on Washington's right, but after eighteen months the rock there proved cracked and the head was blasted off in 1934 and begun again on his left, which is why the composition is off-centre; Jefferson was dedicated in 1936, Lincoln in 1937, and Roosevelt, squeezed into the rock between Jefferson and Lincoln, in 1939. Borglum began the Hall of Records in 1938, a tunnel 70 feet into the canyon behind the heads meant to hold the Declaration and the Constitution on tablets, and Congress ordered him in 1939 to finish the faces first; the tunnel remains, and in 1998 the Park Service put in it a box of porcelain panels recording the memorial's story, sealed under a granite capstone. Gutzon Borglum died in Chicago on 6 March 1941 after surgery; his son Lincoln Borglum, who had run the site, spent the summer finishing what he could, and on 31 October 1941 the work stopped, the figures at the heads and Washington's lapels rather than the waists of the plan, the entablature never begun, the money gone, and the country five weeks from Pearl Harbor. The Park Service considers it finished as it is, and no further carving is permitted.

The numbers and visiting

• The heads. About 60 feet (18 m) high each, from chin to top of head; the noses 20 feet, the mouths 18 feet, the eyes 11 feet across; Washington's nose is a foot longer than the rest. Each head would be part of a figure 465 feet tall.
• Elevation. The summit at 5,725 feet (1,745 m); the faces about 500 feet above the visitor terraces.
• Rock removed. 450,000 tons of granite, still lying in a talus slope below the faces, which the Park Service leaves as part of the monument.
• Time. 1927–41, fourteen years, about six and a half of them carving.
• Workers. About 400; no deaths.
• Cost. 989,992 dollars; about 20 million today.
• Erosion. About one inch per 10,000 years; the heads are inspected by climbers and the cracks sealed with silicone every year.
• Visiting. Free entry, a parking fee; about 2.5 million visitors a year, most in summer; the Avenue of Flags, the Grand View Terrace, the half-mile Presidential Trail to the base of the talus, the sculptor's studio with the models, and the evening lighting ceremony from May to September; the Crazy Horse Memorial and Custer State Park's wildlife loop are nearby, and the profile view from the road on Highway 244 shows Washington in full.

Versions and theories

• The Hall of Records is a secret vault. It is a tunnel 70 feet deep, open at the mouth and fenced, with a titanium box of porcelain panels sealed in 1998; it is not open to visitors and holds no secrets beyond the story of the memorial, which the panels tell.
• There is a room behind Lincoln's head. The Hall of Records, behind and to the left; the film "National Treasure 2" invented a city of gold.
• Borglum was in the Klan. He worked for the Klan at Stone Mountain, attended its meetings, sat on its committees and wrote of his belief in Nordic superiority; the Park Service says so on its site. The Rushmore project was a federal one with no Klan money.
• Roosevelt was added for money. Coolidge and Borglum chose him; Borglum was Roosevelt's friend and supporter and the choice was his, not a donor's.
• The faces were meant to be full figures. True: the model shows the four to the waist, Washington with a coat and Lincoln with a hand on his lapel, and the plan was cut when the money and the sculptor were gone.
• The mountain should be returned. The Supreme Court found the taking of the Black Hills illegal, and the Sioux hold that the land, not the money, is owed; the memorial is federal land and the Park Service has no authority to transfer it. This is where the matter stands.

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