Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a granite sculpture in the Black Hills of South Dakota showing the heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, each about 18 metres (60 feet) tall. It was carved between 1927 and 1941 by Gutzon Borglum and roughly 400 workers, cost just under $1 million, and now draws about two million visitors a year to a site the Lakota call Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, the Six Grandfathers.
Four Faces, Sixty Feet, Fourteen Years
The memorial occupies a granite outcrop at 1,745 m (5,725 ft), about 40 km southwest of Rapid City in Pennington County. The scale is easier to grasp in parts than in total:
- Head height: roughly 18 m each, about the height of a six-storey building
- Nose length: around 6 m, longer than most cars
- Mouth width: about 5.5 m
- Eye width: roughly 3.4 m across
- Rock removed: approximately 450,000 tonnes, some 90 per cent of it by controlled blasting
- Total cost: $989,992.32, the great majority federal money
Borglum chose the four presidents to represent, in his phrasing, the founding, expansion, preservation and development of the United States: Washington for the nation's birth, Jefferson for the Louisiana Purchase that doubled its territory, Lincoln for holding it together through the Civil War, and Roosevelt for the Panama Canal and the conservation movement. Roosevelt was the contentious pick — he had died only in 1919, and critics argued a president within living memory did not belong on a monument meant to last geological time.
The eyes are the sculptural trick worth knowing. Rather than carving pupils, Borglum cut a deep recess in each eye and left a slender granite shaft standing in the middle of it. At viewing distance the shaft catches light while the recess stays in shadow, and the effect reads as a glinting pupil. It is why the faces appear to look at you from the terrace rather than staring blankly.
Doane Robinson's Tourism Scheme and Borglum's Counter-Proposal
The project began as a marketing idea. In 1923 Doane Robinson, South Dakota's state historian, proposed carving figures from the American West — Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea, Red Cloud, Buffalo Bill Cody — into the Needles, a cluster of slender granite spires in the Black Hills, explicitly to pull automobile tourists into a state that had little else to detain them.
Borglum, invited to assess the site in 1924, rejected almost all of it. He judged the Needles too thin and too weathered to hold detail, and he argued that a monument on that scale needed national rather than regional subjects if it were to draw visitors from beyond the plains. He found his own rock instead: a broad face of fine-grained granite that faces southeast, and so catches direct sun for most of the working day — a practical matter for carvers on ropes, and a permanent one for how the finished sculpture is lit.
The mountain already had its name. A New York lawyer, Charles E. Rushmore, visited the Black Hills on a prospecting trip in 1885 and asked a local guide what the peak was called; the answer, more or less in jest, was that it had no name and might as well be called Rushmore. The US Board on Geographic Names made it official in 1930, three years into the carving.
Dynamite, Bosun Chairs and the Honeycombing Technique
Carving started on 4 October 1927 and finished on 31 October 1941. Borglum died in March 1941 and his son Lincoln Borglum completed the final months of work.
The method was industrial. Borglum built plaster models at a ratio of 1:12 and transferred measurements to the cliff using a pointing machine — a rotating boom with a plumb line, replicated at full scale on the summit — so a point on the model translated directly to a point on the rock. Drillers then bored a dense grid of shallow holes, a technique called honeycombing, which weakened the remaining stone enough that it could be removed with hand chisels and pneumatic hammers to within a few centimetres of the finished surface. Powdermen placed charges precisely enough to blast to within eight centimetres of the final face.
Workers reached the face in bosun chairs hung from steel cables and hand-cranked winches operated from the summit. "Call boys" perched on the cliff edge relayed shouted instructions between the carvers and the winch crews, because nothing else could be heard over the drills. Around 400 people worked on the project across fourteen years, most of them former miners from the Black Hills gold and tin operations, paid between $5 and $8 a day — good wages during the Depression, and enough to keep crews returning through repeated funding gaps. Nobody was killed during construction, a record almost unmatched among American public works of the period.
Not everything went to plan. Jefferson was begun on Washington's right, and after roughly eighteen months the rock proved too fractured to hold a face. The partly carved head was blasted off and restarted on Washington's left, which is why Jefferson now sits where he does. Borglum's original design showed all four presidents from the waist up, with a great inscribed panel beside them; funding ran out and the torsos were never attempted.
The Black Hills Were Treaty Land
The legal history of the ground under the memorial is unresolved, and it is the single most important thing to understand about the site.
The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 recognised the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation, held for the "absolute and undisturbed use and occupation" of the Lakota, and barred white settlement. In 1874 an expedition under George Armstrong Custer confirmed gold in the hills. Prospectors poured in, the army did not remove them, and in 1877 Congress passed an act unilaterally seizing the territory.
In United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians (1980), the Supreme Court found the taking unlawful and upheld a compensation award. The Sioux nations have refused to accept the money, on the grounds that taking it would extinguish the claim to the land itself. The award sits in an interest-bearing federal account and has grown substantially since — reported figures vary and run well past $1 billion. The Lakota position remains that the Black Hills are not for sale.
The hills are sacred ground in Lakota tradition, and the outcrop now carrying the four presidents was known as the Six Grandfathers. That layering — a monument to American nationhood carved into a mountain taken in breach of a treaty with the people who hold it holy — is not a footnote to Mount Rushmore. It is a live dispute, and the National Park Service now addresses it directly in the site's interpretation.
The Unfinished Hall of Records
Borglum worried that a sculpture without context would be unreadable to future centuries, so he began cutting a chamber into the canyon wall behind the faces: a Hall of Records, reached by a grand granite stairway, holding the founding documents of the republic. Work stopped in 1939 when Congress directed the remaining funds to finishing the heads. The tunnel had reached about 21 m.
The idea was partly honoured in 1998. A teakwood box inside a titanium vault, containing porcelain enamel panels reproducing the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and a biography of Borglum, was set into the floor of the unfinished tunnel and sealed beneath a granite capstone weighing about 540 kg. The chamber is not open to the public and there is no trail to it.
Preservation of the faces themselves is a smaller worry than it looks. The granite erodes at roughly 2.5 cm per 10,000 years. The real maintenance problem is water: crews seal cracks with silicone annually to stop freeze-thaw cycles from widening them, and the memorial has been laser-scanned in full so an exact record exists regardless of what happens to the rock.
Rushmore, Crazy Horse and Stone Mountain
Three colossal American carvings are usually mentioned together, and the differences between them are instructive.
- Crazy Horse Memorial, 27 km southwest, was begun in 1948 by Korczak Ziolkowski at the invitation of the Lakota chief Henry Standing Bear, in explicit response to Rushmore. The face, about 27 m tall, was dedicated in 1998; the full design calls for a figure roughly 195 m long and 172 m high, which would make it by far the largest sculpture on earth. It takes no federal money and has no completion date.
- Stone Mountain in Georgia carries the world's largest bas-relief, depicting three Confederate figures across a panel about 58 m wide. Borglum began it in 1915 and left in 1925 after a dispute with the sponsoring committee; his work was blasted off the mountain and the carving was completed by others in 1972.
Rushmore is the only one of the three finished as intended, and the only one whose sculptor lived to see almost all of it done. All three sit on ground with a contested claim.
What a Visit Actually Involves
The memorial has been run by the National Park Service since 1933. There is no entrance fee; you pay only to park, and the ticket is valid for the calendar year. Most visits take one to two hours.
From the parking structure the route runs through the Avenue of Flags, lined with the standards of all fifty states and the territories, to the Grand View Terrace — the classic head-on view. The Presidential Trail, a loop of about one kilometre with 422 steps, brings you to the base of the talus slope directly beneath the faces, which is the only place the scale registers properly. The Sculptor's Studio, open seasonally, holds Borglum's original plaster model and the pointing machine. An evening lighting ceremony runs nightly from late May through September.
Mornings are best for photography — the southeast-facing rock is lit head-on early and falls into shadow by late afternoon, which is exactly what Borglum planned for. Pair the trip with the eroded spires and fossil beds of Badlands National Park ninety minutes east, and read up on the wider setting in our overview of the landforms of South Dakota. For how Rushmore ranks against the world's other great monuments, see our list of the most visited landmarks.
