Mount Rushmore looms as one of America’s most recognizable landmarks, a monumental sculpture of four presidents carved into the granite of South Dakota’s Black Hills. But beneath its patriotic imagery lies a layered history of ambition, artistry, and controversy, stretching from the sacred Lakota lands of Paha Sapa to the workshops of San Antonio.
The idea for the colossal carving began in the 1920s with South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson, who was desperate to revive his state’s economy after a devastating agricultural collapse. Hoping to draw automobile tourists en route to Yellowstone, Robinson proposed a monumental sculpture celebrating the spirit of the American West with figures like Red Cloud, Sacagawea, and Lewis and Clark.
When Robinson hired the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, the project transformed from a regional tourism scheme into a grand national statement. Borglum envisioned not pioneers, but presidents, the “empire makers,” who had forged, expanded, and preserved the United States: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.
For Borglum, the monument was not merely an economic endeavor but a statement about American civilization itself.
Borglum was a larger-than-life and deeply complicated figure. The son of Danish Mormon immigrants, he studied in Europe under the influence of Auguste Rodin and returned determined to create art that defined the American spirit.
Before Mount Rushmore, he had worked on the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Georgia, a project backed by the Ku Klux Klan. Though he left that effort after bitter disputes, his association with the Klan and his fervent nationalism would follow him throughout his career.
Borglum’s vision for Mount Rushmore took shape, quite literally, in San Antonio. In the mid-1920s, he rented space at an abandoned pump house in Brackenridge Park where he built early clay and plaster models of what would become Mount Rushmore.
He was experimenting with scale, technique, and proportion. Local craftsmen and artists visited his studio, where the colossal heads of Washington and Jefferson first began to emerge in miniature. Those San Antonio models helped secure political and financial support for the project and established the technical foundation for carving on the granite face in South Dakota.
Work began in 1927, with hundreds of laborers, many of them miners and ranchers displaced by the Depression. Borglum’s son, Lincoln, completed the sculpture after his father’s death in 1941.
But the mountain chosen for the monument was not just any mountain. The Lakota Sioux call the Black Hills Paha Sapa, “The Heart of Everything That Is.”
The region is sacred in their cosmology, the place of their emergence and spiritual renewal. Though the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota, the U.S. government seized them in 1877 after the discovery of gold. More than a century later, the Supreme Court ruled that the taking was illegal, yet the land was never returned.
Guest:
Matthew Davis is the author of "A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore."
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This interview will be recorded live Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025.
