In 1923, some history loving schmuck named Doane Robinson decided that South Dakota had a bit of a problem, namely that nobody gave a shit about South Dakota. Wanting his state to get its hands on some of those sweet ass tourist dollars, which were just beginning to become all the rage, Doane decided the best way to attract in the gaping public was to blast a couple faces into a mountainside; namely Lewis and Clark, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota Sioux. Not being the type to just sit on his ass, Doane met with his state’s senior senator and convinced him to sneak in some federal funding for the building of a colossal monument in the middle of nowhere.
With his funding secured, Doane than sought out to hire somebody to turn his dream into reality. The man he chose was the son of a Danish polygamist who married two sisters, a fellow by the ridiculous name of Gutzon Borglum. It was lucky break for Gutzon, given that he had been recently fired from his previous job, carving the faces of Confederate generals into the side of Stone Mountain in Georgia. Gutzon’s employer for the project had been the Daughters of the Confederacy, a racist group that funded the building of many Confederate monuments across the South and had close ties to the Ku Klux Klan. Gutzon didn’t give a shit about any of this because he was staunchly anti-immigrant, which totally makes sense when you’re the son of a polygamist immigrant. Gutzon was fired because he was a royal pain in the ass to work with. His racist employers actually so sick of his shit that they dynamited the work he had completed so the new sculptor could start from scratch. The Daughters of the Confederacy are still active today.
Anyways, with both money and sculptor in hand, Doane next started looking for a site to start carving away at, eventually deciding on the Black Hills. This was a bit problematic, not just because it was remote as hell, but also because it was on land originally granted to the Lakota Sioux by a treaty in 1868, only to be forcibly seized by the U.S. government a few years later when gold was discovered. Still not too happy with this turn of events fifty years later, the Sioux had just sued the federal government to get their land back. This was when Doane and Gutzman entered the picture, the pair basically giving the tribe a list of possible sites and asking them to rank them based upon how sacred they were. Everyone eventually settled on a granite mountain the Lakota called the Five Grandfathers, which was soon after renamed Mount Rushmore after some rich New York City jackass who donated money to the project.
Construction initially began in 1927 with a few hundred workers blasting away with dynamite and drills. Gutzon quickly asserted himself over Doane as head of the project. His first change was to instead carve the faces of four presidents since he thought nobody would drive hundreds of miles to see the originally planned faces. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln were chosen for their importance in the nation’s history. Teddy Roosevelt was thrown in because President Calvin Coolidge insisted that a second Republican be included. They later declared it was because of national parks or something like that. The carving of the faces was a feat of artistic engineering that took twelve years. After the faces were completed, Gutzman began working to create bodies for the presidents, and a crazy ass vault where he envisioned all of the country’s important documents being stored even though nobody asked him to build it. However, he never had a chance to complete his vision, dying in 1941 from a brain aneurism likely brought on by him constantly yelling at people. Further expansion to the project was soon after abandoned, leaving the sculptor forever half finished with a big pile of loose rock beneath it.
Rather mad about one of their sacred mountains being blown up by shitty white people, a group of Lakota decided to blow up a different sacred mountain to create a sculptor of Chief Crazy Horse. The sculptor was started in 1948 and remains unfinished to this day. Taking a different tact, members of the American Indian Movement, a native activist group, climbed to the top of Mount Rushmore in 1971 and refused to leave. Most were arrested by park rangers twelve hours later. Nine years later, in 1980, after over sixty years of litigation, the Supreme Court agreed that the U.S. government had broken the treaty it made with the Lakota some 112 years earlier. The government was ordered to pay for the value of the land and resources taken, plus interest. Not wanting to give up their claim on the land, the Lakota refused to take the money. Today the U.S. government is holding some $1.5 billion still owed to the tribe.
The majority of the workers who built Mount Rushmore died younger than expected due to breathing in tiny flakes of granite during the construction. Mount Rushmore attracts two million tourists annually to the middle of nowhere. It’s considered one of the major drivers of the South Dakota’s economy.