The four faces on Mount Rushmore are each about 60 feet tall, and they were carved by about 400 workers who blasted away some 450,000 tons of granite without a single death on the job. That's the version printed on the postcards. The version you won't find on them is that the mountain was called Six Grandfathers by the Lakota, that the United States promised them this land by treaty, and that the Lakota still say it was never sold. Both stories are part of the record, and neither makes sense without the other. So this is the whole thing in one place: the rock, the engineering, the argument, and whether the trip is worth it.
The Rock Behind the Faces
The memorial sits in the Black Hills of South Dakota, about two miles from the tourist town of Keystone. The Black Hills are an island of mountains in the middle of the Great Plains, and the granite at the heart of them is old. According to Wikipedia's summary of the geology, the magma that became this rock pushed up into older schist about 1.6 billion years ago. Around 70 million years ago the whole region was lifted into a dome, and erosion stripped away the softer rock around the granite and left it standing. Some of that darker schist, folded and veined with granite, is still visible below the faces.
The granite is what made the project possible. It's fine-grained and smooth, and it wears away very slowly: the National Park Service puts the erosion at about an inch every 10,000 years, and says water freezing in cracks is the bigger threat. Sculptors usually worry about rock that cracks or flakes, and Rushmore's fine-grained stone was unusually forgiving. It wasn't perfect, though. The granite is laced with pegmatite, coarse-grained veins from the same intrusion that are weaker and crack more easily. The mountain also faces southeast, and Borglum picked it partly because it catches the sun for much of the day. Today's rangers still have to send climbers up every year to find and seal cracks.
Nearby is the highest summit in the Black Hills, 7,244 feet. For most of the 20th century it was called Harney Peak, and in August 2016 the U.S. Board on Geographic Names officially renamed it Black Elk Peak, after the Lakota holy man. It's a good first hint that the names on this landscape have been argued over for a long time.
One Tourism Idea, One Hard-Driving Sculptor
The most surprising thing about Mount Rushmore is how it started: as a plan to get more drivers to South Dakota. In 1923 the state historian, Doane Robinson, wanted a giant sculpture in the Black Hills that would pull in the new class of automobile tourists. His idea was to carve western heroes, such as Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea and the Lakota chiefs Red Cloud and Crazy Horse. He wrote to Gutzon Borglum, who was working on the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain in Georgia, and Borglum came to look at the Hills in 1924.
Borglum turned the plan into something bigger. He argued that a memorial should be national, not regional, so the cowboys and chiefs became four presidents. He also abandoned an early idea to carve the granite pillars known as the Needles, which angered locals and, as it turned out, were too small and unstable for the work. According to the National Park Service, Borglum chose each president for what he stood for: Washington for the birth of the country, Jefferson for its growth (the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled its size), Theodore Roosevelt for its development, and Lincoln for its preservation. The park service even invites visitors to ask whether another artist would have chosen differently.
Funding was the next problem, and it never really went away. Congress approved matching funds in 1929, and the project eventually cost $989,992.32, which is a little over $21 million in today's money. Borglum's biography has an uncomfortable chapter. Before Rushmore, he had been the first sculptor of Stone Mountain, a project backed and partly funded by the Ku Klux Klan. According to Wikipedia's summary of his biographers, he befriended Klan leaders and sat on its committees, but there is no documentary proof that he formally joined, and his biographers disagree about how much of it was opportunism and how much conviction. The National Park Service's own biography of him doesn't mention the Klan at all.
Dynamite, Drills and No Deaths
Carving began on October 4, 1927, and stopped on October 31, 1941. The method was less delicate than you'd expect: most of the shape was blasted out with dynamite, and then came "honeycombing," where workers drilled closely spaced holes so the remaining rock could be knocked off in small pieces by hand. In all, about 450,000 tons of rock came off the mountainside. Almost 400 men and women worked on the project, and the park service says nobody died while carving. Dust was another matter: the stonemason Luigi Del Bianco, whom the park service now credits as the chief carver, died of silicosis in 1969.
Washington was dedicated on July 4, 1930, Jefferson in August 1936, Lincoln in September 1937 and Roosevelt in July 1939. Jefferson had a false start: his figure was begun on Washington's left, the rock turned out to be unsuitable, and it was blasted off and redone on the right. Del Bianco, an Italian-born carver hired in 1933 to finish the detail in the faces, was praised by Borglum as worth any three men in America for that kind of work.
Borglum died in March 1941 and his son Lincoln took over. Money ran out that October. The design had called for the presidents to be shown down to the waist, which is why the faces float above bare rock, and only Washington's figure has any detail below the chin. Borglum also imagined a Hall of Records, a vault cut into the mountain behind Lincoln to hold the country's founding documents. Workers got about 70 feet into the rock before work stopped. In 1998 a titanium vault with 16 enamel panels about the memorial was set into the entrance, and it's still closed to the public.
Whose Mountain Is It?
For the Lakota, the Black Hills (Paha Sapa) are sacred ground, and the mountain that became Rushmore was known as Six Grandfathers. The name comes from six head-like knobs on the ridge, and from the Lakota holy man Black Elk's Great Vision of the Six Grandfathers, the spirits of the six directions. The English name came from a New York lawyer, Charles Rushmore, who visited in 1884 and 1885 while checking mining claims and asked his guide what the peak was called. In the usual telling, the guide said it had no name and that it would now be named after him. Rushmore's own later account has one of the prospectors suggesting the name.
The legal story starts with the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868, which set apart the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills, for the "absolute and undisturbed use and occupation" of the Sioux and required three quarters of adult male Sioux to approve any cession. Then came Custer's 1874 expedition and the gold rush. In 1877 Congress took the Hills in an agreement that was signed by only about 10 percent of adult male Sioux. The Sioux say it violated the treaty, and in the long court fight the government did not contest a finding that it had acquired the Hills through "unfair and dishonorable dealing." The government's legal position is that Congress holds paramount authority over Indian property as the Sioux's trustee, and can take land as long as it makes a good-faith effort to pay full value.
On June 30, 1980, the Supreme Court decided United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians and held that the taking required just compensation. The Court wrote that Congress "can own two hats, but it cannot wear them both at the same time," and found that Congress had not made a good-faith effort to pay the full value. The award was the land's 1877 value ($17.1 million) plus a century of interest, about $106 million at the time. The Sioux refused it. Accepting the money would end their legal claim to the land, and they say the land was never for sale. The money has been growing in a federal account ever since. It was reported at about $1 billion to $1.3 billion in 2011 and at roughly $2 billion in 2022, and we couldn't find an official current balance, so treat those as estimates. The dispute is unresolved.
Borglum called his work the Shrine of Democracy. Critics call it a "Shrine of Hypocrisy." Native groups did not openly protest while it was being built, and Black Elk himself visited in 1936. The objections grew with the Native American civil rights movement, and in 1971 members of the American Indian Movement occupied the mountain. The memorial's first Native American superintendent, Gerard Baker, was appointed in 2004 and said that the presidents are "only one avenue and only one focus." Defenders, including the park service, present the memorial as a monument to the nation's founding and growth, while many Lakota and other critics call it a desecration of sacred land that was taken from them. Visitors arrive carrying one view or the other, and often both.
The Other Mountain: Crazy Horse
Elsewhere in the Black Hills, another mountain is being carved, and it's a reply. In 1939 the Oglala Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear wrote to Korczak Ziolkowski, who had worked on Rushmore, that the chiefs wanted white people to know "the red man has great heroes, too." The first blast on the Crazy Horse Memorial came on June 3, 1948. It's run by a private foundation that has refused federal money, and it's far from finished: the face was dedicated in 1998, and the planned figure of Crazy Horse on horseback is meant to be 641 feet long and 563 feet high, which would dwarf Rushmore.
It isn't uncontroversial either. Standing Bear and his fellow chiefs asked for it, but other traditional Lakota oppose it. The medicine man John Fire Lame Deer called it "a pollution of the landscape" in 1972, and the objection is the same one made against Rushmore: you don't carve a sacred mountain.
Visiting Mount Rushmore Today
Mount Rushmore is a good stop, even if it's busy. About two million people visit each year, and the park service says June, July and August are the busiest months, with quieter crowds before 9:00 a.m. and after 3:30 p.m. May, September and October are less crowded, too. The National Park Service says there's no entrance fee, but you pay for parking in the concession garage, and the ticket is good for unlimited visits for a year. Annual America the Beautiful passes don't cover it. Check the page for the current price. The Independence Day fireworks of 1998 to 2009 were linked by the park service to at least 27 forest fires, and a 2020 environmental review left the door open to bringing them back, so check the park's site before planning around them.
The Presidential Trail is a 0.6-mile loop from the Grand View Terrace with 422 stairs and closer views from the base of the mountain. From June through September there are ranger talks and short Sculptor's Studio talks on the tools and techniques of the carving, and a Lakota hoop dance on the Grand View Terrace at 9:00 a.m. in summer. The evening program runs nightly from late May through September: a ranger talk, a film and then the lighting of the faces, weather permitting. No reservation is needed. Because the mountain faces southeast, I'd guess morning light is the friendliest for photos, but that's a guess.
Add Crazy Horse and the rest of the region, and it's a good trip: Custer State Park, Wind Cave and the Badlands are all within reach. The memorial is also off I-90, not the I-80 route in our New York to San Francisco road trip, so it's a real detour, not a casual stop.
Where to Go Next
Mount Rushmore is a good argument for reading a place before you see it. If you want to keep exploring the country, start with our United States country page, test what you've learned with Pinpoint USA, or see how we do 5 Days In travel guides. Whatever you take from the mountain, take both stories.