I swore I wasn't going to visit South Dakota and come back and write a blog post about Mount Rushmore. I swore it! No way was I going to do that. Couldn't imagine any scenario where I'd be putting keyboard to screen to bang out a post about a glowing review of some huge sculpture of privileged, rich men carved into a mountain sacred to so many Native American peoples taken from them against their will. Wasn't going to do it. Especially since I'd already been there before. I was not discovering this thing for the first time on this trip.
I had a better idea. I was going to write about how the Black Hills was sacred land. I was going to write about how the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1851 promised the land to the Lakota in perpetuity. I was going to write about gold and Deadwood and the (new) Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 which took that land promised in perpetuity away forever. I was going to write about the Six Grandfathers and how Doane Robinson (the idea man) and Gutzon Borglum (the sculptor) desecrated the mountain. Finally I was going to write about Crazy Horse and how he was being memorialized like four presidents on Mount Rushmore. I was going to cover everything. All of it. And almost all of it was bad and wrong.
But then a couple of things happened. First, Deadwood is not the place I loved the last time I visited in 2011. It's a huge family tourist trap, a far cry from the small town caught between low table minimums and historic preservation that somehow maintained some sort of image as a dangerous frontier mining town that captured my imagination 11 years ago. And by "dangerous frontier mining town", I mean dangerous without the actual danger.
Second, the Crazy Horse Memorial seems to be getting nowhere on a campus that seems (to me) to be more about pulling in tourists than putting everything behind making the famous Lakota emerge from Thunderhead Mountain. I'm serious. The sculpture that is supposed to be carved out of the mountain is maybe 20 percent complete and it's been going since 1948. How many centuries is it going to take to get this thing complete? I know cathedrals in the middle ages took hundreds of years to complete, but I guess I feel that things should be quicker these days.
And third, the sculpture at Mount Rushmore is actually pretty skillfully executed. If you can ignore the whole stolen land thing. And we are not going to ignore that here. Or the KKK thing.
I could write for a long time about the history of crimes, including theft and murder, committed against the Lakota and other tribes in and around the Black Hills by Europeans who settled what is now the United States. I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to borrow from another source, for two reasons. First, I can't write more succinctly what I'm about to borrow. And second, I love it when trips that we take randomly reinforce immediate, future vacations. Which is exactly what happened in Los Angeles in late March.
On that trip, we visited the Academy Museum, a multi story downtown museum that outlines the history of motion pictures. One of the exhibits in the Museum is a single exhibit display about the history of painted backdrops. The backdrop on display just happens to be of Mount Rushmore. The description of the backdrop reads as follows.
The Mount Rushmore National Memorial has a controversial and painful history. It sits within the Paha Sapa, translated into English as the Black Hills, an area sacred to the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho people. The Lakota call it Wamaka Ogna Ke Icante (The Heart of Everything That Is). The land was reserved for the Lakota Sioux under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, an agreement the US government violated in 1877 following the discovery of gold.
In 1924, sculptor Gutzon Borglum was invited to create a monumental tourist attraction in the Black Hills. The site selected was Mount Rushmore, known to the Lakota as Thunk'sila S'akpe Paha, or the Six Grandfathers. Borglum began work in 1927 and died shortly before the monument's completion in 1941.
For the Lakota community, the National Memorial desecrates their sacred land, an offense compounded by the fact that the Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt all participated in the oppression of America's Indigenous people.
Mount Rushmore has been an ongoing site of Indigenous American protest, most notably in 1970 and 1971. In 1980, the US Supreme Court awarded $105 million in compensation for the loss of the Black Hills. The Lakota rejected the money in favor of the return of the land - a demand that stands to the present day.
Stolen land. Told you. I don't know how I sum up the history around Mount Rushmore any better than that with more words. It's pretty much as short and effective as it can be.
Now is when I embarrass myself and go back on all that because I actually find something to admire at Mount Rushmore.
It is difficult for me to describe what it is that sucked me in and captured me at Mount Rushmore. It's not uber-patriotism or anything like that. I wasn't born here but I am proud to be a naturalized American while also understanding that this country has flaws like any other. I love this place but I don't fall for shows of nationalism that places like Mount Rushmore inspire in some people.
I am also not a huge fan of any of the presidents depicted on Mount Rushmore. I can get behind some to a lot of what Lincoln and Roosevelt did and believed in and I can appreciate the role George Washington and Thomas Jefferson played in founding this nation while also fundamentally disagreeing with a lot of Jefferson's ideals. When it comes to Jefferson vs. Alexander Hamilton, I'm team Hamilton all the way. Jefferson in my opinion did irreparable damage to this country that we still haven't gotten out from under. And no, I'm not going to cover that in this post.
And then there's the thought behind the idea. This thing was carved to give people something to visit in South Dakota. Plain and simple, it was conceived as a tourist attraction. Like that's necessary? There's so much amazing stuff to do and see in southwest South Dakota. Who needs four giant faces to get people to travel there? Certainly not me.
I think for me it comes down to presence and execution. I know that given the history of the land in question here, I should absolutely not be swayed by artistic merit and the way the trees frame the sculpture perfectly in some spots, but I am.
It is difficult, after having visited places like Arches National Park and Zion National Park and having gazed with wonder on the Three Gossips and the Court of the Patriarchs, for me to state that the desecration of the six grandfathers by having some dude carve likenesses of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln into the side of the mountain actually improved the view. I don't know what it was like before they were there. I can look at pictures but can't really state what it was like because I wasn't there before they were carved. Nature makes some of the most gorgeous formations and views without any assistance from man.
All the time.
Having said that, the faces on Mount Rushmore are beautifully sited and they change dramatically (and fortunately to obscure Jefferson a lot) as you move around and in front of the mountain. There's some value in putting something recognizable as a point of reference to stare at and appreciate as the views of the thing shift with your position in the park around the National Monument. I don't like writing these words. Most of the siting of Mount Rushmore is unquestionably due to nature and not to the hand of man.
There is also real skill in both the carving of the mountain and the execution of the project itself. This whole thing took just a bit more than 14 years. That's staggering for a work of this size, type and location, although it was moved significantly along during the Great Depression when any job was a good job, no matter the danger. But you couldn't put just anyone on this project, right? I know it's a huge scale but ultimately, we are talking about art here, right?
Before visiting South Dakota this time around, by the way, I guess I assumed that the carving here was executed by Gutzon Borglum alone. But there is a picture in The Rushmore Hotel in Rapid City (where we stayed) that shows the mountain covered with scaffolding and various people working on the sculpture. I have no idea what possessed me to think one man could execute this thing by himself. Just pointing out my error in case that wasn't obvious here. Still, 14 years for a work of this scale and skill is astounding. As an exercise in project management alone, it's impressive.
The skill required here really hits home when looking at the glasses of Teddy Roosevelt. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of amazing sculpture in the rest of the four faces, but the glasses do it for me. We are talking about portraying an essentially invisible accessory resting on a face. It's a frameless pince-nez, not a pair of thick rimmed glasses or anything like that. But it's totally believable that there are giant spectacles on the face of Theodore Roosevelt. I can't imagine that kind of detail is easy. If you assume Borglum wasn't personally executing that specific piece of the sculpture, it's even more impressive.
Mount Rushmore was about the third thing we did when we landed in South Dakota (lunch and the Crazy Horse Memorial preceded it). I drove out of there impressed but also determined to not write about this place in any context other than the history of the Black Hills in total.
Needles Highway changed my mind.
Needles Highway is a 14 mile long stretch of South Dakota Highway 87 leading out of Custer State Park north towards Rapid City (or at least that's what it did for us). It's a gorgeous drive that is going to take you a while and is worth every minute of it. It climbs and curves through a coniferous forest and shows off some of the amazing natural beauty of the Black Hills.
At four spots in the drive, the road cuts right through some giant boulders. I mean that literally. There are enormous solid rocks in the landscape that rather than remove or crush or dynamite these things out of the way, whoever made the decision to make this road just carved a hole wide enough for a single lane of traffic right through the rock. Each one is an incredible feat of engineering and it's impressive to be driving through a tunnel made just that way.
The last of the four (heading north) tunnels is named after Doane Robinson, the guy that came up with the idea of carving four president heads into mountain sacred to the original inhabitants of that land. To get your car aligned with the axis of the tunnel, you have to make a little bit of a left swing to take the right turn into it so (a) you don't risk scraping the sides of your vehicle getting through the thing and (b) you can see if there's anyone coming the other way.
When you align your car with the Doane Robinson Tunnel, it frames Mount Rushmore perfectly. All you see through the opposite end of the tunnel is the four faces carved into the Six Grandfathers. It's an awesome framed view. Think about the effort and thought required to do that. It's almost unbelievable that someone could pull that off. Ignoring all the context of the bad stuff around this sculpture (and I actually believe I have covered most of that so far), that view made me write this post. For the complete Mount Rushmore experience, you should drive north on Needles Highway. This was a complete accident that we did this. It was an awesome surprise.
Ironically, the framed view through the Doane Robinson Tunnel was originally of the Six Grandfathers. The highway was completed in 1922, before Mount Rushmore was started. Presumably the tunnel was not originally named after Robinson, either.
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| The view of Mount Rushmore through the Doane Robinson Tunnel. And the view on the other side. |
Before I end here, let's talk a little bit about sculptor Gutzon Borglum. I don't understand the thought process Borglum went through before taking this commission. Maybe he did it for the fame or the money. Maybe he felt it was the right and glorious thing to do. Maybe he didn't think or know anything about the site being sacred to Native Americans. Maybe he knew all about that last issue and took the job anyway. Heck, maybe he loved South Dakota so much that he wanted to create its greatest tourist attraction. I don't know what the motivation in him taking the commission was and I'm not going to spend any time figuring it out, although the next paragraph will offer some pretty damning information. Borglum's not really worth much of my effort but I do want to close this post by telling some truth about this guy.
This was not the first controversial job he engaged in. Before he spent 14 years at Mount Rushmore, he spent some time in Georgia, where he was hired as the sculptor for Stone Mountain, a rock which today is carved in bas relief showing the Confederates Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, who rebelled against the United States to preserve slavery, or the right to own black people, in their states. If you want to engage in any sort of debate here about the reason for the United States Civil War, read my Richmond statues post first. Borglum was fired at Stone Mountain. Not out of any sort of moral principle (he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, after all) but due to financial disputes.
We didn't know all this about Borglum before we visited Mount Rushmore. I thought it was important to relate. It certainly colors my own appreciation of that work. It's disappointing that someone with ideas like that could make something so impactful. Maybe I should have refused to write anything complimentary about Borglum's achievements. I decided not to do that in the end.
How We Did It
Mount Rushmore National Memorial is open daily starting at 5 a.m. It closes at 9 p.m. in the fall and winter and 11 p.m. in the spring and summer. Check their opening hours page for the exact dates of spring/summer and fall/winter. There is a $10 fee to park at the Memorial and the fee is non-negotiable. Not even the National Park Service Annual Pass gets you free parking at Mount Rushmore. There is no admission charge beyond the parking fee.
There are other things to do at Mount Rushmore other than walk around and gaze at the sculpture. Park Rangers conduct guided tours of Borglum's Studio and something called a Lakota, Nakota and Dakota Heritage Village. We got to Mount Rushmore at about 5 p.m. and found only the Memorial itself open. It should come as little surprise that that Heritage Village is only open for five non-continuous hours four days a week (but not weekends) for two and a half months of the year. As if the Native Americans needed that additional slap in the face here.
The sculpture is also illuminated nightly and there's some sort of ceremony in the summer months around the illumination. We got out of there before the lights were turned on.
If you want to get to the Doane Robinson Tunnel along Needles Highway, you'll have to do it in the summer months. The highway closes with the first snowfall of the season and doesn't re-open until April 1 or later. Trust me, it's worth it.
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