Mt. Rushmore

Friday, July 12, Day 81

It's only a short distance from Rapid City, Sturgis,  and Deadwood to Mt. Rushmore.  I had never been there before.  I have early pictures of my family being there -- so much happened before I was born!   One of our ongoing jokes, as my family spoke about their adventures, was to ask, "Where was I?"  "Oh, that was before you were born," was the reply!

The idea for the monument came in the 1920's as South Dakota was looking for ways to increase their tourism, and lure visitors away from nearby Yellowstone National Park.  They came up with an idea of carving heads on the rocks -- mainly of men who built the West; Custer, Lewis and Clark, maybe Buffalo Bill Cody, perhaps the Sioux Chief Red Cloud.  The plan then morphed into a monument to 

great American Presidents and their representation of the history of the country: Birth - Washington; Growth-Jefferson, Preservation-Lincoln; Development-Theodore Roosevelt.   

The rock formations you encounter as you began the climb to Mt. Rushmore give you an idea of what the area looked like before the monument.  

The man chosen to built the monuments was Gutzon Borglum,  an internationally known sculpture who had, among others, carved the largest bas- relief in the world into the granite at Stone Mountain, Georgia.  It features Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and their horses.  It was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and a place for ceremonies by the Klu Klux Klan. 

It was Borglum who chose this particular rock formation, known to the Native Americans as the Six Grandfathers.  While Europeans tended to build the places they considered to be sacred like churches and statues, the American Indians looked for places which were naturally sacred.  This area of the Black Hills was historically linked to the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Kiowa.  As a sacred area,
it was used for making contact with the spirit world and obtaining spiritual power.

So instead of being the Six Grandfathers, the granite hill was named Mt. Rushmore, after a New York lawyer looking after the mining interests of East Coast investors. Almost all of the Indian names for local lands were gone by the late 1800's.

The monument originally was meant to be to the waists, but the money ran out, Borglum died and his son carried on for a short time.  Eventually, the monument was left in this half finished state, although it is not readily apparent if you don't know about it!

The statistics are impressive - each face is 60 feet tall, the eyes are 11 feet wide, mouths 21 feet.  Washington's nose is 21 feet long, the rest 20 feet.  Ninety percent of the sculpting was done by
dynamite, removing 450,000 tons of rock.

This side view of Washington shows an area to his right where the face of Thomas Jefferson was supposed to be.  After 14 months, they realized the rock was too weak and they dynamited it away and began anew on the other side. The 400 workers on the project were primarily men who came for the Gold Rush, which didn't materialize for them, so $8.00 a day sounded really good! 

Mt. Rushmore draws over two million visitors each year and the new visitors center is really impressive. The day we were there, it was mostly Japanese tourists in all kinds of weird poses.  I wonder that they make of it all?

The Indians have their own version of who they think should be memorialized here, if indeed they would have carved up the mountain in the first place. Depending on who is stating their opinion, the Indians are Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Chief Joseph, Red Cloud and/or Ben Black Elk.

There is a big light show at night, featuring a lot of patriotic music and laser beams across the faces on the monument.  However, it is clouding up, beginning to show signs of nature's own thunder and lightening and are still going to the Crazy Horse Monument.

As we left , I noticed this little tyke who was somehow missing all of the excitement.  What will his memories be?  It reminds me of my youngest son, who fell asleep while we were watching the sunset at the Grand Canyon.  Later, when he woke up at the hotel, he said,  "What happened to that big crack?"  Out of the mouths of babes!