Historian Doane Robinson had a vision; he wanted to see the great men of the “Old West” carved at monumental scale in the Black Hills of South Dakota. They would be able to take advantage of this new craze of automobile road trips across the West with colossal sculptures of Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea, Buffalo Bill Cody, Crazy Horse, and Red Cloud.

He had heard of a sculptor working near Atlanta, Georgia on a huge project similar to what he had envisioned. The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, paused his work at the Ku Klux Klan member-funded Shrine to the Confederacy (later named the Stone Mountain Monument) to travel to South Dakota and discuss Robinson’s plans.

In their meeting in September 1924, Borglum rejected much of Robinson’s concepts but agreed to work on the project. Instead of symbols of the Old West, the grand sculpture would be a monument to America and its great expansionist project called Shrine of Democracy. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt would be featured. Each of these presidents played key roles in the growth of the United States and manifest destiny, or the idea that the United States was destined to expand from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts. Mount Rushmore National Memorial, completed in 1941, was meant to solidify America’s sense of self–and draw tourists with their dollars to South Dakota.

According to the description text in the Hall of Records at Mount Rushmore, “The [presidents] symbolize the principles of liberty and freedom on which the nation was founded. George Washington signifies the struggle for independence and the birth of the Republic; Thomas Jefferson the territorial expansion of the country; Abraham Lincoln the permanent union of the states, and equality for all citizens, and Theodore Roosevelt, the 20th century role of the United States in world affairs and the rights of the common man.”

Gutzon Borglum observes two workers carving Jefferson's eye on Mount Rushmore. There were more than 400 men who worked on the monument.

American Progress by John Gast is an allegorical representation of westward expansion including the displacement of Native Americans (left), 1872

The decision to create Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills was controversial from the beginning. There were multiple Native American nations with traditional, ancestral ties to the area. In 1868, the United States government signed a treaty with the Lakota (Sioux) that established the Great Sioux Reservation and exempted the Black Hills from non-Indigenous encroachment forever. But when gold was found in the hills three years later, the United States failed to punish invading miners and prospectors, instead using the military to kill Native Americans and the bison they depended on, escalating to the full-scale Black Hills War. By 1877, the Lakota bands were forced to cede the Black Hills to the U.S.

Despite being forced off their ancestral lands, the Lakota still saw the Black Hills including Six Grandfathers (Mount Rushmore) as their most sacred site–and demand their return even today. In the 1980s, the Sioux won a landmark Supreme Court case against the United States for their illegal seizure of the Black Hills and were awarded compensation of around $1 billion adjusted for inflation and interest. They refused to collect the compensation, however, because it would terminate their claim for the return of the Black Hills land. The Sioux continue to push for legislation that will once again cede control of the sacred site to Native Americans.

Today, Mount Rushmore remains a popular tourist destination as well as a symbol of the United State’s complicated history with Native nations. Have you been to Mount Rushmore? What do you think should happen to it? Want to learn even more about the controversial colossal sculptures? Learn about the nearby Crazy Horse Memorial.

Interested in more resources for teaching Native American history? Look here.