Less known is the fact that the sculpture is built on land that was illegally taken from the Sioux Nation in the 1870s. More about that below.

The sculpture itself features the 18-metre-(60-foot)-tall heads of four United States presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln … chosen to represent the nation's birth, growth, development, and preservation (of the Union), respectively.

The idea for Mount Rushmore was conceived by South Dakota historian Doane Robinson in 1923. He wanted to create a large-scale tourist attraction in the Black Hills to boost the local economy.

Robinson originally wanted the sculpture to feature American West and Native American heroes, but the appointed sculptor Gutzon Borglum chose the four presidents instead. Construction began in 1927. Borglum and a team of over 400 workers used dynamite, jackhammers and chisels to carve the faces into the granite cliff. Each president was originally to be depicted from head to waist, but lack of funding forced construction to end in 1941, and only Washington's sculpture includes any detail below chin level.

Mount Rushmore and the surrounding Black Hills are considered sacred by Plains Indians such as the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Lakota Sioux, who have used the area for centuries as a place to pray and gather food, building materials and medicine. The Lakota name for the mountain is "Six Grandfathers", symbolising the ancestral deities personified as the six directions: north, south, east, west, above (sky) and below (earth).

It's also land that, according to the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, was to belong to American Indians forever. But, after an expedition led by General Custer discovered gold there in 1874, the Fort Laramie Treaty was soon scrapped and the Lakota relocated to reservations. Colonialism 101.

Bizarrely, the mountain was named on a whim after a visiting New York attorney Charles E. Rushmore asked his guide the mountain's name. The guide replied that the mountain didn't have a name, but that it should henceforth be named “Mount Rushmore”. The name stuck and became official in 1930.

The Sioux continue to demand the return of the land, and in 1980 the US Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the taking of the Black Hills required just compensation, and awarded the tribe US$102 million. The Sioux have refused the money, which has grown with interest to over a billion dollars, and demand the return of the land. This conflict continues, leading some critics of the monument to refer to it as not the “Shrine of Democracy”, a title coined by the sculptor Borglum, but rather as a "Shrine of Hypocrisy”.

Despite its somewhat shameful back story, the monument is undeniably iconic. It attracts millions of visitors each year, and is South Dakota’s top tourist attraction. Along with Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial, it is a common target in movies showing an attack on a landmark to signify the scope of a threat. Plundering aliens anyone?

Mount Rushmore has also been depicted in many films, comic books and television series … its most famous cameo as the dramatic location for the final chase scene in the 1959 Hitchcock film North by Northwest. Watch that HERE.

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References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rushmore
https://ictnews.org/archive/a-different-view-of-mount-rushmore

Images

1. Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota. Photo credit: Thomas Wolf.
2. Aerial view of Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Credit: Carol M. Highsmith.
3. Mount Rushmore ("Six Grandfathers") before construction, circa 1905
4. Sioux Ben Black Elk poses at Mount Rushmore, 1960s
5. Construction at Mount Rushmore of George Washington's likeness
6. Gutzon Borglum's model of the Mount Rushmore memorial
7. Mount Rushmore Memorial US Post 3-cent commemorative stamp, 1952
8. Poster for North by Northwest, 1959
9. Video: Clip from North by Northwest, 1959. Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) proposes to Eve (Eva Marie Saint) while they scale Mount Rushmore.