On the Many—and Contradictory—Histories of Mt. Rushmore

Back at Mount Rushmore the following day, I looked at the four presidents from the Grand View Terrace, the only spot at the actual memorial that offers an uninterrupted frontal view of Gutzon Borglum’s sculpture. Because of this, the terrace is the logical first stop for visitors, like the father and daughter taking in the full sweep of the presidents. “I know it’s not the most exciting trip,” the father said. “It’s not the beach, but it’s important.” His daughter didn’t respond. There is, in truth, not much cool about Mount Rushmore. Even if it’s an impressive work of art and engineering, it can feel stuffy and square, overly familiar, like reproduced paintings in hotel lobbies.

To get to the terrace, visitors park in the memorial’s oversized concrete lot—which feels like both a maze and a hive—and walk up a series of stairs to the memorial’s entrance, pass the small information booth and bathrooms, and enter the First Amendment area, where today, Mormons present Post-it notes to place hometowns on a world map, and yogis sell books on meditation. As visitors continue to walk straight, the sculpture comes into view at Borglum Court, where on a wall of hewn granite, the names of Rushmore’s almost four hundred workers are etched.

Opposite the workers’ wall, a bust of Gutzon Borglum created by his son, Lincoln, rests on a pedestal, the sculptor’s bald dome and fluffy mustache the two physical landmarks on an otherwise unremarkable face. The Avenue of Flags—a collection marking the country’s fifty states, one district, and four territories—acts as a promenade toward the Grand View Terrace, where the sixty foot portraits of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln rise above a large pile of rubble. A couple of old-fashioned silver viewfinders allow, for a quarter, intimate looks at Washington’s ample forehead, Jefferson’s aquiline nose, Roosevelt’s magical glasses, or Lincoln’s detailed beard.

The memorial’s self-guided audio tour is offered in English, Spanish, French, German, and Lakota, and it leads the listener along the Presidential Trail that follows the base of the sculpture and through the eastern areas of the memorial where most of the work was accomplished: the Sculptor’s Studio, where Borglum continually adjusted his sculptural models; the trailhead where workers hiked to the top of the mountain each morning before a wooden cable car was installed; and an open-air structure called Borglum’s View Terrace, where the artist monitored the sculpture’s progress from the ground. Of the twenty-nine parts of the audio tour, there are segments about Borglum’s life and vision; the lives of his children, Lincoln and Mary Ellis; the workers of the mountain; the Lakota view of the memorial—“Wounds have begun to heal,” intones the narrator; how cracks in the sculpture are remedied; and brief bios of the four presidents and how each face was carved and ultimately revealed and dedicated.

It is impossible to separate the land of the Black Hills—and the people who currently live in and have historically claimed this land—from the meanings of the memorial.

It’s a tour meant to inform, but it is notable for its omissions. No mention of Borglum’s affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan from when he worked on the Confederate memorial of Stone Mountain. No mention of protests by Native Americans over the years, who would strongly object to the idea that wounds have healed. No mention of this iconic memorial’s uncertain completion, its fits and starts in funding, or the tempestuous moods of Gutzon Borglum that often dictated the pace of construction.

The tour acknowledges that the memorial is incomplete, and “that the fact that Rushmore remains incomplete is a mirror to the incomplete, still emerging nature of the USA.” It ends at the Grand View Terrace, with a rendering of “America the Beautiful,” the narrator asking us to consider what the memorial means to each of us, the listeners.

It’s a question posed by a park ranger in a presentation given soon after my tour ended—what is the meaning of Mount Rushmore? Her name was Tayla, and she was one of dozens of seasonal rangers who work at Rushmore over the summer. She was in her tan Park Service uniform, from Rapid City, and a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Wyoming. I was the only person on that hot July day who wanted to join her talk, and she graciously asked whether I wanted to hear her presentation or just converse, and I told her I’d like the presentation.

There are four types of anthropology, she began—biological, cultural, archaeology, and linguistic. You can read Rushmore through these layers of anthropology, especially cultural anthropology. Symbols matter, she continued, their importance often derived from where you grew up. She said that the sign is the smallest form of meaning, and she opened a binder and asked me to identify the meaning of certain signs: the peace sign, the Star of David. She moved on to Rushmore and said four different groups offer interpretations of the symbolic sculpture we were staring at from the terrace.

Veterans, she said, see the memorial as representing freedom and patriotism, a vision shared by the National Park Service, which casts Rushmore in both a patriotic light and as a celebration of our country’s ideals. Third, the Mount Rushmore Society, the country’s oldest National Park Friends group, preserves the memorial and provides education and outreach. And the Indigenous community, she concluded, sees the memorial as a form of disrespect. She mentioned the protests in 2020 and said many in the Native American community think the story of how the Black Hills came to be in American hands should be taught here, not just the stories of the workers and construction methods.

According to the National Park Service, cultural anthropologists like Tayla “study how people who share a common cultural system organize and shape the physical and social world around them, and are in turn shaped by those ideas, behaviors, and physical environments.” There is a symbiotic relationship, then, between objects, environments, and people, each churning to create culture and meaning. But it is the relationship between environment and people that creates the disparate, charged meanings of contemporary Mount Rushmore. It is impossible to separate the land of the Black Hills—and the people who currently live in and have historically claimed this land—from the meanings of the memorial.

At the core of these meanings is history, the narratives that originate from the past, the relationships between memory and land, the creation of myths that are difficult to displace. Though Mount Rushmore was built to commemorate the first 150 years of American history, in some ways, history is glaringly absent at the memorial today, while myth is abundant. The history of the memorial is well covered in the exhibits and informational videos, as are slight capsules of the men on the mountain, but the deep history of the Black Hills, the Paha Sapa, is present only in a replica Lakota village that abuts the sculpture and the occasional talk from rangers like Tayla. Miss those and a visitor could miss hundreds of years of forces that have led to the centennial of Mount Rushmore’s first dedication on October 1, 1925.

I know this because though the memorial itself hasn’t physically changed since I first saw it two decades earlier, the histories behind it, the narratives that shape the relationship between object, environment, and people, have come more into focus for me and millions of other Americans in the intervening quarter century.

*

In the town of Spearfish, South Dakota, there is a bar whose name I forget, though the hour I spent there has become cataloged in my memory as myth.

Barely into the new millennium, I was a twenty-two-year-old recent college graduate. In two months, I was moving abroad, unsure when I would return, and I wanted to see my country before leaving it, so I had decided to drive west from Chicago to Yellowstone National Park. In 2000, Spearfish was a Black Hills town of fewer than ten thousand people whose origins resemble many other towns in western South Dakota: previously home to Native communities, Spearfish was founded by white settlers when gold was discovered in the 1870s. The wealth from those minerals had faded, as had the light from the mid-April afternoon, and a motel caught my attention. I had been camping through the state, but after several nights under the stars, I was looking forward to a shower, a mattress, and a beer. My suitcase was a laundry basket full of clothes and books, and resting atop the jumbled pile was a candle my high-school-age sister had given me. The candle was sculpted into the shape of a wandering mendicant in a waxy blue robe, a flowing white beard, and carrying a wooden staff, and it had served as a kind of talisman as I traveled west.

After showering, I walked to the bar down the street, whose door chime let the occupants know there was company. There were only two—the barman who doubled as a grill man looked up at the sound, and an older man turned around from his perch at the bar. He bore a faint resemblance to the candle—waxy skin, beard (more scraggly than flowing), and a walking stick that rested against the bar beside a pint of light beer. He wore no robe—his favored color was the olive and gray of camouflage, and his dusty hat bore, at least in my memory, the insignia of either a fish or a tractor. The television was on, and it didn’t appear I had disrupted any chatter.

I ordered a burger and beer, and the barman filled up a pint before heading into the kitchen. We were sitting next to each other at the battered wooden bar, the mendicant and me, below the television, when he reached over to grab the book I had brought.

“What you reading?” He flipped through the pages of a literary journalism anthology whose mustard color matched the Heinz bottle that sat next to the sugar packets. “You a journalist?” His voice was gravelly and suspect, the kind that questioned the love of a child.

“I just finished college,” I said. “Studied journalism.”

“Congratulations,” he said in a world-weary voice. You could smoke indoors in those days, and he lit a cigarette with an orange filter and threw the match in the plastic ashtray.

He must have gathered that I was far from home, so he asked what I was doing in Spearfish. I told of my trip west—Chicago to Yellowstone and back—before moving to Mongolia. I can see myself in that young man at the bar, though, after two decades, the view is beginning to strain. Recently cut ponytail; a triangular necklace of brown-and-yellow beads; a face moving from baby fat to bone; a desire for adventure without the self-confidence or ability.

“Where?” he asked in an incredulous tone.

I began to explain where Mongolia was.

“I know where it is, but why the hell you wanna go there?”

He sipped his beer, pulled his smoke, and looked at the television. I didn’t have a good answer, at least one I felt like sharing, so I ignored the question and followed suit in every way—the drink, the cigarette, the television. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was advertised to begin shortly.

I asked the mendicant whether he had been to Asia, and he told me he had spent more time there than he had wanted, having served in Vietnam.

When my burger came, I ordered two beers, one for me and one for him. He became garrulous and slapped my back in thanks and picked up the book again more thoughtfully. I looked up at Regis Philbin, who was giving the introduction to the game show, which, at that time, was a national sensation.

*

The previous night, I had camped in the Badlands, under a beautiful spread of stars, and woke to bison wandering around my tent. In the purple morning light, the land inspired awe—its enormity and natural angles of mountain, butte, and crag, the way its thigh-high grasses, where they existed, undulated like ripples in the sea. I had first driven north from Chicago, along the Mississippi, stopping at river towns in Wisconsin and Minnesota, before turning west. There is an unmarked though unmistakable border that delineates passage into a different ecosystem, a different landscape, a different experience of being within the land. That border is the Missouri River, which divides South Dakota into two halves, like an aquatic fault line has severed the state. Locals refer to East River and West River, and the wetness and moisture of the Great Lakes and Mississippi basin—its thick canopy of trees, its suppleness—cedes to an aridity and expansiveness that bears its own harsh beauty.

The morning light softened the landscape, and as I made coffee on my camp stove, I focused one destination in my mind: Mount Rushmore, about eighty miles away.

The original idea behind Mount Rushmore was to attract visitors like me—car tourists wandering the middle west on their way to the grand national parks of Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, and California. When Gutzon Borglum was hired to create Rushmore, the project’s emphasis shifted from South Dakota tourism to political expression. Inside the furnace of Borglum’s imagination, Rushmore had become perhaps the purest artistic representation of America’s political system, its symbol of freedom and democracy, the personification of visual Americana.

In this spring of 2000, the U.S. enjoyed the kind of prosperity, power, and prestige it had never experienced and probably never will again. Rushmore reflected this strength and an American idealism and confidence born both from our victory in the Cold War and a near decade of economic growth. The four men on the mountain still stood mostly strong and resolute in the public’s imagination and perception. Washington and Lincoln—their words, actions, and legacies—were stainless, the twin pristine gods of American democracy. Thomas Jefferson was beginning to wobble with revelations he had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. And Theodore Roosevelt, then and now, seemed the odd man out, or at least the wrong Roosevelt to put on the mountain. But collectively, the foursome, who they were and what they represented, reflected an American strength at the turn of the century. Unless, of course, you were a member of the Lakota Nation or another tribe who had called the Black Hills home for generations and saw the men and the country they built differently. But at that time, this complexity wasn’t present at the memorial, nor was it present in me.

Instead, my own memory of Rushmore is composed of concrete and pine, granite and patriotism. The gigantic parking structure had been completed at the memorial in 1998, and I remember its blocky concrete, devoid of cars on a blustery spring day, felt cold and soulless. I remember driving through the Black Hills and pulling off the road to look at the sculpture. The distant portraits looked smooth and burnished, and the memorial’s granite seemed as strong as the foundations of our republic. I was affected in the way Borglum likely wanted me to be affected: feeling pride in the men on the mountain and the country they had built, a dash of uncomplicated patriotism that surprised a young me.

I likely packed more books than clothes that trip, though I can only remember two. One was that literary journalism anthology the mendicant had flipped through. The other was Spring and All by William Carlos Williams. With the afternoon light guiding me to Spearfish, and Tom Waits and cigarette smoke escaping an open car window into a cool blue April sky, I like to think that, sometime that day, maybe over my morning coffee, I had read “To Elsie”:

The pure products of America
go crazy.

*

“Holy shit, that’s my poetry teacher.”

“Huh?” came the reply from the mendicant. It was bad enough I had brought an anthology of literary journalism into the bar. Now I was talking about poetry.

“That man taught me poetry.”

On the screen was Bob Watts, the young man who, four months earlier, had taught my poetry class at the University of Missouri and who had likely inspired me to bring the Williams. Bob was southern, and he spoke with a courtly accent. He had the kind of closely trimmed brown beard I then imagined was a prerequisite in southern men, was a little overweight, wore glasses, and seemed a bit awkward. He told us that when it came to singing and dancing he had no rhythm whatsoever, but that with poetry, with language, he heard rhythm in his head.

That April evening, incredulously, Bob was hearing trivia answers in his head. The mendicant and I watched as Bob answered the first few questions to put his winnings at $2,000 until the show paused for commercial. With my buying him a beer and us sharing a rooting interest, the mendicant and I had settled into a détente. He had asked me about Rushmore, and I told him of its beauty and of the bonhomie I had felt for the four presidents on the mountain.

“Never been,” he said.

That surprised me, given our proximity, and I was poised to ask why when Regis reappeared. The show’s point was for Regis to engage in conversation with the contestant so that the audience at home could wiggle themselves into the brain of the man or woman on the hot seat, step in their shoes, care about their success or failure. Bob was exceedingly polite and funny in his underhanded way, and as he moved through questions with a down-home wittiness, I could tell he was winning Regis and the mendicant over.

Bob had just passed $32,000 in winnings, and for each previous question, the mendicant and I had shouted answers at the television, because even if we didn’t actually know them, the questions, in their familiarity, allowed a spirited guess. Sometimes we agreed and sometimes we didn’t, but that was the fun part as we sat in Spearfish and drank and smoked. But when Regis read the $64,000 question, the mendicant and I were both silent. We had no idea, nor truly where to begin. Bob did, though, and I could tell by the confident banter with Regis that he knew the answer. The $64,000 was his, and now for every proceeding question, he could choose not to answer and keep his winnings, or, if he chose wrongly, tumble back down to the $32,000 threshold.

The show cut to commercial again, and the mendicant and I discussed the beads that hung from my neck. He asked me where I had gotten them, and I told him that a Yaqui elder had given them to me during a summer working on the Yaqui reservation, and that I wore them for good luck. He nodded and didn’t ask for explanation. I wanted to reciprocate an interest but couldn’t see any jewelry or tattoos, so I asked him about his stick. He chuckled.

“Vietnam,” he said. In my memory, I’d like to think that he tapped a wooden leg but he didn’t. He just took a sip of beer and lit another smoke.

The show returned with a heightened sense of drama. Hundreds of thousands of dollars was real money, and Bob now had the opportunity to win $125K. The question was a literary question, or at least one pertaining to books, about a book by a specific author that had sold more copies, or gone through more editions, than any other book. Bob hemmed and hawed and decided to use one of his Life Lines. He called the director of creative writing at Missouri, Rod Santos.

“Rod Santos,” I said.

“What? You know him, too?”

“No, but I once heard he had a dinner party with a bunch of poets. They all climbed a tree and howled at the moon.”

“I don’t think that guy,” and here he pointed at Bob, “is climbing anything anytime soon.” The mendicant stubbed out his smoke and lit another one.

We had been talking over the preliminary conversation between Rod, Regis, and Bob, but we became silent and stared at the television. Rod was whittling his way down to an answer to help Bob, and he came to The Joy of Cooking. Bob took his advice and suddenly had $125,000. The mendicant and I bellowed our approval, smashed glasses together, and finished our beers. He called the barman from the kitchen, and by the time he got to us, the $250,000 question appeared on the screen:

This national monument was designed by Gutzon Borglum.

“Crazy Horse!” the mendicant shouted, even before the answers had appeared on the screen. “Crazy Horse!”

Of the four answers given, one was Crazy Horse—the monument being built to the great Lakota military leader just miles away from Mount Rushmore—and another was Mount Rushmore.

“I think it’s Mount Rushmore,” I told the mendicant.

“Crazy Horse!” he shouted again.

“I think he’s right,” the bartender chimed in. “Crazy Horse.”

“I’ll bet you a beer,” I said to the mendicant.

“You’re on.”

We all stared at Bob on the screen. Regis was doing Regis, pulling Bob’s thoughts out of him, or at least trying to. Bob wasn’t revealing much, which had me worried. He asked to use another of his Life Lines, the 50/50 Life Line, where two of the answers magically drop away. Two did, and the two that remained were Crazy Horse and Mount Rushmore.

Though Mount Rushmore was built to commemorate the first 150 years of American history, in some ways, history is glaringly absent at the memorial today, while myth is abundant.

“Crazy Horse, you son of a bitch, Crazy Horse!”

The mendicant was now out of his seat, leaning up against the bar. I turned to him, and it was the first time I was able to get a good look. The camo, the dirty cap, the face shielded by glasses and beard. All this time, I had ascribed to him a certain identity—white hillbilly fallen on bad times. But watching him, I began to readjust. I couldn’t put a finger on it, but in that moment something broke through, and I realized I was out my depths of understanding. I turned to the barman for guidance but he had none to give. His eyes alternated between the mendicant and Bob.

It is a particularly precarious predicament—do you take a stab at $250K, knowing that if you’re wrong, you’ll drop back to $32K? Or do you content yourself with $125K? Bob decided on the latter and told Regis he would not be answering the question. The mendicant was apoplectic, and he sneered at me, as if my affiliation with Bob Watts meant I was party to some form of weakness. It was a kind of look that, when Regis showed the answer, I offered to buy him a beer—even though, according to the terms of our agreement, the mendicant owed me one.

He had sat down again and lit another smoke. I had no idea how long he had been at the bar or how many drinks he had had. And I don’t know whether it was the beer or the graciousness I had shown in the bet, but the mendicant suddenly warmed.

“Fucking Rushmore,” he said and he laughed. “What’s your name anyway?” I told him mine but I’ve forgotten his. He reached out his hand to shake, and I took it with my right. He held it for a second.

“Let me see the other one.” I gave it, and he rubbed both palms in a way that made me a little uncomfortable.

“Where you say you going again?”

“Yellowstone.”

“No, farther.”

“Asia.”

“Yeah, where?”

“Mongolia.”

“Mongolia,” he said, drawing out the last syllable. “Boy, you better stick those things in some turpentine because you got hands like a woman’s tit.”

*

Twenty-two years later, I’ve poked my head into every bar on the main drag and a couple off it, but nothing fits. Spearfish was the week’s last stop before returning home. I spent two days in Pierre, the state capital, a town a friend mockingly calls “Pierre-idise” in honor of its shabby appearance. There, I rummaged through papers at the South Dakota State Historical Society, where the password for the Wi-Fi was “Mt. Rushmore.” Back in the Hills, I spent this last day driving north, first to Deadwood and Lead, and now Spearfish.

The population of this Black Hills town had grown by about a third, and its broad streets and small-town feel were more charming than I had remembered. In my search for the bar, I had hoped to encounter, if not the mendicant, then at least a Proustian moment of recall of where I had watched Bob Watts almost win a quarter of a million dollars. I had tracked down Watts at his current position as a professor of English at Lehigh University. When the show had ended, and he and his wife were driven back to their hotel, what they had felt was not exhilaration over winning $125,000 but deflation and disappointment. He had known the answer, he told me, but he didn’t pull the trigger. I was unsure whether that piece of information would have assuaged the mendicant.

Perhaps I was so consumed with my own past because the Hills are so consumed with theirs. The Deadwood of Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and Seth Bullock that HBO made famous seemed unable or unwilling to move past the 1870s. Advertisements for reenactments of noteworthy murders; placards describing the exact location of old saloons; banners proclaiming Days of ’76; sepia photography studios; graveyards with entrance fees to visit the burial sites of those who created the myths of the Great American West. Lead, South Dakota, is only slightly different. A “lead” is a line that leads you to a motherlode of gold, which is how the town garnered its name and fame. The Homestake Mine, the largest gold mine in the Western hemisphere, operated there until it closed when gold prices slumped at the end of the twentieth century.

Now the mine is an underground laboratory, as scientists try to understand neutrino physics and the composition of dark matter miles beneath the surface. The Sanford Underground Research Facility is a sign of the changing times, but otherwise, Lead, too, seems locked in its past—the still visible cut into the earth from the mine, where forty million ounces of gold was removed; the Homestake Opera House, created by William Randolph Hearst’s widow, Phoebe; the museum devoted to gold mining, where my pimply guide, a self-proclaimed creationist, mocked the doings at the laboratory: “They think they’re looking for dark matter,” he chuckled.

Whose history, though, is being marked—at Mount Rushmore, at Deadwood, at Lead, at Rapid City, where the downtown is dotted with sculptures of each president from Washington to George W. Bush?

Whenever I have told the story of the mendicant and me over the decades, one detail always unsettles me: the identity of the man I sat next to. Memory is fallible, we all know that, and what I consider as an inability to place the mendicant into a roster of men I had previously encountered has become an acknowledgment of blindness. Perhaps I couldn’t see that he was likely Native American. Perhaps it was him I was looking for as I traipsed through Spearfish. Perhaps, after twenty years, instead of plying him with tales of my poetry teacher and upcoming trip to Mongolia, I was ready to ask him some questions and learn more about my country’s history than I was offered in school. Of course, the mendicant has likely moved on, and we would never meet again. But it was him, and my hour with him, that made me first want to understand the Black Hills and work through the myths and history of Mount Rushmore.

__________________________________

From A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore by Matthew Davis. Copyright © 2025 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan.