Mount Rushmore: Dynamite Facts and Surprising History

Western South Dakota boasts incredible sights like the Badlands and the Needles of the Black Hills, but nothing “sticks out” quite like Mount Rushmore National Memorial. Today, this giant monument is close to 90 years old. In honor of this milestone, here are some interesting facts about the history and legacy of this iconic sculpture.

History of Mount Rushmore

• The idea of creating a sculpture in the Black Hills was dreamed up in 1923 by South Dakota historian Doane Robinson. He wanted to find a way to attract tourists to the state. It worked. Mount Rushmore is now visited by nearly 3 million people annually.

• Robinson initially wanted to sculpt the likenesses of Western heroes like Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud, explorers Lewis and Clark, and Buffalo Bill Cody into the nearby stone pinnacles known as the Needles.

Who Built Mount Rushmore?

• The state of South Dakota commissioned Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum to help with the project. At the time, he was working on a massive carving at Stone Mountain in Georgia, but by his own account, he said the model was flawed. He believed the monument wouldn’t stand the test of time. He was looking for a way out when South Dakota called.
• Borglum, a good friend of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, dreamed of something bigger than the Needles. He wanted something that would draw people from around the world. He wanted to carve a mountain! Besides, the Needles site was deemed too narrow for sculpting, and the mountain had better exposure to the sun. Borglum and his son, Lincoln, thought the monument should have a national focus and decided to carve four legendary presidents.
• The men who worked on the mountain were miners who had come to the Black Hills looking for gold. Although they weren’t artists, they did know how to use dynamite and jackhammers. Sometimes, that’s all you need.
• The Borglums did hire one artist, Korczak Ziolkowski, to work as an assistant on the mountain. However, Ziolkowski left the project after 19 days and a heated argument with Lincoln Borglum. He would later begin another mountain carving nearby, Crazy Horse Memorial®, which today is the world’s largest in-progress mountain sculpture.
• Mount Rushmore once had an amateur baseball team. In 1939, they took second place in the South Dakota amateur baseball tournament. Because Gutzon and Lincoln Borglum were so competitive, they often hired young men for their baseball skills rather than their carving and drilling skills.
• Sculptor Gutzon Borglum died in March of 1941, leaving the completion of the monument to his son, Lincoln.

Who are the Four Presidents on Mount Rushmore?

• The Borglums chose the presidents for their significant contributions to the country's founding, expansion, preservation and unification.
• George Washington (1732-1799) represents our nation as its founding father.
• Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) represents expansion, as a signer of the Louisiana Purchase and author of the Declaration of Independence.
• Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) represents conservation and the industrial blossoming of the nation.
• Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) represents perseverance at all costs since he was the nation’s leader during the Civil War.
• Each president’s face is 60 feet high. The original carving conception included the bodies of the presidents down to their waists. The faces appear in this order: Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln.
• After nearly two years of work on Jefferson, Borglum’s team decided the rock was unsuitable, and the partially completed face was “erased” from the mountainside. With dynamite.
• The team completed Washington’s face in 1934 and Jefferson’s in 1936. Lincoln and Roosevelt were both finished in 1937.
• In 1937, a bill was introduced to Congress to add the image of women’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony to the mountain. In response, Congress then passed a bill requiring the completion of only the in-process heads. 

How Did Mount Rushmore Get Its Name?

• The mountain Borglum chose to carve was known to the Lakota as the “Six Grandfathers.”
• Depending on who you ask, it was also called Cougar Mountain, Sugarloaf Mountain, Slaughterhouse Mountain and Keystone Cliffs.
• The mountain’s most famous name came from a New York lawyer surveying gold claims in the area in 1885. Charles E. Rushmore asked his guide, William Challis, “What’s the name of that mountain?” Challis allegedly replied, “It’s never had one…till now…we’ll call the damn thing Rushmore.”
• In 1930, the United States Board on Geographic Names officially recognized it as Mount Rushmore.

How Long Did It Take to Complete Mount Rushmore?

• The carving of Mount Rushmore began in 1927 and finished in 1941. A team of more than 400 men did the actual carving. Remarkably, no one died during construction.
• The image of the sculpture was mapped onto the mountain using an intricate “pointing machine” designed by Borglum and based on a 1:12 scale model of the final sculpture.
• Dynamite carved 90% of the mountain, removing more than 450,000 tons of rock. Afterward, fine carving techniques created a surface as smooth as a concrete sidewalk.
• Bosun chairs and 3/8-inch-thick steel cables lowered drillers and finishers down the 500-foot face of the mountain. Workers at the top of the mountain would hand-crank a winch to raise and lower the drillers. If they went too fast, whoever was in the bosun chair would be dragged up the mountain on their face.
• Call boys sat on the side of the mountain to shout messages back and forth to the operators to speed up or slow down.
• A massive panel with 8-foot-tall gilded letters commemorating famous territorial acquisitions of the U.S. was also originally intended. Funding ran out, and the monument was declared complete on October 31, 1941.
• Overall, the project cost $989,992.32. Finishing the project took 14 years — six years of actual carving and 8.5 additional years due to weather delays and lack of funds.
• Charles E. Rushmore donated $5,000 toward sculpting the mountain that bore his name.

What is the Hall of Records at Mount Rushmore?

• In 1938, Gutzon Borglum secretly began blasting a Hall of Records into the mountain behind the heads.

• Borglum intended the Hall of Records to be a vault containing the nation's history and vital documents like the Constitution.
• Congress found out about the project and demanded Borglum use the federal funding for the faces, not the Hall of Records.
• Gutzon reluctantly stopped working on the hall in 1939 but vowed to complete it.
• In 1998, Borglum’s vision for the Hall of Records came to fruition. State officials sealed porcelain tablets containing images and text from the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in a vault inside the unfinished hall.
• The Hall of Records played a role in the plot of the 2007 movie “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” starring Nicolas Cage. However, the Hall of Records is not open to the public.

More Mount Rushmore Fun Facts

• Mount Rushmore's public facilities include a visitor center, the Lincoln Borglum Museum, the Sculptor’s Studio and the Presidential Trail.
• The Lincoln Borglum Museum features multimedia exhibits that let you use an old-style explosives plunger to re-create dynamite blasting the face of the mountain.
• At the Sculptor’s Studio, Gutzon Borglum worked on scale models of Mount Rushmore. The Grand View Terrace — one of the best places to see Mount Rushmore — is just above the museum.
• The Grand View Terrace is at the end of the Avenue of Flags, which features flags from all 50 states, one district, three territories and two commonwealths of the United States of America.
• The Presidential Trail is a 0.5-mile walking trail that offers up-close and different views of each face. To start the trail from the Sculptor’s Studio, you must climb 422 stairs. Enter the trail from the Grand View Terrace and you’ll have an easier time.
• Rushmore’s mountain goats are descendants of a herd Canada gifted to Custer State Park in 1924. Six goats escaped their pens and made their home in the granite peaks of Black Hills National Forest. Now, you can spot more than 200 of those rebels’ descendants.
• From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Ben Black Elk, a famous Lakota holy man, personally greeted visitors to Mount Rushmore.
• From late May to late September, high-tech, environmentally safe LED lights illuminate Mount Rushmore every night for two hours.
• Some believe you can see an elephant — or at least the stone face of an elephant — if you look to the right of Lincoln. Others believe if you look at a picture of the mountain rotated 90 degrees, you can see another face.
• Mount Rushmore is granite, which erodes roughly 1 inch every 10,000 years. Since each nose is about 240 inches long, they might last up to 2.4 million years before completely disappearing.
• After about 500,000 years, the faces will likely have lost some definition. But at this rate, the basic shape of the presidents’ heads may last up to 7 million years.
• Numerous efforts are being made to preserve Mount Rushmore, including installing 8,000 feet of camouflaged copper wire in 1998 to help monitor 144 hairline cracks. The copper wire was replaced with fiber optic cable in 2009.
• So far, preservation efforts have been successful, with Mount Rushmore celebrating its 83rd anniversary in 2024 — with all four noses, chins and foreheads (as well as all eight eyes, nostrils, lips and ears) intact!

Plan Your Trip to Mount Rushmore

Feeling like a Mount Rushmore expert yet? To learn even more and see this breathtaking monument for yourself, plan your trip to South Dakota today! Whether you want to stay in a cozy cabin, a hotel or make it a camping trip, there are plenty of places to stay near Mount Rushmore and other South Dakota landmarks.