🇺🇸 United States · Great Plains
Mount Rushmore National Memorial is one of the most iconic and recognizable monuments in the United States: the colossal faces of four presidents — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln — carved into the granite wall of a mountain in the Black Hills, South Dakota. Each head is about 18 meters high, and the ensemble, sculpted between 1927 and 1941, has become a symbol of the country and its history.
For the traveler, Mount Rushmore is an obligatory stop when touring the Black Hills region. The visit includes the spectacular sight of the sculptures from the avenue of flags and the terraces, a trail that takes you closer to the base, a visitor center telling the story of the work and, in summer, a moving evening ceremony with the faces lit up. The setting of the Black Hills, forested mountains sacred to the Lakota, also offers many other attractions.
This guide covers the essentials of Mount Rushmore with a practical eye: what the visit is like and what to see, the history and the controversy surrounding the monument, the evening ceremony, and the many nearby attractions in the Black Hills (the Crazy Horse Memorial, Custer State Park, the Needles Highway and Badlands National Park) that are worth combining to make the most of a trip to this corner of the Great Plains.
Mount Rushmore was conceived in the 1920s to draw tourism to South Dakota and was carved between 1927 and 1941 under the direction of sculptor Gutzon Borglum, with hundreds of workers using dynamite and tools to carve the four presidential faces into the granite. The monument stands in the Black Hills, mountains sacred to the Lakota, which has generated historical controversy, since the area was taken from them despite earlier treaties.
Read the full history ↓The state of the presidential faces and the Black Hills: sacred land of the Lakota, setting of the Deadwood gold rush and of the Wounded Knee massacre, of the Badlands, the bison and the monuments of Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse.
Read the history of South Dakota →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The most patriotic monument in the United States is carved into a stolen mountain. That paradox is the key to understanding Mount Rushmore: the four presidential faces that millions of people photograph every year look out over a territory that a court in their own country declared to have been taken illegally from its original owners. The Black Hills (Paha Sapa, 'black hills', in the Lakota language) are a forested mountain region rising above the Great Plains of South Dakota, and they are deeply sacred territory for the Lakota people and other Indigenous nations. Under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the United States had recognized the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation. However, the discovery of gold in the area in the 1870s set off a rush that led the government to seize the land, in violation of the treaty, in an episode that remains the subject of claims to this day.
The idea of carving a great monument into the mountains arose in the 1920s, driven by state historian Doane Robinson, who was looking for an attraction that would bring tourism to South Dakota. His original proposal was to sculpt figures of the American West into the granite spires of the area. To carry it out, sculptor Gutzon Borglum was hired, and he redirected the project towards something of national scope: the faces of four great American presidents.
Borglum chose the granite wall of what was then called Mount Rushmore (named after a New York lawyer) for its southeastern orientation (good light) and the quality of its rock. The choice of presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt) was meant to represent the country's first 150 years of history: its founding, expansion, preservation and development.
The carving of Mount Rushmore was carried out between 1927 and 1941, in a long and technically complex process. Under the direction of Gutzon Borglum, and after his death in 1941 that of his son Lincoln Borglum, hundreds of workers (many of them former miners from the region) carved the faces into the granite. The main technique was, surprisingly, the use of dynamite: it is reckoned that most of the rock, thousands of tons, was removed with carefully calculated explosives, before the detailed work with drills and chisels.
The workers hung from cables down the face of the mountain, in difficult and dangerous conditions, although, remarkably, there were no deaths during construction. Each face is close to 18 meters high. The project advanced in fits and starts, constrained by funding (partly federal) and by the difficulties of the Great Depression. The original plan was to sculpt the presidents down to the waist, but the lack of funds and of suitable rock meant the work was limited to the heads.
The monument was declared finished in 1941, coinciding with the death of Gutzon Borglum and the United States' entry into the Second World War. Since then, Mount Rushmore has become a national symbol and one of the country's most visited tourist attractions, managed by the National Park Service. Behind the mountain there is also a small chamber, the 'Hall of Records', conceived by Borglum to hold documents about the country's history.
Mount Rushmore has established itself as one of the great icons of the United States, a symbol of its history and its political system, reproduced countless times in popular culture, film and advertising. It receives millions of visitors a year and is considered by many Americans a place of patriotic pride, a tribute in stone to the leaders who shaped the nation.
However, the monument is also the subject of deep controversy, above all from the perspective of Indigenous peoples. The Black Hills are sacred Lakota land that was taken from them in violation of the 1868 treaty. For many Native Americans, carving the faces of American presidents (some of them tied to policies that hit Indigenous peoples hard) into their sacred mountain is an affront. The dispute over the Black Hills even reached the Supreme Court, which in 1980 recognized that the land had been taken illegally and ordered financial compensation, which the Lakota nations have refused, demanding instead the return of the land.
Partly as a response to this tension, in 1948 construction began nearby on the Crazy Horse Memorial, a colossal monument dedicated to the Lakota leader Crazy Horse, driven by Native leaders to honor their own heroes. So the Black Hills today hold two monuments that reflect the different memories and wounds of American history, in a debate that remains open about the meaning of the place.
The architect of Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum (1867-1941), was an American sculptor of Danish descent, ambitious and strong-willed, who already had experience with monumental works: before Rushmore he had worked on the gigantic Confederate relief at Stone Mountain, in Georgia, a project he walked away from after bitter disputes. Borglum saw sculpture on a colossal scale as a form of civic art capable of lasting thousands of years, and he applied pioneering techniques to Rushmore, such as the use of a system of plumb lines and reference points to transfer to the granite, at great scale, the 1:12 models he sculpted in his studio at the foot of the mountain, today the Sculptor's Studio.
Borglum's figure also carries shadows: he had ties to nationalist organizations of his era, an aspect that recent historiography examines when reviewing the monument's context. His son, Lincoln Borglum, supervised the final phase of the work and was the site's first superintendent. Behind the faces, Borglum had planned a great 'Hall of Records', a chamber cut into the rock intended to hold the great documents and the history of the United States; the project was left unfinished, but in 1998 a vault was placed there with panels narrating the creation of the monument and the country's founding texts.
Since its completion in 1941, Mount Rushmore has become one of the most recognizable visual symbols in the world, omnipresent in film, advertising and popular culture, and one of the most visited units of the National Park Service, with around two to three million visitors a year. Over the decades improvements were added (visitor center, Avenue of Flags, amphitheater for the lighting ceremony) that organized the visitor experience. Today the monument presents itself not only as a feat of engineering and art, but also as a place to reflect on the complex history of the nation and of the Indigenous nations who live in the Black Hills.