Mount Rushmore: Six Grandfathers
Near Custer, South Dakota
The Lakota name for this mountain is Six Grandfathers. They called it that long before Gutzon Borglum set foot in the Black Hills.
The story of how the mountain became Mount Rushmore runs like this in the official record. A South Dakota state historian named Doane Robinson conceived the idea in nineteen twenty-three, hoping large carved figures might draw tourists to the Black Hills. He recruited Borglum, a sculptor with a national reputation who had begun, and later abandoned, a massive Confederate memorial on Stone Mountain in Georgia. Borglum chose the mountain, chose the four presidents, and began drilling in nineteen twenty-seven. Four hundred workers shaped the stone over fourteen years. Nine hundred ninety-two thousand federal dollars funded the project. No worker died in the carving itself, though injuries were numerous.
Borglum's original design included a Hall of Records to be carved into the granite behind the faces: an eighty-foot chamber with an eight-hundred-foot staircase, intended to hold documents of American history. He began drilling it in nineteen thirty-eight. Funding ran out before it was complete. A titanium vault was installed in the chamber in nineteen ninety-eight, but the Hall itself was never finished.
The mountain's Lakota name tells a different history. Six Grandfathers, called Tunkasila Sakpe, was a sacred site within the Black Hills territory guaranteed to the Lakota by the Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight. The carving began without the consent of the Lakota, on land the Supreme Court would later rule, in nineteen eighty, had been taken illegally.
The NPS interpretive materials at the site have increasingly acknowledged both the monument's official history and the Lakota account. Both are documented. Both are part of what you are standing in front of.
Seventeen miles away, the Crazy Horse Memorial has been under construction since nineteen forty-eight, built at the invitation of Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear. The two monuments face different directions. They have not spoken to each other yet.
