Mount Rushmore: The Monument and What It Replaced
Near Custer, South Dakota
The Black Hills rise from the surrounding plains like a dark island, the Paha Sapa, as the Lakota call them, a name that means the heart of everything that is. The Hills are sacred in Lakota cosmology, a place for vision quests, for gathering medicinal plants, for ceremony. They were guaranteed to the Lakota by the Treaty of Fort Laramie in eighteen sixty-eight, in perpetuity.
In eighteen seventy-four, the United States Army sent an expedition into the Hills led by Custer. The expedition found gold. The treaty was effectively abandoned within two years.
The Supreme Court ruled in nineteen eighty that the taking of the Black Hills was illegal. It awarded the Lakota over one hundred million dollars in compensation. The Lakota refused the money.
The money has been in a federal account accumulating interest ever since and is now worth over one billion dollars. The Lakota want the land, not the money. They have not changed their position.
Mount Rushmore was carved between nineteen twenty-seven and nineteen forty-one. The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, chose the site in the Black Hills specifically because the federal government controlled the land. He carved the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lincoln.
The Crazy Horse Memorial, about seventeen miles away and begun in nineteen forty-eight, will be larger when finished than all four Rushmore faces combined. It has not been finished. The founding sculptor died in nineteen eighty-two.
His family continues the work. No federal money funds it. A Lakota elder, Henry Standing Bear, invited the carving, writing to the sculptor that the red man had great heroes too.
Many Lakota today still object to it. The family that runs it considers it a tribute. The question of what tribute looks like in the Black Hills is not settled.
