Mount Rushmore Inspiration

Robinson's descendants placed this marker in 2019, and it tells the family's story: an overheated Model T, a son sent for water, a historian looking up at Cathedral Spires. Among the westerners he pictured there was Red Cloud, the Oglala leader, though the Lakota, for whom the Hills were sacred, opposed carving them. Cora Johnson of the Hot Springs Star attacked the plan as desecration; Borglum would not call her by name and called her an agent of evil. He judged the spires' granite flawed and left them alone.

What the plaque says

Mount Rushmore Inspiration In 1923, on this outlook beneath Cathedral Spires, South Dakota State Historian Doane Robinson and his family stopped because the Model-T Ford he was driving overheated. He sent son Will down to a stream with a canvas water sack to get water for the car. Doane looked up and envisioned a westerner like Jim Bridger, Kit Carson or Red Cloud carved into the spires. He and Will were members of the Black and Yellow Trails Association which promoted tourism between Chicago and Yellowstone. Doane saw this inspiration as a unique way of drawing people to the state and to the beauty of the Black Hills. From the inception of this idea to its fruition, Robinson worked closely with Sen. Peter Norbeck, Rep. William Williamson, and John Boland who provided tireless support. One year later he toured the area with sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who found quartz, feldspar and mica mixed with the granite which was not ideal for carving. Impressed by the Spires, Borglum also reflected, "Who is he, but a man, to improve upon the hand of God." They found suitable granite at a nearby mountain where work began on Mount Rushmore in 1927, and Robinson's inspiration became a reality. Warren and Suzanne Robinson Dixon Family

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Black Elk Peak — 1.7 mi
  The highest summit in the Black Hills, renamed in 2016 for an Oglala holy man after carrying, for 150 years, the name of the general who attacked a Sicangu camp in 1855.
• Crazy Horse Memorial — 4.4 mi
  A Lakota elder's answer to Mount Rushmore, carved for more than seventy years by one family with private money, and still argued over by Crazy Horse's own relatives.
• Mount Rushmore National Memorial — 4.6 mi
  Four faces blasted out of a sacred mountain by 400 workers in fourteen years, with a Jefferson that had to be dynamited off and a hall of records never finished.
• 1880 Train — 6.6 mi
  A steam excursion on a mining branch line that hauled gear for Mount Rushmore, named for a decade it never ran in by a man who wanted steam to survive.

More markers nearby

• Campsite of General Custer's Expedition — 4.9 mi
• Gutzon Borglum — 5.0 mi
• In Memory of Anna Donna Tallent — 5.1 mi
• The Father of Mount Rushmore — 5.3 mi