Mount Rushmore National Memorial

The idea belonged to Doane Robinson, the state historian, who wanted to bring tourists to the Black Hills and first imagined western figures, Red Cloud and Lewis and Clark among them, carved into the granite needles. The sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who came in 1924, chose presidents instead and chose this mountain for its fine-grained granite and the way its face takes the morning sun.

About 400 people worked on it between October 1927 and October 1941, rarely more than a few dozen at a time, hanging in harness from the top with jackhammers and dynamite. They blasted and drilled away some 450,000 tons of rock, which still lies in a pale apron of talus below the faces, and finished the surfaces by drilling close rows of holes and breaking the rock between them. No one died on the job. Jefferson was first begun on the other side of Washington; after two years the rock there proved too cracked, and the half-made face was blasted off and started again on Washington's other side. Borglum died in March 1941, and his son Lincoln brought the work to a stop that October.

Behind the heads Borglum had begun a tunnel for a Hall of Records to explain the monument to the future; it was abandoned, and only in 1998 was a vault of porcelain panels sealed into its floor. In 1971 American Indian Movement activists climbed the mountain and camped on top, calling it Mount Crazy Horse, and the Lakota holy man John Fire Lame Deer planted a prayer staff on the summit.