Course AmericaCourse America The Field Map
Case FileNº 005

Department of Curiosities

The Unfinished Mountain

Named after a lawyer who happened to ride by. Redesigned nine times. One president dynamited off the cliff and restarted. America's most famous monument is a masterpiece that stopped mid-sentence.

Opened1923 LocationBlack Hills, S.D. Lead InvestigatorG. Borglum StatusStopped · Oct 31, 1941

Open the file

Exhibit A · Folio 1 of 4

The Name Nobody Chose

In 1885, a young New York attorney named Charles E. Rushmore rode through the Black Hills checking tin-mining claims. He pointed at a granite peak and asked his guide what it was called. The answer, in the frontier's finest bureaucratic style: no official name on the books, so his guides joked they'd call it Rushmore. The joke stuck, the maps followed, and decades later the lawyer donated $5,000 toward carving the mountain that carried his name by accident.

The file also records the peak's older name: to the Lakota it was known as Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, the Six Grandfathers. A granite wall that had already carried names and stories for centuries turned out to be exactly the right canvas for the boldest carving project ever attempted anywhere: four presidents, sixty feet tall, cut into the American sky.

Exhibit B · Folio 2 of 4

The Pitch That Changed

The monument began as a tourism scheme. In 1923–24, South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson proposed carving giant figures of Western heroes (Lewis and Clark, Red Cloud, Buffalo Bill Cody) into the granite spires called the Needles. He wanted travelers to stop in South Dakota. He got a national shrine instead.

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum, one of the few artists alive with real experience planning sculpture at mountain scale and an appetite for the colossal, took one look and overruled everything: the Needles were too thin and cracked to carve, and regional heroes were too small a subject for a mountain. He chose Rushmore's broad southeast-facing wall, and he chose presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and, controversially modern at the time, Theodore Roosevelt. Go national, he argued, or don't bother blasting.

Exhibit C · Folio 3 of 4

The Dynamited President

Carving ran from 1927 to 1941, and the design refused to sit still: Borglum's plan was formally revised nine times as the granite revealed its cracks. The most spectacular revision involved Thomas Jefferson. His face was begun beside Washington, and after about eighteen months of work the rock proved too flawed to hold him. So in 1934 they did the only reasonable thing: blasted Jefferson's face off the mountain with dynamite and started him again on Washington's other side, where he gazes today.

In fact, dynamite did about 90% of all the carving: roughly 450,000 tons of granite came off the mountain in controlled blasts, finished by jackhammer and hand-drill "honeycombing." Around 400 workers hung off the cliff in bosun chairs through fourteen years of it, and the record shows a fact almost as improbable as the monument: not one of them died on the job.

Engineer's elevation of Mount Rushmore: the four carved faces with scaffolding, the abandoned first Jefferson site struck through with a red dashed X, and dashed outlines of the never-carved torsos

Design revised ×9 · Jefferson Nº1 dynamited 1934 · 90% dynamite · 0 deaths

Exhibit CThe design that would not sit still

Exhibit D · Folio 4 of 4

The Stopping Point

The monument you know is the abridged edition. Borglum's design called for the presidents to the waist (coats, lapels, Washington's hand) plus a grand stairway and a Hall of Records: a chamber blasted into the canyon behind the faces to hold the nation's founding documents, so that a civilization finding the mountain in ten thousand years would know who these giants were.

Then reality intervened in sequence: money thinned, Borglum died suddenly in March 1941, his son Lincoln carried on through summer, and a world war made mountain sculpture a peacetime luxury. Work stopped for good on October 31, 1941. The Hall of Records sat as a bare 70-foot tunnel until 1998, when a titanium vault of porcelain-enamel panels, the texts, the how, the why, was finally sealed into its floor. The mountain remains what it became: a national masterpiece with the sculptor's pencil marks still visible, the head of the horse drawn magnificently, on purpose and by accident at once.

★ American Oddity

Borglum considered the work so unfinished that his final design studies still hang in the sculptor's studio at the site, meaning Mount Rushmore is possibly the only monument on Earth exhibited alongside the blueprint of what it failed to become.

Your Turn, Investigator

Examine the Evidence

Five questions from the file. No timer. Every answer comes with the real history. Mind the blasting schedule.

The Full Record

The Design History of Mount Rushmore: Nine Revisions, One Dynamited Jefferson, and a Monument That Stopped

Mount Rushmore National Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota was carved between 1927 and 1941 under sculptor Gutzon Borglum. Its design history is stranger than its postcard: the mountain was named informally for a visiting New York attorney, the original proposal featured Western figures rather than presidents, the design was formally revised nine times, Thomas Jefferson's first face was removed with dynamite, and the monument as planned was never completed.

Naming: Charles E. Rushmore and the Six Grandfathers

The peak acquired its English name around 1885, when New York attorney Charles E. Rushmore, in the Hills on tin-mining business, asked its name and was told it had no established English name, so his guides jokingly supplied his own. Rushmore later contributed $5,000 to the carving fund. The mountain's older Lakota name, Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe (the Six Grandfathers), predates the English one and remains part of the peak's long record.

From the Needles to the presidents

State historian Doane Robinson's 1923–24 proposal envisioned figures such as Lewis and Clark, Red Cloud, and Buffalo Bill Cody carved into the Needles formation to draw tourists. Borglum, by then among the few American sculptors with practical experience in monumental stone carving at vast scale, rejected both site and subject: the Needles' granite was too fragile, and he insisted a mountain carving demanded national figures. He selected Mount Rushmore for its sound granite and southeastern sun exposure, and chose Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt to represent the nation's founding, expansion, preservation, and development.

Nine designs and the moved Jefferson

The carving design was formally changed nine times between 1925 and 1941 as work exposed cracks and inclusions in the stone. Jefferson's head was originally begun on the opposite side of Washington from his present position; after roughly eighteen months the granite there proved unworkable, and in 1934 the partially carved face was blasted from the mountain, with Jefferson re-begun on Washington's other flank. Approximately 90% of the sculpture was executed with dynamite, removing about 450,000 tons of rock, with finish work done by pneumatic drill and hand tools. About 400 workers carried out the carving over fourteen years with no fatalities.

The unfinished plan and the Hall of Records

Borglum's full design showed the four figures to the waist, an inscription, and a Hall of Records, a chamber cut into the canyon wall behind the heads to house copies of the nation's founding documents. Borglum died in March 1941; his son Lincoln Borglum continued through October 31, 1941, when congressional funding ended amid the approach of war, and the memorial was declared complete as it stood. The Hall of Records remained an unfinished 70-foot tunnel until 1998, when a repository of sixteen porcelain-enamel panels in a titanium vault was installed beneath its floor.

Sources & further reading