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How did four US presidents Washington Lincoln, Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt come to be carved on the side of a mountain in South Dakota?
Why were their faces chosen, and by whom?
In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Matthew Davis traces how a mountainside in the Black Hills, on land vital to the origin stories of the Lakota Nation, came to be a granite canvas for a colossal sculpture at Mount Rushmore.
Talking to Eleanor Evans.
He explores the story of the monument and its creation.
That illuminates the question about whose version of history ends up carved in stone.
Matthew, thank you so much for joining us on today's History Extra podcast.
How are you doing today?
I am doing great.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's great to be here.
It's a real pleasure.
And we're talking about somewhere that I'm sure a lot of people will have seen images of.
We have a lot of American listeners, so they will probably be aware of this memorial.
But we also have a lot of British and worldwide listeners too.
So I think we're going to go back to basics with Mount Rushmore.
You describe in your book very evocatively how on an early visit it struck you as quote beautiful and unseemly, which I thought was a really interesting juxtaposition.
And for those of us who haven't been there, can you take us a bit closer to the memorial?
What's there and what's the experience of visiting it like?
Yeah.
So, you know, let's even pull back a little bit further.
If you're driving towards the Black Hills, you're driving through this sort of prairie land of South Dakota, with the occasional river and grasslands.
And as you're approaching the horizon, you see this island, literally this island, this black dense island on the horizon.
And those are the Black Hills of South Dakota.
When you enter into the Black Hills, you're driving sort of to the south central part of the Black Hills.
And that's where Mount Rushmore is.
It's in the oldest part of the Black Hills, carved into granite that's about two billion years old.
That was forged about 15 kilometers below the Earth's surface.
And as you're getting to Mount Rushmore, you're winding through this amazing, beautiful ponderosa pine that gives the Black Hills their name.
The Lakota called the Black Hills the Paha Sapa or the He Sapa, Black Hills or Black Ridge.
And then, when you arrive at Mount Rushmore, you do, you see this sculpture, these four faces carved into that granite.
And they are a beautiful sculpture.
Gunson Borglum, the sculptor, did an amazing job.
They're very classically beautiful, but they're also kind of shocking and jarring.
They're sort of minimized in the larger breadth of the Black Hills.
And so as a viewer, for me, I first viewed the sculpture in 2000.
But when I was doing this book in the summer of 2022, when I first saw them, they sort of seem both dwarfed by the Black Hills but also, you know, beautiful in how they are actually constructed.
And is it right that your experience of visiting Mount Rushmore will change with the seasons?
That came across to me in your book.
Yeah, it really does.
The summer season, as you can imagine, is very crowded, very full.
There's a wonderful diversity of people that are at Mount Rushmore.
Many Americans, many veterans, many foreign visitors as well.
And you can imagine people taking selfies in front of the memorial, having ice cream, eating cheeseburgers, all at the base of the memorial.
And then the wintertime is very different.
It's much quieter.
It's much more contemplative.
And my favorite season is the fall.
The skies are beautifully blue.
The air is crisp.
The weather is perfect.
And the crowds are not as big.
And you're really able to sort of just really inhabit the beauty of the Black Hills and of the memorial.
So I think it really depends on the season that you go.
That's going to impact how you engage with and experience the memorial.
And 100 years on, it's still drawing many crowds to the location.
Over 2 million a year, although that number slipped for the first time this past year.
But it still draws a lot of people annually.
So we're going to get into today that story of how the memorial did come to be on this mountainside.
But your book is beyond the memorial itself, isn't it?
It's the biography of a mountain.
And you're thinking about the land that it's on.
You're thinking about the granite that it's carved into.
And you trace the history of how the Black Hills came to be in American hands.
I want to go back in the story and ask what's the importance of this place to the Lakota Nation and its origin stories?
I'm glad you mentioned the title A Biography of a Mountain because really I wanted to de-emphasize the actual sculpture in favor of the mountain of Rushmore and the broader Black Hills.
And the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Lakota call it the heart of everything that is.
And they're cosmological places.
View of the world.
Their belief system starts from the emergent story through a cave called Wind Cave, that's in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
So Lakota believe that both the buffalo and them as a people emerged from this cave into the Black Hills.
And so the Black Hills, they're sort of the spiritual center of Lakota belief and of their culture.
And there are many sacred sites along the Black Hills.
Now from an archaeological perspective.
Most archaeologists believe that the Lakota were in the Black Hills from about the early 18th century, so the early 1700s.
So what that means is that as the Lakota moved further and further west, they eventually arrived to the Black Hills around that time.
So the story of how the Black Hills came to be in American hands then is from the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.
And that treaty was signed by the Lakota in the United States.
The United States actually sued for peace because after the Civil War the United States was building military forts along the Bozeman Trail in Montana.
And that was in Lakota territory.
The Lakota were attacking those forts, attacking the military that were going to those forts and attacking the Americans that were heading in that territory as well.
So the US sued for peace and gave the Lakota a very large swath of land, which included the entire western half of what becomes South Dakota, which included the Black Hills of South Dakota, which included what is today where Mount Rushmore is.
And just a few years after that treaty was signed, the United States had a financial panic, what was called the original Great Depression of 1873.
And during that depression a lot of banks closed, a lot of corporations and companies closed, a lot of people were unemployed and morale was very low.
And so there was a real sort of effort to try to boost not just the economics of the United States but the morale of the United States.
In that context, George Armstrong Custer led an expedition through the Black Hills.
And that expedition was rather controversial because during the Treaty of Fort Laramie no Americans were allowed into the Black Hills except for official business.
And so what Custer and the military said was that we were going to be looking for a military fort within the Black Hills.
But everyone knew that what Custer wanted to find was gold in the Black Hills.
And he did.
In August 1874, gold was discovered in the Black Hills.
And Ulysses S Grant, who was the president at the time and who had been very adamant about preventing Americans from going into the Black Hills, relented and let Americans, let miners, primarily go into the Black Hills of South Dakota to try to search for the gold there.
And he said that At this point, all Native Americans that were in that area needed to go to American-run reservations, and those that refused, in the words of one scholar, would be rounded up.
So there's an American military push to get recalcitrant Lakota leaders and Lakota people onto reservations.
And of course, the Lakota resisted.
They were led by really tremendous leaders like Red Cloud and Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, who fought against the United States.
And this all came to a head in June 1876 at the Battle of Little Bighorn, where George Armstrong Custer led his 7th Cavalry against a group of Lakota in northern Cheyenne.
Custer and his 7th Cavalry, of course, were soundly defeated at the Battle of Greasy Grass is what the Lakota call it.
And when word got back to Philadelphia, where the United States was celebrating its centennial, Americans were outraged and they demanded that the United States take over the Black Hills, which they did just several months later, in early 1877.
So from that moment on, the Treaty of Fort Laramie was violated.
The land became in the hands of the United States.
And that's where that history now is very resonant to people in the Black Hills today.
It's so fascinating how this land with such a complex, contested history and is so tied up in the expansion westward of Americans and the removal and persecution of people of the Lakota Nation and many others as well.
It's so interesting that this becomes the site of this memorial.
We will get into how in just a moment.
But before I wonder could we change direction again in the story and look at a man you've already mentioned, Gutzon Borglum?
Can you introduce him as a figure?
Sure.
Yeah, Borglum is a very fascinating American character.
I mean, he was born to Danish immigrants who happened to be Mormon.
He was born in what is now the state of Idaho.
And his family was a polygamist family, like many Mormon families at the time.
His birth mother was the younger sister of two sisters that his father had married.
And unlike many Americans at that time, the Borglims actually began to move east.
So they moved from what was now Idaho further east in the United States.
And when they got to the Midwest, when they got to what is now Nebraska, They began to understand that that arrangement, that familial arrangement that was common in Mormon territory, was illegal in this part of the country.
And so they made a really terrible decision of asking Gunson Borglum's birth mother to literally leave the family.
And so when Gunson was about four or five years old, his mother left the family, and he never saw her again.
He was raised mostly in Fremont, Nebraska, where he had very little formal schooling.
He began to work and to draw as an artist.
But his life really changed when he moved to Los Angeles as a teenager.
And there he began to study art more formally.
He ended up actually marrying his art teacher, who was a woman much older than he was.
And he had an encounter with a woman named Jessie Fremont, who was the wife of the famed Civil War general and first Republican Party candidate for president, John Fremont.
And Jesse Fremont loved Borglum's artwork and she encouraged him to go to Europe to study more formally.
And so he did.
And he spent about a decade off and on in Europe.
And that was a transformative period for Gunson Borglum, because he began to learn and study, in particular the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, And at that moment, as he was learning from Rodin, he decided he was going to just be a sculptor.
And he returned to the United States in 1901.
He said, I am an American sculptor, and that is what I'm going to do.
And he got caught up in the monument craze, the memorial craze during the early 20th century.
There was so much work to be had as a sculptor doing these kinds of public monuments.
And Borglum's initial muse was Abraham Lincoln.
He named his son Lincoln after Abraham Lincoln.
His initial artworks that gave him a great deal of attention were of Abraham Lincoln.
But in the summer of 1915 Gunson Borglum was invited to go down to Atlanta to think about carving a face, a sculpture of Robert E Lee, onto Stone Mountain, which is a gargantuan piece of granite in just outside of Atlanta which actually dwarfs Mount Rushmore.
So that's how Borglum got to Atlanta, and we can sort of talk a little bit more about that later.
But Borglum as a personality was very driven, very energetic, very talented, very hardworking, but also for most accounts, very hard to work with.
He was demanding in his artwork and he was someone that, like many artists, both mined their youth and also went through different periods of ups and downs in terms of how he felt about himself as an artist and how he felt about his work.
Yes, he really has such complexity.
As you've said, you have immense pathos for him as a young child who loses his mother, but then also he has this confronting sympathy with white supremacist causes, as we might come on to.
Can we look at his work in Georgia on this edifice you call Stone Mountain?
Can you introduce our listeners to this if they haven't come across it before?
Yes, Stone Mountain is crucial to the story of Gunston Borglum, is crucial to the story of Mount Rushmore.
So a lot of things are happening at Stone Mountain.
In the summer of 1915, Helen Plain, who was a Confederate widow and very involved in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, had an idea to put Robert E Lee, the former Confederate general, onto Stone Mountain.
And she asked Gunston Borglund to come down and think about doing it.
And now there's some speculation that that she really intended to ask his brother, Solon Borglum, who was also a sculptor and actually a more accomplished sculptor at that time than Gunson was, who had done some work in Atlanta previously.
But Gunson got the invitation.
He came down, listened to Helen Plain and said listen, this idea is interesting, but it's not big enough.
If you're going to put just one portrait of Robert E Lee on this mountain, it's going to be dwarfed by the mountain.
So let's create a whole tableau of Confederate generals, presidents, soldiers onto this mountain.
So that's in the summer of 2015.
Just a few months later, in November of 2015, the Ku Klux Klan is reborn atop Stone Mountain, in large measure because of the influence of the film Birth of a Nation.
And so from the very beginning of Stone Mountain, the idea of Stone Mountain, it was very closely associated with the pretty much ran Stone Mountain and funded Stone Mountain.
And Borglum had a very deep relationship with the Ku Klux Klan.
There's no indication that I've seen that he was officially a member of the Klan.
I'm not sure if he ever donned a white hood, for example.
But he was very friendly with its leaders.
He introduced its leadership to American leaders, presidents, senators, Supreme Court justices.
And he was very attuned to some of the concerns of the Ku Klux Klan.
And And it should be noted that the Klan of the 1920s was very different than the Klan post-Civil War
It was rather mainstream.
A lot of national politicians were members of the Ku Klux Klan.
It had very prominent chapters across the country.
So Borglum's association with it may not have been unusual for the time, but he certainly adhered to its nativism.
He was virulently anti-immigrant.
He was anti-Semitic, and he was racist.
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So this is really important context to understand where Mount Rushmore eventually comes from.
We should say that Stone Mountain, his design doesn't fully come to pass.
Yeah, the ending of Stone Mountain is crucial to the beginning of Mount Rushmore.
Stone Mountain was run by the KKK, and there was a question of funding.
How was the mountain going to be funded?
And so the idea came and this is always mind-boggling to me, but the idea came for the federal government, the US federal government, to create a coin, that that commemorated the Confederacy which they had literally just defeated in the Civil War.
And the proceeds from that coin, which was going to be a lot of money, was going to go to the construction of Stone Mountain.
And so that coin was something that Gunson Borglum designed many times.
And then there was a dispute between him and the KKK about how to spend the proceeds of that money.
The KKK wanted to keep all the proceeds for themselves and basically just pay Gunson Borglum a small portion of a salary and just do a small design on the mountain.
So the KKK wanted to be funded by the federal government and Borglum did not like that approach.
He wanted to take on the mountain in the way that he wanted to take it on.
And there was a disagreement and the KKK basically fired Gunson Borglum.
And Borglum was irate.
He has set his heart on doing Stone Mountain.
In an episode of deep frustration and anger, he smashed the models that he had used to create Stone Mountain.
And the Stone Mountain Association hired a police officer, hired a sheriff, to go and arrest Gunson Borglum for destruction of property.
And so literally, you have this scene in February of 1925, where Gunson Borglum is fleeing the through the woods of Georgia, trying to get to South Carolina, while these police officers are chasing him to arrest him for destroying these models of Stone Mountain.
And so he eventually seeks kind of refugee status for lack of a better word in North Carolina, and he's housed there.
And no sooner.
Just months after that happens, he is on top of Mount Rushmore orchestrating its first dedication on October 1st 1925.
And the story of how Mount Rushmore came to be in the Black Hills is actually my favorite part of this story because it involves a man that not many people know but who is absolutely integral to this story.
And in a story of big personalities and big ambitions, Doane Robinson has a sort of a special place in my heart.
Doane Robinson was a state historian of South Dakota.
He was trained as a lawyer, but he was a journalist.
He loved literature.
He was sort of a Renaissance man.
He was interested in the kind of alfalfa that farmers grew, interested in the kinds of bridges that were being built over the Missouri River.
He was interested in the design of the state flag.
He wrote the first book on the history of the Lakota.
In the 1920s, the state that Doane Robinson had grown to love so much was in deep economic crisis.
World War, I had been a great boon to South Dakota's economic markets, its commodities markets, its agriculture.
But when World War I ended and European markets recovered, there was a deep decline in the prices of agriculture and commodities in South Dakota and across the broader American Midwest.
But Joan Robinson saw this deeply impacting his state and he wanted to steer South Dakota away from reliance on agriculture and diversify its economies.
So he had this idea of building a sculpture in the Black Hills that would attract the burgeoning car tourists that were driving from the Black Hills to Yellowstone National Park.
So he wanted to build a sculpture that would reflect characters of the American West.
His initial idea was to carve a red cloud into the pinnacles of South Dakota, then perhaps to include Lewis and Clark Sacagawea.
That led Lewis and Clark, maybe even George Armstrong Custard.
And so his idea was to build these characters in the American West that were not nearly as political as the idea has become.
But he struggled to find a sculptor to carve this idea of his.
When he landed on Gunson Borglum and Gunson Borglum accepted the commission the idea transformed from one of sort of benign sculptures of the American West into this grandiose political project that Gunson Borglum had in mind.
I'd love to dig into that a little bit more in a second.
But keen-eared listeners might have spotted we haven't yet said who Rushmore is.
And I found this quite a comical part of your book that this name tell us where this name comes from.
Yeah, I call this the cheapest naming rights purchase in American history, because Charles Rushmore was a New York City lawyer who was in the Black Hills in the 1880s to represent Tin Mine Corporations.
And one day he was riding along a horse with a couple of guides and he stumbled across this mountain and he asked the two guides he was with what this mountain was called.
And the mountain was actually called Cougar Mountain because there were a lot of cougars in the area.
And Black Elk, the great Lakota medicine man and spiritual leader had given it the name the Six Grandfathers.
But the guides didn't know that.
And they said that, well, it had no name.
So Charles Rushmore was there and the guides who wanted to appease Rushmore said what if we name it Rushmore?
So the mountain became known as Mount Rushmore.
And decades later, when the Mount Rushmore Memorial Project began, Doane Robinson reached out to Charles Rushmore and said hey listen, we're starting this new memorial project.
It's named after you.
Would you mind chipping in some money to help support it?
And so, for the cost of five thousand American dollars, Charles Rushmore had his name emblazoned on what has become the most famous memorial in the United States.
It's quite a tale, quite a quirk of this tale.
So to situate us then, we've got the Black Hills that are immensely important to the Lakota Nation.
They've been transferred through a breach of this treaty into American hands.
And by this point, the 1920s, we've got this project.
Is there any sense at this stage of those historical complexities at play?
Is there any sense of taking these competing narratives into account?
Not at the time.
I mean, you know, this is one of the interesting things about memorials and monuments.
And they often tell us more about the time that they're built and the time when we're thinking about them, the actual events that they're meant to sort of represent.
And in 1925, when the idea of Rushmore is really getting started, where the first dedication happens.
There is pushback from some people in the Black Hills about why would you try to improve on God's creation?
Why would you try to improve on the beauty of the Black Hills?
But there's not a lot of historical controversy about whether the memorial should go forward in the Black Hills.
There's more of a question of can this be done, not whether should it be done.
And, at the time, Gunsten Borglum.
He wanted to create a memorial that emphasized and that celebrated American empire and expansion.
And you can read his journals and he has this idea of he wants to create a memorial to empire makers.
And so he chooses these four presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, that in his mind sort of fit that bill of empire making and American expansion.
And so that's how those four presidents are chosen.
And that was the initial idea was to sort of create this homage to manifest sestity to American empire.
But shortly after that moment, things begin to change.
You have in 1927, the second dedication of Mount Rushmore, which was led by Borglum, but was Calvin Coolidge, who was president at the time, was asked to speak some words.
He was summering in the Black Hills that summer.
And Calvin Coolidge gave the imprimatur of patriotism to the memorial that has never really left.
And that was the first time that that idea sort of surfaced.
It was deeply impactful for how we view the memorial today.
It began to steer a little bit away from these ideas of empire and more towards patriotism.
And then the third dedication of the memorial in 1930, on July 4th 1930, this idea of the shrine of democracy was first posited.
And that's when the memorial changed again to sort of be this epicenter of democracy and patriotism and, to a lesser degree, empire.
So from the very beginning of the memorial there were these different ideas that sort of began to infuse it, but it was not nearly as historically controversial as it is today.
Well, I'm sure we'll come on to some of these imbued meanings as we continue the conversation.
But to go back to this dedication, or these series of dedications and the building itself, because this is a really fascinating element of the story,
How did Borglum go about making this a reality?
Yeah, it's a tremendous act of faith on Gunsend Borglum's behalf to think that he would be able to finish what his vision was.
Because if you think of what it'd be like to build something like that today...
Just imagine the amount of technology that would be involved the laser scans, the sort of environmental impact reports, all the things that we sort of think about when we create gigantic projects today.
There was none of that in Borglum's time.
He created a maquette, a small model of what he envisioned Mount Rushmore to be.
And he used a system that had been used in antiquity, called the pointing system, where for every inch of this model he had created, he made that become a foot on the mountain itself.
It actually started with the nose of George Washington and sort of looked at the model, looked at the mountain and said well, this is where we're going to put the nose of George Washington.
And from that point, the sculpture sort of came into focus.
And he used some techniques that he used in Stone Mountain.
So in Stone Mountain he first was introduced to the idea of dynamite to blast off different parts of the mountain.
So he implemented that at Mount Rushmore.
And so, as the mountain was more and more destroyed, it became more and more apparent that there was granite there that you could carve, that you could sculpt, that you can bump, that you can with smaller charges of dynamite sort of have smaller pieces crumble down.
So that's how he began to do it.
And then, as it got closer and closer to doing the finishing touches, That's when it became way more technical.
You would literally have workers dangling hundreds of feet from the ground on these harnesses.
And they were sort of held up by a winch house on the top of the memorial where these young boys would sort of lower and raise these workers as they dangle below the Black Hills.
And they would sort of call out, pull me up, pull me down, pull me up, pull me down in these.
Just like puppets, these young boys would sort of puppeteer these workers as they carried these massive machines to bump and to carve the memorial.
It's an absolutely crazy process that worked.
And remarkably, over the course of its 14 years, there was not a single death at Mount Rushmore.
There were a couple of people that were injured.
But if you compare that to other massive work projects at that time, like the Hoover Dam, for example, which had many deaths, Mount Rushmore did not.
And that's a testament to the kind of safety measures that Gunston Borglum and his son, Lincoln Borglum, implemented.
Yes, for all its controversies, it really is an improbable, impressive feat, really.
And these are sort of 60 feet tall.
Is that right?
These faces?
The faces are 60 feet tall.
Yeah.
And the original vision of Rushmore, the original models, and what Borglum had in mind was not just to create faces, which is all we see today, but to create coat lapels, more of the torso.
He had designs to create a huge hall of records.
Those never got built, but the faces themselves are 60 feet.
So it's a long, arduous process.
You've already alluded to it that Borglum is sort of caught out by the length of this project and almost sort of hamstrung by his own ambition a bit.
What's the end of the story for him?
So Goodson Borglum, he never sees the memorial complete.
He dies in Chicago in March 1941.
He dies in Chicago because he's on his way to Washington DC to try to drum up more money for the memorial.
He has these big plans to create what he calls a hall of records.
It's really fascinating.
He wanted to have a whole section of the mountain devoted to different Americans that couldn't make it on the mountain.
He wanted to have smaller busts of important historical figures that had contributed to American history.
He wanted to have the original documents of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence in the Hall of Records.
And he needs money to do that.
And so he's on his way to Washington to try to drum up more money for his memorial.
Gunson Borglum had surgery in Chicago for issues related to his prostate.
And while he was recovering from that surgery, he had blood clots that went into his lungs and he ended up dying from a pulmonary embolism in March of 1941.
So he never got to see the end of the sculpting of Mount Rushmore, although the sculpting of Mount Rushmore didn't last much longer.
When he passed away, his son, Lincoln Borglum, took over the sculpting of Mount Rushmore and finished up the final touches of the memorial.
But what's interesting is and the memorial sort of emphasizes this as kind of a metaphor for the country that the memorial is not totally complete.
I mean, if you visit it you're going to see all this rubble that is at the base of the memorial, right below the faces.
That was supposed to be removed but they ran out of money to have that removed.
And so the memorial likes to say, just like the United States, Mount Rushmore is an unfinished product.
That is something that needs to be thought of as an unfinished thing, not a totally finished, complete project.
So that's where Gunston Borglum's story ends, but not where the story of Mount Rushmore ends.
Absolutely.
And I think an equally fascinating part of your book, if not more so than the construction of the monument itself, is how the memorial then tells the history of its conception and the land and so on.
A figure who's really important to this part of the story in your book is Gerard Baker.
I wonder if you could introduce him to our listeners.
Yeah.
So when I first went to Mount Rushmore, when I was I just graduated from college and it was in the year 2000 and I visited Mount Rushmore
And at that time, there was nothing at the memorial.
It had just finished a huge construction project that took the most of the 1990s.
Before that construction project, the memorial had been described to me as sort of like this quaint sculpture in the woods that you just would stumble upon.
But it was transformed in the 1990s and it became sort of our national memorial with a lot of concrete and parking lots added to it.
But when I visited there there was nothing that sort of told the story of the people who had lived in the Black Hills for thousands of years before the memorial became an idea.
So, in other words, Without any context, without any kind of pre-knowledge, you would just assume that the story of Mount Rushmore began with Gunson Borglum and the sculpting of these four faces.
And what Gerard Baker did.
Gerard Baker was the first Native American superintendent at Mount Rushmore, and he arrived to the park in 2004.
And he had had an illustrious career in the National Park Service.
He was the highest-ranking Native American to serve in the Park Service at the time.
And for every stop he made in his journey in the National Park Service, he made it a priority to emphasize and tell the stories of the Native communities of that park.
And that's what he did at Mount Rushmore.
He introduced a Lakota heritage village just to the left of the sculpture.
He hired Native American interpreters to tell the stories of their tribes, to tell the histories of their communities.
He hired hoop dancers and other cultural performers to perform on this grand amphitheater at Mount Rushmore.
And he began to shift the memorial into a direction that was more comprehensive in terms of the historical elements of Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills.
I mean, it was controversial.
There were a lot of people in the Black Hills that did not like what he was doing.
But he persevered, and the memorial is very different today because of him.
And you look elsewhere in the book at how different events are commemorated and memorialised.
You look at the Battle of Little Bighorn, also known as Greasy Grass, as you mentioned the massacre at Wounded Knee.
And you interrogate this story of what memorials tell.
You say that geologically, we look at the present in order to understand the past.
We look at the strata and the layers to see what's happened before.
Looking at Mount Rushmore today, what has that illuminated for you about what we should know about the past?
Yeah, it's called the principle of uniformitarianism, the geologic principle that you're talking about where literally, geologists look at the present to understand the past.
And so when I started this book, I was very, why is Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills?
And just by asking that question you're able to go back and understand the historical forces that led us to this moment today.
And so I think what I am very interested in just generally speaking, but specifically with this book is that understanding how the past influences the present, but also how the present influences the past, and how we view the historical forces that have led to this moment and how we view, how we interpret those historical forces right.
And I think, with memorials and monuments.
What's so interesting to me about them is that, even though the vast majority of them are built of concrete or bronze these sort of elements that are not meant to be changed very easily memorials themselves are not static.
And how we think about them, how we view them changes over time a great deal.
And I think Mount Rushmore is the perfect example of that.
I mean how it was conceived, first as an economic project, and then became this huge political project.
And now is kind of a lightning rod, for how different Americans view the historical narratives of our country is something that very much interests me.
And it sort of really highlights not just the malleability of memorials and monuments but how the present is so important into how the past is interpreted and thought of.
Absolutely.
As we're talking, it is 100 years since this particular memorial's first dedication.
Can you take us a little bit closer to what conversations are happening now, be it conversations around the land ownership still, or will we see another face added to this memorial?
So the land ownership question is really important.
I'm not going to get into the legal minutiae because there's been.
In 1920s the Lakota introduced a series of land claims against the United States to be compensated for the theft of the Black Hills.
And That was a many decades long process, which I describe a little bit in my book.
But ultimately what ended up happening was that in 1980, the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed a lower court decision that allowed the Lakota Nation to be compensated for the theft of the Black Hills and said that the Treaty of Fort Laramie had indeed legally been broken and ordered the United States to pay the Lakota 102 million in compensations.
Now, the Lakota in 1980 did not want that money.
And that money has been sitting there for 45 years and is now accrued, by most estimates, to over a billion dollars.
And so the Lakota could take a billion dollars in compensation for the land that was stolen, but they do not want the money.
They want the land back.
They want the political solution to this disagreement.
And you know it's hard for me to imagine a scenario where where the United States would give the land that was allotted to the Lakota in the 1868 treaty back to the tribe.
I think I have a hard time imagining that taking place.
But there are questions of whether there could be co-stewardship of national lands, for example.
What would co-stewardship of Mount Rushmore look like?
So those are the kinds of questions that are out there today.
You know, the Lakota nation is not monolithic.
There are many views within many different Lakota peoples.
But there is a certain segment that is advocating for the land to be returned to the Lakota people.
Now in terms of the memorial itself.
Yeah, there's long been speculation about whether more faces can be added to Mount Rushmore.
I mean certainly in the context of today.
The big question is will Donald Trump be added to Mount Rushmore?
And there was legislation that was introduced in 2025 to include him on Mount Rushmore.
And You know, that legislation has not been passed.
And almost everyone that I've spoken to that you read is pretty adamant that there's no space on Mount Rushmore for another phase.
What's clear is that it's a very live conversation.
Your book arrives at a very pertinent time.
Matt, thank you so much for sharing your expertise and your research with us today.
Is there anything we haven't covered yet that you'd like to leave our listeners with?
I just would love to leave listeners with a sense of the beauty of the Black Hills.
I had not spent a lot of time there before I researched this, and it's an incredible area.
And Mount Rushmore, though it is controversial, I think, at its best, what it can allow us to do as an American, and perhaps more if you're a foreign visitor as well, is to really consider the complications.
Even though there are very complicated narratives to American history, that it's okay to embrace all that complication on that space at that memorial.
That's how history should be told, in my opinion.
And to try to whitewash it or to decentralize the Lakota story in favor of, just simply, the American story, is not giving our history and the history of the Black Hills its full, complicated due.
That was Matthew Davis speaking to Eleanor Evans.
His book is A Biography of a Mountain, the making and meaning of Mount Rushmore.
