On October 4, 1927, Gutzon Borglum, at 60, started cutting into the granite face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. He had chosen the mountain for its southeast exposure, which gave the faces sun all day. The work ran for 14 years, cost about a million dollars and employed about 400 people at one time or another. It killed nobody. That was considered a remarkable safety record for the job.
The idea came from Doane Robinson, the state historian of South Dakota, who wanted something to pull tourists west off the main route. Borglum was hired in 1924 and chose four presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. He picked them for what he said they stood for, the founding, the expansion, the preservation and the growth of the country.
It was done with dynamite. Workers drilled holes and blasted away most of the rock, then finished the surfaces with pneumatic hammers and a technique called honeycombing, in which closely spaced holes are drilled and the ridges between them chipped off. About 450,000 tons of rock came down. The faces are about 60 feet from chin to forehead.
Borglum had a plan for a hall of records behind the faces, and it was cut about 70 feet into the rock before work stopped. He redesigned the figures repeatedly. Jefferson was moved. He was started on Washington's right, abandoned as unworkable, and restarted on the left. Borglum died in March 1941 with the work unfinished, his son Lincoln finished it, and the monument was declared complete that October.
The mountain was part of the Great Sioux Reservation, guaranteed to the Lakota by the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 and taken after gold was found in the Black Hills. The Lakota never accepted the sale, and the Supreme Court held in 1980 that the taking had been illegal and awarded compensation, which the Oglala Lakota have refused because accepting it would settle the claim. Protests at the site continue, and the heads remain the largest sculpture in the United States.