Mount Rushmore

Mount Rushmore, a granite peak in South Dakota’s Black Hills, combines a monumental national sculpture with a much older Lakota sacred landscape. Its sixty-foot carvings of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln were created between 1927 and 1941 as part of a tourism-driven project reshaped by sculptor Gutzon Borglum into a national symbol. Yet the mountain, once known in Lakota tradition as Cougar Mountain and Six Grandfathers Mountain, stands in a region the United States had recognized as Lakota territory before seizing it after the Black Hills Gold Rush. The site remains both a major landmark and a center of continuing dispute over taken Sioux land.

South Dakota · United States