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- Steeped in controversy, Mount Rushmore marks 100th anniversary of its birth</p>
<p>Marc Ramirez, USA TODAYOctober 1, 2025 at 4:09 AM</p>
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<p>Mount Rushmore is an American icon: Its majestic, 60-foot-tall carved presidential heads, overlooking South Dakota's Black Hills, have been immortalized in cinema and remain a bucket-list destination for U.S. travelers.</p>
<p>On Oct. 1, the state's most recognizable landmark will mark the 100th anniversary of its dedication as a national memorial. While illustrious, it's a site with a checkered history, beloved to some, anathema to others and an enduring symbol of America's complicated past.</p>
<p>"To some people it's a point of great pride, but to others it's an evil symbol of the horrible things done to Native people," said Tom Lawrence, a fourth-generation South Dakota and local writer. "I love Rushmore, but I understand the complex history behind it."</p>
<p>More recently, some have floated the idea of adding President Donald Trump's head to the lineup despite admonitions that such a feat would be structurally impractical. Meanwhile, South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden has invited Trump to attend next year's Independence Day festivities marking the country's 250th anniversary at the site, where a fireworks show is slated despite tribal opposition.</p>
<p>How was Mount Rushmore created?</p>
<p>In the 1920s, American automobile ownership was growing – and with it, the concept of the road trip in an age of unbridled opportunity and Will Rogers wisdom. In 1923, South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson took in the granite bluff 23 miles south of Rapid City and imagined a sculpted monument that could transform the mountainside into a boon for tourism.</p>
<p>"The Black Hills are an absolutely spectacular area, and South Dakota was looking to draw tourism," said Lawrence, who co-publishes the South Dakota Standard, a local news commentary site.</p>
<p>Sculptor Gutzon Borglum was chosen to carry out the project.</p>
<p>The site was dedicated as a national memorial on Oct. 1, 1925, but carving didn't begin until two years later. By then, Borglum had reframed the monument's focus to spotlight four U.S. presidents representing elements of American history – George Washington for the nation's foundation, Thomas Jefferson for its growth, Abraham Lincoln for its preservation and Theodore Roosevelt for its development.</p>
<p>A view of the national monument as a storm rolls in on Friday, May 9, 2025, at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, South Dakota.</p>
<p>Funding was hard to come by. As the National Park Service notes, even though Borglum had procured U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's willingness to fully fund the project, he only asked for half, confident he could match the rest through private donations.</p>
<p>The task was harder than he thought, and despite his status, Lawrence said, Borglum was continually bereft of money.</p>
<p>"He was carving the monument but was always near broke," he said. "People would say he would go to gas stations in the Black Hills, fill up his car with gas and just drive away."</p>
<p>Borglum spent much of the project's last two years traveling and scrounging for the last of the funds, the park service said. He died in 1941, the year the project was completed; his son Lincoln oversaw final drilling.</p>
<p>Until recently, the site drew close to 2.5 million visitors annually before dipping to 1.85 million in 2024, according to National Park Service figures.</p>
<p>Why is Mount Rushmore controversial?</p>
<p>For the Native people of the Great Plains who had long inhabited the Black Hills, the four faces peering over their former homelands represent something entirely different – the European-descended leaders who oversaw the western expansion of white men and the desecration of a sacred burial site the Lakota Sioux knew as Six Grandfathers.</p>
<p>Activists and tribal members from the Black Hills region protest in Keystone, South Dakota on July 3, 2020, during a demonstration at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial around the visit of President Donald Trump.</p>
<p>An 1868 treaty had granted the lands to the Lakota but the pact was cast aside with the discovery of gold; by 1877, seven million acres in the Black Hills had been confiscated.</p>
<p>"When they came and started carving in the Black Hills, our people didn't like it but we had no say-so – even though it was stolen land," said Darrell Red Cloud, a fifth-generation descendant of prominent Oglala Lakota leader Chief Red Cloud who now teaches Native American studies at Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, South Dakota.</p>
<p>In 1970, Oglala Lakota activist Russell Means, an early leader of the American Indian Movement, famously urinated on George Washington's head in protest during an occupation of the site, which he would later call "a shrine of hypocrisy" in reference to its reputation as "a shrine of democracy."</p>
<p>While some, including Borglum's great-granddaughter, have since called for the monument's removal, others say a more realistic approach would be providing a fuller account of the Native perspective. For example, Lincoln, while admired for moving to end American slavery, is remembered by the Lakota for the largest mass execution in U.S. history; it was he who was in office when 38 Lakota were hanged in Minnesota during the Dakota War of 1862.</p>
<p>For a time, Red Cloud served as a Mount Rushmore guide, where he said he was a lone voice offering such a perspective. He also did cultural presentations at the site's Lakota Dakota Nakota Heritage Village, which had opened in 2008 along Mount Rushmore's Presidential Trail.</p>
<p>American Indian Movement (AIM) leaders Dennis Banks (L) and Russell Means (C) attend a meeting on March 16, 1973, as about 200 American Indians occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, fighting for the rights of Indigenous people. The town of Wounded Knee, site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, was seized on February 27, 1973, by AIM followers, who staged a 71-day occupation of the area. Two protesters were killed and a US Marshall seriously wounded.</p>
<p>While the site does feature information about the land's Native origins, he said, details remain sparse.</p>
<p>A portion of the memorial's website reads: "Many National Park sites occupy spiritually and culturally important places to Native peoples, and possess histories often marred by dispossession and exclusion of Native peoples from these sites."</p>
<p>"It's a sore amongst our people," Red Cloud said. "I don't think it will ever be healed. To tell the truth of what the mountain meant to the Lakota people would be a big step in the right direction, but I don't know if that will ever happen."</p>
<p>Could a fifth face be added to Mount Rushmore?</p>
<p>Earlier this year, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., introduced a bill proposing to carve President Donald Trump's face next to Lincoln's but offered no details about when the project would be undertaken or how it would be paid for. The bill did not advance beyond the House Committee on Natural Resources.</p>
<p>Such a development is likely not even possible.</p>
<p>US President George W. Bush addresses a crowd at Mount Rushmore in Keystone, S.D., during a speech in August 2002. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum started work on the landmark in 1927 and continued for 14 years.</p>
<p>In a letter written to then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1936, Borglum addressed the idea after proposals were made to add the face of suffragist Susan B. Anthony to the monument. He said the notion was likely impossible given the limitations of the stone and not in keeping with the philosophy of the monument itself.</p>
<p>"If Mount Rushmore were simply a gallery of the immortals, I would have selected a mountain range that would have admitted twice as many of our great outside of politics, who have given more, whose services will ensure longer than the bulk of our official world," he wrote.</p>
<p>Lawrence said he's spoken with experts as well as the National Park Service, "and they've said it's impossible. And it's a work of art created by someone who, despite his difficulties, was a master of this. Do we have a right to alter his finished work?"</p>
<p>As a lifelong resident, he's grown to appreciate the complex origins of what for him is a longtime emblem of state pride. In some ways, he said, the monument remains a relic of the past in a present that seeks to acknowledge the nuances and imperfections of American history, despite recent efforts to the contrary.</p>
<p>"Growing up, I never heard that side of it, the fact that it's on stolen land," Lawrence said. "We were told it was a great symbol of the state. It was on our T-shirts and on our license plates. Now we want to understand the whole complicated story, which is good. You can be impressed by the artwork and still saddened by the whole process around it."</p>
<p>This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Mount Rushmore: US landmark symbolizes nation's complicated past</p>
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