Speaker
Matthew Davis
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1 episodes
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The four presidential faces at Mount Rushmore are each 60 feet tall, yet they appear smaller in person due to the overwhelming grandeur of the surrounding Black Hills landscape.
The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie gave the Lakota a large reservation encompassing almost all of western South Dakota, including the Black Hills, with provisions barring outsiders from entering without consent.
Just six years after the Fort Laramie Treaty was signed, Custer's expedition discovered traces of gold in the Black Hills in 1874, triggering a gold rush that effectively destroyed the treaty.
At the Battle of Little Bighorn in June 1876, Custer attacked a large Lakota and Cheyenne encampment without reinforcements and his 7th Cavalry was almost completely destroyed; Custer himself was killed.
As many as 350 Lakota — mostly women, children, and unarmed men — were slaughtered by the 7th Cavalry on December 29, 1890, in what is considered the last military engagement of the American Indian Wars.
New York lawyer Charles Rushmore had his name attached to the mountain after a guide jokingly named it after him in 1885; he later paid just $5,000 toward the memorial fund, making it the cheapest naming rights in American history.
Mount Rushmore took 14 years to build with 400 workers using dynamite, yet not a single worker was killed during construction — one of the most remarkable safety records of any major American public works project.
In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled the 1877 seizure of the Black Hills unconstitutional and awarded the Lakota $17.1 million plus 103 years of interest, totaling $105 million — money the Lakota refused to accept.
The Lakota's refused Supreme Court settlement, worth $105 million in 1980, has grown to over $2 billion today with accrued interest — yet the Lakota still refuse it, insisting the Black Hills were never for sale.
Gutzon Borglum had a close relationship with D.C. Stevenson, the Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan and most powerful KKK figure in the US at the time, writing him letters described as 'terrible reading' from a modern perspective.
In November 1915, approximately 15 men who had just watched the pro-Klan film Birth of a Nation climbed Stone Mountain, burned a 16-foot cross, and relaunched the KKK — initiating the Second KKK — at the very site where Borglum was commissioned to work.
Borglum's own journal describes the four presidents of Mount Rushmore as 'a group of empire makers,' connecting each to a phase of American expansion: Washington to founding, Jefferson to the Louisiana Purchase, Lincoln to preservation, and Roosevelt to the Panama Canal. This explicit imperial framing has been completely erased from the monument's official narrative.
At Little Bighorn in June 1876, Custer attacked a massive Lakota and Cheyenne encampment without reinforcements and was nearly completely wiped out — a decisive Lakota military victory. But it was a Pyrrhic win: the news enraged a centennial-celebrating America, painted Custer as a martyr, and ended any US interest in diplomacy with the Lakota, accelerating the seizure of the Black Hills.
The Lakota call the Black Hills 'the heart of everything that is' — their literal origin point, the site of vision quests, medicine, and cosmological ceremony. The mountain now called Mount Rushmore was known as the Six Grandfathers, named for the six sacred directions of Lakota spirituality. Blasting presidents' faces into it wasn't just vandalism; it was an assault on a living cosmology.
The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty gave the Lakota virtually all of western South Dakota including the Black Hills, with strict protections against outside entry. Just six years later, Custer's expedition discovered traces of gold, triggering a gold rush that created today's Black Hills towns — and made the treaty worthless. The US government's response: move onto reservations by 1876 or be 'hunted down.'
On December 29, 1890, the 7th Cavalry — Custer's old regiment — surrounded a group of Lakota mostly composed of women, children, and unarmed men. When a gun accidentally discharged, the massacre began: as many as 350 Lakota were killed. The US Army awarded 20 soldiers Medals of Honor for the slaughter — medals revoked under Biden and then re-awarded under Trump.
South Dakota's first state historian, Doane Robinson, conceived of Mount Rushmore in 1923 not as a monument to democracy but as a tourist attraction to rescue his state's tanking economy. South Dakota was experiencing its own Great Depression a decade before the rest of America. Robinson initially wanted to carve Red Cloud — the Lakota chief who had actually defeated the US in war — into nearby granite spires called the Needles.
In November 1915, roughly 15 men climbed Stone Mountain after watching Birth of a Nation — a film that lionized the Ku Klux Klan — burned a 16-foot cross, and relaunched the defunct Klan as the Second KKK. Borglum was simultaneously working on a Confederate memorial on that same mountain, commissioned by a woman who described the Klan as 'the men who saved the South from Negro domination.'
After refusing to let the KKK pocket US Treasury funds meant for the Stone Mountain memorial, Borglum was fired, a warrant was issued for his arrest, and he fled through the Georgian night to cross state lines. Within six months of that escape, he was standing atop Mount Rushmore for its first dedication — bringing all his ambitions and contradictions with him.
Ninety percent of Mount Rushmore was carved by dynamite; the fine detail work was done by men hanging in bosun chairs — wooden garden-seat-style rigs suspended hundreds of feet above the ground. Over 14 years and 400 workers, not a single person was killed on site, though many later suffered lung disease from breathing siliceous granite dust.
In 1980, the US Supreme Court ruled the 1877 seizure of the Black Hills unconstitutional, calling it 'a more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings' in American history, and awarded the Lakota $105 million. The Lakota refused — and still refuse today, even as the settlement has grown to over $2 billion. Their position: the hills were never for sale, so there is no price to accept.
Jefferson was originally planned for Washington's right side, but the granite proved insufficient and the half-carved face had to be blasted off and relocated. Washington's faint lapel outlines are still visible — remnants of a plan to show torsos that never materialised due to funding shortfalls. The mountain is as much a monument to what was abandoned as to what was built.
Borglum was trained in Paris under Rodin, carved a Lincoln bust that still stands in the US Capitol, and was a Progressive Party supporter — yet he was also deeply entangled with the KKK, maintained a close correspondence with the Grand Dragon of Indiana, and held virulent anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant views. He is a walking contradiction that Mount Rushmore's official story simply erases.
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