FINDING MOUNT RUSHMORE Every summer evening at sundown visitors gather in the hills of South Dakota at Mount Rushmore People rise to sing the national anthem Darkness falls on the great stone faces as the sun sets Then a flash of light illuminates the mountain The monument to great American presidents stands in a glowing light The ceremony at Mount Rushmore combines drama and patriotism These are exactly the feelings that sculptor Gutzon Borglum had in mind when he first saw the Sunset at Mount Rushmore can be a dramatic event
mountain in 1925 South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson had invited him Robinson wanted more tourists to visit the state He thought sculpting a rock formation would attract visitors Borglum had experience carving mountains He had recently designed a memorial at Georgia's Stone Mountain The project has become controversial It honors three figures from the Confederacy the group of states that tried to break away from the United States in the 1860s to keep the practice of slavery The memorial and Borglum were linked with the Ku Klux Klan KKK a PERSPECTIVES SACRED LAND Mount Rushmore is on land the Lakota Sioux consider sacred The US government had promised them this land in the 1868 Treaty of Laramie In 1874 miners discovered gold there Three years later the US government broke its promise It reclaimed the land racist and anti Semitic group Borglum himself held anti Semitic views Some historians believe he joined the KKK to get funding for the
For millions of years before Borglum arrived in South Dakota the rock formation that would later become Mount Rushmore had been shaped by nature Stone Mountain project Others think he joined the group for political reasons Borglum was one of the world's only artists with large scale stone carving experience He accepted Robinson's invitation and traveled to South Dakota to investigate the area The Native American Lakota
