How did four US presidents, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt come to be carved on the side of a mountain inside the Cota? Why were their faces chosen and by whom? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Matthew Davis traces how a mountain side in the Black Hills on land vital to the origin stories of the Locota nation came to be a granite canvas for a colossal sculpture at Mount Rushmore. Talking to Eleanor Evans, he explores the story of the monument and its creation that illuminates the question about whose version of history ends up carved in stone. Matthew, thank you so much for joining us on today's History Extra podcast. How are you doing today? I am doing great. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. It's a real pleasure and we're talking about some weather. I'm sure a lot of people will have seen images of. We have a lot of American listeners so they will probably be aware of this memorial, but we also have a lot of British and worldwide listeners too. So I think we're going to go back to basics with Mount Rushmore. You describe in your book very evocatively how on a nearly visit, it struck you as quote, beautiful and unseemly, which I thought was a really interesting juxtaposition. And for those of us who haven't been there, can you take us a bit closer to the memorial? What's there and what's the experience of visiting it like? Yeah, so let's even pull back a little bit further. If you're driving towards the Black Hills, you're driving through this sort of prairie land of South Dakota with the occasional river and grasslands and as you're approaching the horizon, you see this island, literally this island, this black dense island on the horizon. And those are the Black Hills of South Dakota. When you enter into the Black Hills, you're driving sort of to the south central part of the Black Hills. And that's where Mount Rushmore is. It's in the oldest part of the Black Hills carved into granite. That's about two billion years old. That was forged about 15 kilometers below the earth's surface. And as you're getting to Mount Rushmore, you're winding through this amazing beautiful ponderosa pine that gives the Black Hills their name, the Lakota called the Black Hills, the Paha Sapa or the Hisapa. Black Hills are Black Ridge. And then when you arrive at Mount Rushmore, you do. You see this sculpture, these four faces carved into that granite. And they are a beautiful sculpture. Guns in Portland, the sculptor did an amazing job. They're very classically beautiful, but they're also kind of shocking and jarring. They're sort of minimized in the larger breath of the Black Hills. And so as a viewer, for me, I first view the sculpture in 2000. But when I was doing this book in the summer of 2022, when I first saw them, they sort of seem both dwarfed by the Black Hills, but also beautiful and how they are actually constructed. And is it right that your experience of visiting Mount Rushmore will change with the seasons that came across from me in your book? Yeah, it really does. The summer season, as you can imagine, is very crowded, very full. There's a wonderful diversity of people that are at Mount Rushmore. Many Americans, many veterans, many foreign visitors as well. And you can imagine people taking selfies in front of the memorial, having ice cream, eating cheeseburgers, all at the base of the memorial. And then the winter time is very different. It's much quieter. It's much more contemplative. And my favorite season is the fall. The skies are beautifully blue. The air is crisp. The weather is perfect. And the crowds are not as big. And you're really able to sort of just really inhabit the beauty of the Black Hills and of the memorial. So I think it really depends on the season that you go that's going to impact how you engage with and experience the memorial. And a hundred years on, it's still drawing many crowds to the location. Over two million a year, although that number slipped for the first time this past year, but it still draws a lot of people annually. So we're going to get into today that story of how the memorial did come to be on this mountainside. But your book is beyond the memorial itself, isn't it? It's the biography of a mountain, and you're thinking about the land that it's on. You're thinking about the granite that it's carved into. And you trace the history of how the Black Hills came to be in American hands. I want to go back in the story and ask what's the importance of this place to the Locotination and its origin stories? I'm glad you mentioned the title of Bogdor Favour Mountain because really, I wanted to deemphasize the actual sculpture and favor of the mountain of Rushmore and the broader Black Hills. And the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Locota call it the heart of everything that is. And they, their cosmological view of the world, their belief system, starts from the emergent story through a cave called Wind Cave that's in the Black Hills of South Dakota. So the Locota believe that both the Buffalo and them as a people emerged from this cave into the Black Hills. And so the Black Hills, they're sort of the spiritual center of Locota belief and of their culture. And there are many sacred sites along the Black Hills. Now, from an archaeological perspective, most archaeologists believe that the Locota were in the Black Hills from about the early 18th century, so the early 1700s. And so what that means is that as a Locota moved further further west, they eventually arrived to the Black Hills around that time. So the story of how the Black Hills came to be in American hands than is from the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. And that treaty was signed by the Locota and the United States. The United States actually sued for peace because after the Civil War, the United States was building military forts along the Bozeman Trail in Montana. And that was in the Locota territory. The Locota were attacking those forts, attacking the military that were going to those forts and attacking the Americans that were heading in that territory as well. And so the US sued for peace and gave the Locota a very large swath of land, which included the entire Western half of what becomes South Dakota, which included the Black Hills of South Dakota, which included what is today where Mount Rushmore is. And just a few years after that treaty was signed, the United States had a financial panic, had, it was called the original Great Depression of 1873. And during that depression, a lot of banks closed, a lot of corporations and companies closed. A lot of people were unemployed and morale was very low. And so there was a real sort of effort to try to boost not just the economics of the United States, but the morality of the United States. In that context, George Armstrong Custer led an expedition through the Black Hills. And that expedition was rather controversial because during the Treaty of Fort Lermy, no Americans were allowed into the Black Hills except for official business. And so what Custer and the military said was that we were going to be looking for a military fort within the Black Hills. But everyone knew that what Custer wanted to find was gold in the Black Hills. And he did, in August 1874, gold was discovered in the Black Hills. And Elyseez Esgrant, who was the president at the time, and who had been very adamant about preventing Americans from going into the Black Hills, relented and let Americans, let miners primarily go into the Black Hills of South Dakota to try to search for the gold there. And he said that at this point, all Native Americans that were in that area needed to go to American run reservations. And those that refused in the words of one scholar would be rounded up. So there's an American military push to get, we call the Trent Lakota leaders and Lakota people onto reservations. And of course, the Lakota resisted. They were led by really tremendous leaders like Red Cloud and Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull who fought against the United States. And this all came to a head in June 1876 at the battle Little Big Horn, where George Armstrong Custer led his seventh Calvary against a group of Lakota and Northern Cheyenne, Custer and his seventh Calvary, of course, were soundly defeated at the Battle of Greece and Grass is what the Lakota call it. And when word got back to Philadelphia, where the United States was celebrating its centennial, Americans were outraged. And they demanded that the United States take over the Black Hills, which they did just several months later in early 1877. So from that moment on, the Treaty of Fort Laramie was violated. The land became in the hands of the United States. And that's where that history now is very resonant to people in the Black Hills today. It's so fascinating how this land with such a complex contested history and is so tied up in the expansion westward of Americans and the removal and persecution of people of the Lakota nation and many others as well. It's so interesting that this becomes a site of this memorial. We will get into how in just a moment. But before I wonder, could we change direction again in the story? And look at a man you've already mentioned. Goodson Boglum, can you introduce him as a figure? Sure. Yeah. Boglum is a very fascinating American character. I mean, he was born to Danish immigrants who happened to be Mormon. He was born in what is now the state of Idaho. And his family was a polygamous family like many Mormon families at the time. His birth mother was the younger sister of two sisters that his father had married. And unlike many Americans at that time, the Boglums actually began to move east. So they moved from what it was now Idaho further east in the United States. And when they got to the Midwest, when they got to what is now Nebraska, they began to understand that that arrangement, that familial arrangement that was common and Mormon territory was illegal in this part of the country. And so they made a really terrible decision of asking Gunson Boglum's birth mother to literally leave the family. And so when Gunson was about four or five years old, his mother left the family and he never saw her again. He was raised mostly in Fremont, Nebraska, where he had very little formal schooling. He began to work and to draw as an artist. But his life really changed when he moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. And there he began to study art more formally. He ended up actually marrying his art teacher who was a woman much older than he was. And he had an encounter with a woman named Jesse Fremont, who was the wife of the famed Civil War general and first Republican party candidate for president, John Fremont. And Jesse Fremont loved Borglum's artwork and she encouraged him to go to Europe to study more formally. And so he did. And he spent about a decade off and on in Europe. And that was a transformative period for Gunson Borglum because he began to learn and study in particular the French sculptor Auguste Rodan. And at that moment as he was learning from Rodan, he decided he was going to just be a sculptor. And he returned to the United States in 1901. He said, I am an American sculptor and that is what I'm going to do. And he got caught up in the monument craze and memorial craze during the early 20th century. There was so much work to be had as a sculptor during these kinds of public monuments. And Borglum's initial muse was Abraham Lincoln. He named his son Lincoln after Abraham Lincoln. His initial artworks that gave him a great deal of attention were Abraham Lincoln. But in the summer of 1915, Gunson Borglum was invited to go down to Atlanta to think about carving a face, the sculpture of Robert E. Lee on two stone mountain, which is a gargantuan piece of granite in just that side of Atlanta, which actually dwarfs Mount Rushmore. So that's how Borglum got to Atlanta. And we can sort of talk a little bit more about that later. But Borglum as a personality was very driven, very energetic, very talented, very hard working, but also, you know, for most accounts, very hard to work with. He was demanding in his artwork. And he was someone that, you know, like many artists, both mined their youth and also went through different periods of ups and downs in terms of how he felt about himself as an artist and how he felt about his work. Yes, he really has such complexity. As you've said, you have immense pathos for him as a young child who loses his mother, but then also he has this confronting sympathy with white supremacist causes as we might come onto. Can we look at his work in Georgia on this edifice you call Stone Mountain? Can you introduce our listeners to this if they haven't come across it before? Yes, Stone Mountain is crucial to the story of Gunson Borglum. It's crucial to the story of Mount Rushmore. So a lot of things are happening at Stone Mountain. In the summer of 1915, Helen Plain, who was Confederate widow and very involved in the United Daughters, the Confederacy, had an idea to put Robert Lee, the former Confederate General, onto Stone Mountain. And she asked Gunson Borglum to come down and think about doing it. And now there's some speculation that she really intended to ask his brother, Solon Borglum, who was also a sculptor and actually a more accomplished sculptor at that time than Gunson was, who had done some work in Atlanta previously. But Gunson got the invitation. He came down, listened to Helen Plain, and said, listen, you know, this is idea is interesting, but it's not big enough. You know, if you're going to put just one portrait of Robert Lee on this mountain, it's going to be dwarfed by the mountain. So let's create a whole tab low of Confederate generals, presidents, soldiers onto this mountain. So that's in the summer of 2015, just a few months later in November of 2015, the Ku Klux Klan is reborn a top stone mountain, and large measure because of the influence of the film, Birth of a Nation. And so from the very beginning of Stone Mountain, the idea of Stone Mountain, it was very closely associated with the Ku Klux Klan. And in fact, the Klan pretty much ran Stone Mountain and funded Stone Mountain. And Borglum had a very deep relationship with the Ku Klux Klan. There's no indication that I've seen that he was officially a member of the Klan. I'm not sure if he ever dawned a white hood, for example, but he was very friendly with its leaders. He introduced its leadership to American leaders, presidents, senators, Supreme Court Chesices. And he was very attuned to some of the concerns of the Ku Klux Klan. And it should be noted that the Klan of the 1920s was very different than the Klan post-civil war. It was rather mainstream. A lot of national politicians, remembers the Ku Klux Klan. It had very prominent chapters across the country. So Borglum's association with it may not have been unusual for the time, but he certainly adhered to its nativism. He was apparently anti-immigrant. He was anti-Semitic, and he was racist. And that all becomes apparent in his correspondences with members and leaders of the KKK. So this is really important context to understand where Mount Rushmore eventually comes from. We should say that Stone Mountain, his design, doesn't fully come to pass. Yeah, the ending of Stone Mountain is crucial to the beginning of Mount Rushmore. Stone Mountain was run by the KKK. And there was a question of funding. How was the mountain going to be funded? And so the idea came, and this is always mind-boggling to me. But the idea came for the federal government, the US federal government, to create a coin that commemorated the Confederacy, which they had literally just defeated in the Civil War. And the proceeds from that coin, which was going to be a lot of money, was going to go to the construction of Stone Mountain. And so that coin was something that Klan's in Borglum designed many times. And then there was a dispute between him and the KKK about how to spend the proceeds of that money. The KKK wanted to keep all the proceeds for themselves and basically just pay Guntz and Borglum a small portion of a salary. It just do a small design on the mountain. So the KKK wanted to be funded by the federal government. And Borglum did not like that approach. He wanted to take on the mountain in the way that he wanted to take it on. And there was disagreement and the KKK basically fired Guntz and Borglum. And Borglum was irate. He has set his heart on doing Stone Mountain. In an episode of deep frustration and anger, he smashed the models that he had used to create Stone Mountain. And the Stone Mountain Association hired a police officer hired a sheriff to go and arrest Guntz and Borglum for destruction of property. And so literally you have this scene in February of 1925 where Guntz and Borglum is fleeing through the woods of Georgia trying to get to South Carolina. Well, these police officers are chasing him to arrest him for destroying these models of Stone Mountain. And so he eventually seeks kind of refugee status for lack of a better word in North Carolina. And he's housed there and no sooner just months after that happens, he is on top of Mount Rushmore orchestrating its first dedication on October 1st, 1925. And the story of how Mount Rushmore came to be in the Black Hills is actually my favorite part of this story. Because it involves a man that not many people know, but who is absolutely integral to this story. And in a story of big personalities and big ambitions, Don Robinson has sort of a special place in my heart. Don Robinson was a state historian of South Dakota. He was trained as a lawyer, but he was a journalist. He loved literature. He was sort of a renaissance man. He was interested in the kind of al-Falfa that farmers grew, interested in the kinds of bridges that were being built over the Missouri River. He was interested in the design of the state flag. He wrote the first book on the history of the Lakota. In the 1920s, the state that Don Robinson had grown to love so much was in deep economic crisis. World War I had been a great boon to South Dakota's economic markets. It's commodities markets, it's agriculture. But when World War I ended in European markets recovered, there was a deep decline in the prices of agriculture and commodities in South Dakota and across the broader American Midwest. But Don Robinson saw this deeply impacting his state. And he wanted to steer South Dakota away from reliance in agriculture and diversify its economy. So he had this idea of building a sculpture in the Black Hills that would attract the burgeoning car tourists that were driving from the Black Hills to Yellowstone National Park. So he wanted to build a sculpture that would reflect characters of the American West. His initial idea was to carve red cloud into the pinnacles of South Dakota. Then it perhaps to include Lewis and Clark, Sakajwiyah, that led Lewis and Clark, maybe even George Armstrong Custer. And so his idea was to build these characters of the American West that were not nearly as political as the idea has become. But he struggled to find a sculptor to carve this idea of his. When he landed on Gunson Borglum and Gunson Borglum accepted the commission, the idea transformed from one of sort of benign sculptures of the American West into this grandiose political project that Gunson Borglum had in mind. I'd love to dig into that a little bit more in a second. But keen eared listeners might have spotted, we haven't yet said who Rushmore is. And I found this quite a comical part of your book that this name, tell us where this name comes from. Yeah, I call this the cheapest naming rights purchase in American history because because Charles Rushmore was a New York City lawyer who was in the Black Hills in the 1880s to represent 10 mind corporations. And one day he was riding along a horse with a couple of guides and he stumbled across this mountain and asked the two guides he was with what this mountain was called. And the mountain was actually called Kruger Mountain because there were a lot of Kruger's in the area and Black Elk, the great Lakota, menacea man and spiritual leader had given it the name, the six grandfathers. But the guides didn't know that and they said it will have had no name. So Charles Rushmore was there and the guides who wanted to appease Rushmore said, what if we name it Rushmore? So the mountain became known as Mount Rushmore and decades later when the Mount Rushmore Memorial Project began, Don Robinson reached out to Charles Rushmore and said, hey listen, we're starting this new Memorial Project. It's named after you. Would you mind shipping some money to help support it? And so for the cost of $5,000, American dollars, Charles Rushmore had his name in blazing on what has become the most famous Memorial in the United States. It's quite a tale, quite a quirk of this tale. So to situate us then we've got the Black Hills that are immensely important to the Lakota nation. They've been transferred through a breach of this treaty into American hands and by this point, the 1920s, we've got this project. Is there any sense at this stage of those historical complexities at play? Is there any sense of taking these competing narratives into account? Not at the time. I mean, you know, this is one of the interesting things about memorials and monuments and they often tell us more about the time that they're built and the time when we're thinking about them, the actual events that they're meant to sort of represent. And in 1925, when the idea of Rushmore is really getting started, or the first dedication happens, there is pushback from some people in the Black Hills about why would you try to improve on God's creation? Why would you try to improve on the beauty of the Black Hills? But there's not a lot of historical controversy about whether the memorial should go forward in the Black Hills. There's more of a question of can this be done, not whether should it be done. And, you know, at the time, Gunson Borglum, you know, he wanted to create a memorial that emphasized and that celebrated American empire and expansion. And you can read his journals and he has this idea of he wants to create, you know, a memorial to empire makers. And so he chooses these four presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, that in his mind sort of fit that bill of empire making an American expansion. And so that's how those four presidents are chosen. And that's what the initial idea was to sort of create this homage to Manifest Cestity to American empire. But shortly after that moment, things begin to change. You have in 1927 the second dedication of Mount Rushmore, which was led by Borglum, but was Calvin Coolidge, who was president at the time, was asked to speak some words, he was summering and the Black Hills that summer. And Calvin Coolidge gave the impromptuor of patriotism to the memorial that has never really left. And that was the first time that that idea sort of surfaced. It was deeply impactful for how we view the memorial today. It began to steer a little bit away from these ideas of empire more towards patriotism. And then the third dedication of the memorial in 1930, on July 4, 1930, this idea of the shrine of democracy was first positive. And that's when the memorial changed again to sort of be this epicenter of democracy and patriotism and to a lesser degree empire. So from the very beginning of the memorial, there were these different ideas that sort of began to infuse it. But it was not nearly as historically controversial as it is today. Well, I'm sure we'll come on to some of these imbued meanings as we continue the conversation. But to go back to this dedication, all these series of dedication and the building itself, because this is a really fascinating element of the story, how did Borglum go about making this a reality? Yeah, it's a tremendous act of faith on Guns and Borglums, we have to think that he would be able to finish what his vision was, because there, if you think of what it'd be like to build something like that today, just imagine the amount of technology that would be involved, the laser scans, the sort of environmental impact reports, all the things that we sort of, you know, think about when we create gigantic projects today, there was none of that in Borglum's time. He created a, a, a, cat, a small model of what he envisioned Mount Rushmore to be. And he used a system that had been used in antiquity called the pointing system, where for every inch of this model he had created, he made that become a foot on the mountain itself. And he actually started with the nose of George Washington and sort of looked at the model, looked at the mountain, said, well, this is where we're going to put the nose of George Washington. And from that point, the sculpture sort of came into focus. And, and he used some techniques that he used in Stone Mountain. So, it's Stone Mountain. He first was introduced to the idea of dynamite to blast off different parts of the mountain. So, he implemented that, and Mount Rushmore. And so, as the mountain was more and more destroyed, it became more and more apparent that there was granite there that you could carve, that you could sculpt, that you can bump, that you can, with smaller charges of dynamite, sort of have smaller pieces crumbled down. So, that's how he began to do it. And then, as it got, you know, closer and closer to doing the finishing touches, that's when it came way more technical. You would literally have workers dangling hundreds of feet from the ground on these harnesses. And they were sort of held up by a winch house on the top of the memorial, where these young boys would sort of lower and raise these workers as they dangle below the black hills. And they would sort of call out, pull me up, pull me down, pull me up, pull me down. And these, just like puppets, these young boys would sort of puppeteer these workers as they carried these massive machines to bump and to carve the memorial. It's an absolutely crazy process that worked, and remarkably, over the course of its 14 years, there was not a single death at Mount Rushmore. There were a couple people that were injured, but if you compare that to other massive work projects at that time, like the Hoover Dam, for example, which had many deaths, Mount Rushmore did not, and that's a testament to the kind of safety measures that Gunson and Borglem and his son, Lincoln Borglem implemented. Yes, for all its controversies, it really is an improbable, impressive feat really. And these are sort of 60 feet tall, is that right? These, these faces. The faces are 60 feet tall, yeah. And the original vision of Rushmore, the original models, and what Borglem had in mind, was not just to create faces, which is all we see today, but to create coat lapels more of the torso, he had designs to create a huge hall of records. Those never got built, but the faces themselves are 60 feet. So it's a long, arduous process. He's already alluded to it, that Borglem is sort of caught out by the length of this project and almost sort of Ham's Drone by his own ambition a bit. What's the end of the story for him? So Gunson Borglem, he never sees the memorial complete. He dies in Chicago in March 1941. He dies in Chicago, because he's on his way to Washington, DC to try to drum up more money for the memorial. He has these big plans to create what he calls a hall of records. It's really fascinating. He wanted to have a whole section of the mountain devoted to different Americans that couldn't make it on the mountain. He wanted to have smaller busts of important historical figures that had contributed to American history. He wanted to have the original documents of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence in the hall of records, and he needs money to do that. So he's on his way to Washington to try to drum up more money for his memorial. Gunson Borglem had surgery in Chicago for issues related to his prostate. While he was recovering from that surgery, he had blood clots that went into his lungs and he ended up dying from a pulmonary embolism in March of 1941. So he never got to see the end of the sculpting amount Rushmore. Although the sculpting amount Rushmore didn't last much longer. When he passed away, his son, Lincoln Borglem, took over the sculpting amount Rushmore and finished up the final touches of the memorial. But what's interesting is the memorial sort of emphasizes this as kind of a metaphor for the country that the memorial is not totally complete. I mean, if you visit it, you're going to see all this rubble that is at the base of the memorial right below the faces that was supposed to be removed, but they ran out of money to have that removed. And so the memorial likes to say just like the United States, Mount Rushmore is an unfinished product. That is something that needs to be thought of as an unfinished thing, not a totally finished, complete project. So that's where Gunson Borglem's story ends, but not where the story of Mount Rushmore ends. Absolutely. And I think an equally fascinating part of your book, if not more so than the construction of the monument itself, is how the memorial then tells the history of its conception and the land and so on. A figure who's really important to this part of the story in your book is Gerard Baker. I wonder if you could introduce him to our listeners. Yeah. So when I first went to Mount Rushmore, when I was, I'd just graduated from college and it was in the year 2000 and I visited Mount Rushmore, and at that time there was nothing at the memorial. It had just finished a huge construction project that took the most of the 1990s before that construction project. The memorial had been described to me as sort of like this quaint sculpture in the woods that you would just would stumble upon, but it was transformed to the 1990s. And it became sort of a national memorial with a lot of concrete and parking lots added to it. But when I visited there, there was nothing that sort of told the story of the people who had lived in the Black Hills for thousands of years before the memorial became an idea. So in other words, without any context, without any kind of pre-knowledge, you would just assume that the story of Mount Rushmore began with Guns and Borglem and the sculpting of these four faces. And what Gerard Baker did, Gerard Baker was the first Native American superintendent at Mount Rushmore and he arrived to the park in 2004 and he had had an illustrious career in the National Park Service. He was the highest ranking Native American to serve in the Park Service at the time and for every stop he made in his journey the National Park Service, he made it a priority to emphasize and tell the stories of the Native communities of that park. And that's what he did at Mount Rushmore. He introduced a Lakota heritage village just to the left of the sculpture. He hired Native American interpreters to tell the stories of their tribes, tell the histories of their communities. He hired hoop dancers and other cultural performers to perform on this grand amphitheater Mount Rushmore. And he began to shift the memorial into a direction that was more comprehensive in terms of the historical elements of Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills. I mean, it was controversial. There were a lot of people in the Black Hills that did not like what he was doing, but he persevered and the memorial is very different today because of him. And you look elsewhere in the book at how different events are commemorated and memorialized. You look at the battle of Little Big Horn, also known as Grease Gras, as you mentioned, the massacre at Wounded Knee. And you interrogate this story of what memorials tell. You say that geologically we look at the present in order to understand the past, we look at strata and the layers to see what happened before. Looking at Mount Rushmore today, what has that illuminated for you about what we should know about the past? Yeah, it's called the principle of uniformitarianism, the geologic principle that you're talking about. We're literally geologists look at the present to understand the past. And so, you know, when I started this book, I was very like, why is Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills? And just by asking that question, you're able to go back and understand the historical forces that led us to this moment today. And so I think what I am very interested in just generally speaking, what specifically with this book is that understanding how the past influences the present, but also how the present influences the past, and how we view the historical forces that have led to this moment, and how we view how we interpret those historical forces, right? And I think with memorials and monuments, what's so interesting to me about them is that even though the vast majority of them are built of concrete or bronze, these sort of elements that are not meant to be changed very easily, memorials themselves are not static. And how we think about them, how we view them changes over time, a great deal. And I think Mount Rushmore is the perfect example of that. I mean, how it was conceived first as an economic project and then became this huge political project. And now is kind of a lightning rod for how different Americans view the historical narratives of our country as something that very much interests me and it sort of really highlights not just the malleability of memorials and monuments, but how the present is so important to how the past is interpreted and thought of. Absolutely. As we're talking, it is 100 years since this particular memorial's first dedication. Can you take us a little bit closer to what conversations are happening now, be it conversations around the land ownership still, or will we see another face added to this memorial? So the land ownership question is really important. I'm not going to get into the legal minutia because there's been in 1920s, the Lakota introduced a series of land claims against the United States to be compensated for the theft of the Black Hills. And that was a many decades long process, which I describe a little bit in my book. But ultimately, what ended up happening was that in 1980, the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed a lower court decision that allowed the Lakota nation to be compensated for the theft of the Black Hills and said that the Treaty of Fort Laramie had indeed legally been broken and ordered the United States to pay the Lakota 102 million dollars in compensation. Now, the Lakota in 1980 did not want that money and that money has been sitting there for 45 years and has now accrued by most estimates to over a billion dollars. And so the Lakota could take a billion dollars in compensation for the land that was stolen, but they do not want the money. They want the land back. They want the political solution to this disagreement. And it's hard for me to imagine a scenario where the United States would give the land that was allotted to the Lakota in the 1868 treaty back to the tribe. I think I have a hard time imagining that taking place. But there are questions of whether there could be co-stourship of national lands, for example. What would co-stourship of Mount Rushmore look like? So those are the kinds of questions that are out there today. You know, the Lakota nation is not monolithic. There are many views within many different Lakota people, but there is a certain segment that is advocating for the land to be returned to the Lakota people. Now, in terms of the memorial itself, yeah, there is long been speculation about whether more faces can be added to Mount Rushmore. I mean, certainly in the context of today, the big question is, will Donald Trump be added to Mount Rushmore? And there was legislation that was introduced in 2025 to include him on Mount Rushmore. And, you know, that legislation has not been passed. And almost everyone that I've spoken to, that you read, is pretty adamant that there's no space on Mount Rushmore for another phase. What's clear is that it's a very live conversation. Your book arrives at a very pertinent time. Matt, thank you so much for sharing your expertise and your research with us today. Is there anything we haven't covered yet that you'd like to leave our listeners with? I just would love to leave listeners with a sense of the beauty of the Black Hills. I had not spent a lot of time there before I researched this. It's an incredible area. And Mount Rushmore, though it is controversial, I think, at its best, what it can allow us to do as an American, and perhaps more, if you're a foreign visitor as well, is to really consider the complications. You know, even though there are very complicated narratives to American history, that it's okay to embrace all that complication, you know, on that space, at that memorial. That's how history should be told, in my opinion, and to try to whitewash it or to decentralize the Lakota story in favour of just simply the American story, is not giving our history and the history of the Black Hills its full complicated do. That was Matthew Davis speaking to Alana Evans. His book is A Biography of a Mountain, the Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore.
