High in the Black Hills of South Dakota, on October 31, 1941, workers finally laid down their drills and dynamite for good. For fourteen years, a crew of about 400 miners, ranchers, and stoneworkers had dangled in leather harnesses off a granite cliff, blasting and chiseling four giant presidential faces into the mountainside. Each head stands roughly 60 feet tall - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, staring out over the prairie.
The project began in 1927, led by sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had a wild idea: turn an entire mountain into a monument. Workers used about 450,000 tons of dynamite to blast away the rough shapes, then switched to jackhammers and chisels for the fine details, like Lincoln's beard and Washington's nose. Borglum's son Lincoln took over after his father died in March 1941, and finished the job that same year. Not a single worker died during the carving, despite the dizzy heights and exploding rock.
Mount Rushmore was meant to celebrate American history and bring tourists to South Dakota, and it worked - today more than two million people visit each year. The mountain itself is sacred to the Lakota Sioux, who call the area the Six Grandfathers, and the carving remains controversial because of that history. Even so, the four stone faces have become one of the most recognizable sights on Earth, a reminder that humans sometimes try to carve their ideas straight into the planet.
