SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) – It was a historian’s idea: carve gigantic sculptures into the granite pinnacles of the Black Hills of South Dakota, significant Western figures like Lewis and Clark, Buffalo Bill Cody, Fremont, Red Cloud and Sacagawea.
“In the vicinity of Harney Peak … are opportunities for heroic sculpture of unusual character,” South Dakota Department of History Superintendent Doane Robinson wrote to a sculptor in Georgia in 1924.
The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, redefined the project entirely. Using jackhammers and dynamite, he began in 1927, first sculpting President George Washington, then Thomas Jefferson, followed by Abraham Lincoln and finally Theodore Roosevelt.
Next month, Mount Rushmore National Memorial marks 75 years of public pervasiveness, ending up in movies and comics and on quarter-dollar coins.
“Burglum told Robinson ‘You are not thinking big enough. Western figures? That’s not going to attract enough people. You need to think bigger,'” said Maureen McGee-Ballinger, the memorial’s chief of interpretation and education.