Mount Rushmore National Memorial To Celebrate 75 Years

Above, the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

It is kind of funny that I should find a story about Mount Rushmore in South Dakota in a Japanese news website, but here it is.

The Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota will be celebrating its 75th anniversary next month. It opened on October 31, 1941.

According to Japan Today:

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. —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.

Back in 1990, when my daughter Amber was three, our family took a camping vacation to Mount Rushmore (we stayed at the Mount Rushmore KOA nearby where we were bused to the sculpture for its nightly lighting show). It is well worth a visit.

There are a lot of other attractions in the vicinity such as the Crazy Horse sculpture (now in progress), Deadwood (where Wild Bill Hickok was shot at the Saloon #10 and where he and Calamity Jane are buried), the 1880 Train and other places.

To read more, go here.