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Mount Rushmore National Memorial, near Keystone, South Dakota, is a United States Presidential Memorial that represents the first 150 years of the history of the United States of America with 60-foot (18 m) sculptures of the heads of former U.S. Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. The entire memorial covers 1,278 acres (5.17 km²), and is 5,725 feet (1,745 m) above sea level. It is managed by the National Park Service, a bureau of the United States Department of the Interior. The memorial attracts around 2 million people annually.

Known to the Lakota Sioux as Six Grandfathers, the mountain was renamed after Charles E. Rushmore, a prominent New York lawyer, during an expedition in 1885. At first, the project of carving Rushmore was undertaken to increase tourism in the Black Hills region of South Dakota. After long negotiations involving a Congressional delegation and President Calvin Coolidge, the project received Congressional approval. The carving started in 1927 and ended in 1941 with a few injuries and no deaths.

Controversy

Mount Rushmore is controversial among Native Americans because the United States seized the area from the Lakota tribe after the Black Hills War in 1876–77. The Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) had previously granted the Black Hills to the Lakota in perpetuity. The Lakota consider the hills to be sacred, although historians believe the Lakota also gained control of the hills by force, displacing the Cheyenne in 1776. Members of the American Indian Movement led an occupation of the monument in 1971, naming it "Mount Crazy Horse." Among the participants were young activists, grandparents, children and Lakota holy man John Fire Lame Deer, who planted a prayer staff atop the mountain. Lame Deer said the staff formed a symbolic shroud over the presidents' faces "which shall remain dirty until the treaties concerning the Black Hills are fulfilled."

The Monument remains controversial among Native Americans, even after the appointment of Gerard Baker, the first Native American superintendent of the park in 2004. The Crazy Horse Memorial is being constructed elsewhere in the Black Hills to commemorate a famous Native American leader and as a response to Mount Rushmore. It is intended to be larger than Mount Rushmore and has the support of Lakota chiefs; the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation has rejected offers of federal funds.

Ecology

The flora and fauna of Mount Rushmore are similar to those of the rest of the Black Hills region of South Dakota. Several birds like the turkey vulture, bald eagle, hawk, and meadowlark fly around Mount Rushmore, occasionally making nesting spots in the ledges of the mountain. Smaller birds, including songbirds, nuthatches, and woodpeckers, inhabit the surrounding pine forests. Terrestrial mammals include the mouse, chipmunk, squirrel, skunk, porcupine, raccoon, beaver, badger, coyote, bighorn sheep and bobcat. In addition, several species of frogs and snakes inhabit the region. The two brooks in the memorial, the Grizzly Bear and Starling Basin brooks, support fish like the longnose dace and the brook trout. Some endemic animals are not indigenous to the area; the mountain goats are descended from goats which were a gift from Canada to Custer State Park in 1924 but later escaped.

At lower elevations, coniferous trees, mainly the Ponderosa pine, surround most of the monument, providing shade from the sun. Other trees include the bur oak, the Black Hills spruce, and the cottonwood. Nine species of shrubs live near Mount Rushmore. There is also a wide variety of wildflowers, including especially the snapdragon, sunflower, and violet. Towards higher elevations, plant life becomes sparser. However, only approximately 5% of the plant species found in the Black Hills are indigenous to the region.

Though the area receives about 18 inches (460 mm) of precipitation on average per year, alone it is not enough to support the abundant animal and plant life. Trees and other plants help to control surface runoff. Dikes, seeps, and springs help to dam up water that is flowing downhill, providing watering spots for animals. In addition, stones like sandstone and limestone help to hold groundwater, creating aquifers.

Forest fires occur in the Ponderosa forests surrounding Mount Rushmore around every 27 years. This was determined from fire scars in tree core samples. These help to clean forest debris located on the ground. Large conflagrations are rare, but have occurred in the past.

Geology

Mount Rushmore is largely composed of granite. The memorial is carved on the northwest margin of the Harney Peak granite batholith in the Black Hills of South Dakota, so the geologic formations of the heart of the Black Hills region are also evident at Mount Rushmore. The batholith magma intruded into the pre-existing mica schist rocks during the Precambrian period about 1.6 billion years ago. However, the uneven cooling of the molten rock caused the formation of both fine and coarse-grained minerals, including quartz, feldspar, muscovite, and biotite. Fractures in the granite were sealed by pegmatite dikes. The light-colored streaks in the presidents' foreheads are due to these dikes.

The Black Hills granites were exposed to erosion during the late Precambrian, but were buried by sandstones and other sediments during the Cambrian Period. The area remained buried throughout the Paleozoic Era, but was exposed again to erosion during the tectonic uplift about 70 million years ago. The Black Hills area was uplifted as an elongated geologic dome which towered some 20,000 feet (6 km) above sea level, but erosion wore the area down to only 4,000 feet (1.2 km). The subsequent natural erosion of this mountain range allowed the carvings by stripping the granite of the overlying sediments and the softer adjacent schists. The contact between the granite and darker schist is viewable just below the sculpture of Washington.

Borglum selected Mount Rushmore as the site for several reasons. The rock of the mountain is composed of smooth, fine-grained granite. The durable granite erodes only 1 inch (2.5 cm) every 10,000 years, indicating that it was sturdy enough to support sculpting. In addition, it was the tallest mountain in the region, looming to a height of 5,725 feet (1,745 m) above sea level. Because the mountain faces the southeast, the workers also had the advantage of sunlight for most of the day.

Tourism

Tourism is South Dakota's second-largest industry, with Mount Rushmore being its number one tourist attraction. In 2004, over 2 million visitors traveled to the memorial.

The Lincoln Borglum Museum is located in the memorial. It features two 125-seat theaters that show a 13-minute movie about Mount Rushmore. One of the best viewpoints is located at Grandview Terrace, above the Museum. The Presidential Trail, a walking trail and boardwalk, starts at Grandview Terrace and winds through the Ponderosa pine forests to the Sculptor's Studio, providing close-up views of the memorial. The Sculptor's studio was built by Gutzon Borglum, and features discussion about the construction of the monument as well as the tools used. The amphitheater also has a 30-minute program at dusk that describes the construction of the memorial. Following that, the mountain is illuminated for two hours.

Appearances in popular culture

Because Mount Rushmore has large carved faces, its appearances in the media often include a replacement of one or more of the four presidents' faces with other people or characters.

• In Superman II, General Zod and his criminal partners use their superpowers to replace three of the carvings with their own faces and wipe out the fourth.
• The cover of Deep Purple's album, In Rock, is inspired by Mount Rushmore: it depicts the five members' faces instead of the four presidents.
• The cover of the February 1957 issue of MAD Magazine (Issue #31) depicts Mount Rushmore, but adds a fifth face: that of Alfred E. Neuman. The cover was later featured (in truncated form) as a MAD mini-poster in MAD Special #4 (1971), with the caption: "Where Have All The Statesmen Gone?". A preview of this poster graces the cover of the MAD Special.
• In a deleted scene from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, the monument is shown with the head of a female African-American president added.

Because the mountain is an important historical landmark, it is often used as a base for various action-themed movies and books. Mount Rushmore is featured in Team America: World Police as the Team America headquarters, where it was destroyed by Michael Moore's suicide bomb.

The memorial was famously used as the location of the final chase scene in Alfred Hitchcock's movie North by Northwest. However, it was not actually filmed at the monument, since permission to shoot an attempted killing on the face of a national monument was refused by the Park Service. Closeups were shot on a set.

In the Family Guy episode "North by North Quahog", Peter and Lois are chased down the monument by Mel Gibson after stealing a copy of his new movie, Passion of the Christ 2: Crucify This in a spoof of the chase scene from North by Northwest. Peter refers to one of the faces as "President Rushmore".

Beginning in 1975, Mount Rushmore has been referenced, featured and spoofed by the Muppets on over half a dozen separate occasions.

See also

• Crazy Horse Memorial, a nearby mountain carving of a Native American leader.

Notes and references

1. Mount Rushmore National Memorial. December 6 2005.60 SD Web Traveler, Inc. URL accessed on April 7 2006.
2. McGeveran, William A. Jr. et al (2004). The Word Almanac and Book of Facts 2004. New York: World Almanac Education Group, Inc. ISBN 0-88687-910-8.
3. ^ Mount Rushmore, South Dakota (November 1 2004). Peakbagger.com. URL accessed on March 13 2006.
4. ^ Mount Rushmore facts, National Park Service. Cite error: The named reference "NPSfacts" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
5. Belanger, Ian A. et al. Mt. Rushmore- presidents on the rocks. URL accessed on March 13 2006.
6. Matthew Glass, "Producing Patriotic Inspiration at Mount Rushmore," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 62, No. 2. (Summer, 1994), pp. 265-283.
7. First American Indian heads shrine to democracy, Indian Country Today. Accessed on April 3 2006
8. Nature & Science- Animals National Park Service. URL accessed on April 1 2006.
9. ^ Mount Rushmore- Flora and Fauna. American Park Network. URL accessed on March 16 2006. Cite error: The named reference "FloraFauna" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
10. Nature & Science- Mount Rushmore. National Park Service. URL accessed on March 13 2006.
11. Nature & Science- Groundwater. National Park Service. URL accessed on April 1 2006.
12. Nature & Science- Forests. National Park Service. URL accessed on April 1 2006.
13. ^ Geologic Activity. National Park Service.
14. Irvin, James R. Great Plains Gallery (2001). URL accessed on March 16 2006.
15. Carving History (October 2 2004). National Park Service.
16. Park Overview American Park Network. URL accessed on April 1 2006.
17. Cover of MAD #31 (February 1957), Doug Gilford's MAD Cover Site. URL accessed on December 5, 2006.
18. Cover of MAD Special #4 (1971), Dick Hanschette's MAD Site - Special Covers. URL accessed on December 6, 2006

Further reading

• The National Parks: Index 2001-2003. Washington: U.S. Department of the Interior.
• Taliaferro, John. Great White Fathers : The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore. New York : PublicAffairs, c2002. Puts the creation of the monument into a historical and cultural context.

External links

• Official Site
• The Making of Mount Rushmore
• Climate
• A Monumental Achievement
• Google Map Link
• Matthew Buckingham, The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year 502,002 C.E.

• IUCN Category V
• Abraham Lincoln
• Buildings and monuments honoring American Presidents
• George Washington
• Mountain monuments and memorials
• National Memorials of the United States
• Outdoor sculptures in the United States
• Rock formations in the United States
• Landmarks in South Dakota
• Theodore Roosevelt
• Thomas Jefferson
• 1941 works
• Registered Historic Places in South Dakota