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Tongues in Granite Cheeks

By John Andrews

Mount Rushmore is a point of pride, a vacation destination and a vehicle for the nation’s humorists.

South Dakota Magazine celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2010. For much of the previous year, we discussed how to celebrate such a significant milestone in the publishing world. Ideas for special stories in each of the year’s six issues took shape in editorial meetings and blossomed as we gathered the information and photos. But as we neared press time on the first issue of our anniversary year, one detail seemed to be missing: We needed an impactful way to kick everything off, something that combined the state culture that the magazine had explored for nearly a quarter century and the celebratory energy that we felt in our offices and hoped to convey to our readership.

Someone mentioned that Mount Rushmore, perhaps the most iconic and recognizable image associated with South Dakota, had never appeared on the magazine’s cover. What if we could find a way to make it look like those four, stoic granite heads were celebrating with us?

We located a beautiful photo by Chad Coppess, then a photographer with the South Dakota Department of Tourism and today this magazine’s photo editor. With his permission, we decided to have some fun. Or so we thought.

Our graphic designer skillfully added colorful, conical party hats to the top of each head, embellished with festive, silver tinsel where each hat met a rocky forehead. Directly below George Washington, we added a huge banner that appeared to be fixed to the mountain itself that read,”Happy Birthday SD Magazine,” and below that, the one-liner,”By George, we made the cover.”

We delighted in our mockup and sent the issue off to print around Thanksgiving. Our January/February issue is designed to arrive in mailboxes a few days before Christmas so that subscribers who receive it as a gift can enjoy a new issue during the holidays. Staffers received an unexpected gift, however, when readers saw the cover.

Cartoonist Jeffrey Koterba drew this image of a Roosevelt-less Mount Rushmore during a government shutdown. He says the national memorial is a good vehicle for editorial cartoons because it is widely recognizable.

It was far from the magazine’s most controversial cover image. That goes to a friendly rattlesnake that slithered his way to the top of the list in the fall of 2002 and never again made an appearance in such a prominent position. (Honestly, we had no idea how many people have snake phobias!) But a few readers were upset that we had taken such liberties with the Shrine to Democracy. Some even thought we’d desecrated the national memorial, as if we’d truly traveled across the state and spraypainted birthday wishes onto the billion-year-old granite. We feared what might happen if those readers ever saw the iconic”backside of Mount Rushmore” postcard.

All jokes aside, when it came to Mount Rushmore we began to wonder if people thought all jokes should be set aside. Since the last piece of granite was chiseled away in 1941, the images of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln — locked into their stony gazes across the Black Hills — have slowly seeped into American popular culture. Their likenesses help sell cars, beer, toothpaste, shirts and hats. They show up on music albums, at theme parks, in Hollywood movies and newspapers — both in the comics section for pure entertainment and the opinion page as the vehicle for cartoonists who have something to say.

It seems, though, that Mount Rushmore has always had one foot in pop culture. Even when the memorial was still an idea inside state historian Doane Robinson’s mind, the motivation behind it was to draw tourists into the Black Hills. As roads began to improve in the 1920s, the Hills were already becoming a vacation destination for people longing for the cool mountain air and beautiful topography. But Robinson worried that it wasn’t enough.”Tourists soon get fed up on scenery unless it has something of special interest connected with it to make it impressive,” he said.

About the same time, he began reading reports of sculptor Gutzon Borglum’s massive undertaking east of Atlanta, Georgia, where he was attempting to carve Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and other heroes of the Southern Confederacy into Stone Mountain. It served as inspiration for Robinson, who began dreaming of historical figures carved into the Needles.

In December of 1923 Robinson wrote to Lorado Taft, considered one of America’s pre-eminent sculptors, to gauge his interest in such a grand project. When Taft demurred, Robinson turned to Borglum in August 1924. Borglum’s relationship with the committee behind the Stone Mountain project had become strained and he was looking for a way out. Intrigued by Robinson’s proposal, he came to the Black Hills the fall of 1924 to see the lay of the land.

Borglum believed whole-heartedly in American exceptionalism, once saying that the records of the American people and their achievement should be”built into, cut into, the crust of this earth so that those records would have to melt or by wind be worn to dust before the record could, as Lincoln said, ‘perish from the earth.'” He also believed in big art.”Volume, great mass, has a greater emotional effect upon the observer than quality of form. Quality of form affects the mind; volume shocks the nerve or soul centers and is emotional in its effect.”

In the Black Hills, he discovered the perfect natural canvas to accomplish both of those aims. After abandoning the idea of full-bodied likenesses in the Needles, he began work at Mount Rushmore, a granite uplift that had been named years earlier for New York lawyer Charles Rushmore.

An air of patriotism and national pride surrounded the memorial from its start. President Calvin Coolidge attended a dedication ceremony during the summer he spent vacationing in the Black Hills in 1927. President Franklin Roosevelt visited in 1936 as Thomas Jefferson’s head was unveiled and was awed by the undertaking.”I had had no conception until about ten minutes ago not only of its magnitude but of its permanent beauty and of its permanent importance,” Roosevelt said in impromptu remarks.

Among the most iconic and irreverent riffs on Mount Rushmore is the view from the “backside” of the mountain. It has appeared on postcards, T-shirts and commemorative plates.

Work concluded on Mount Rushmore in October of 1941 under the leadership of Borglum’s son, Lincoln, who took over after his father’s death earlier that year. In 1933, President Roosevelt had signed an executive order placing the memorial under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. That organization still serves as the guardian of Mount Rushmore, helping more than 2 million visitors each year learn about its history and trying to ensure that its image is not sullied.

Perhaps the earliest and most visible challenge came in 1958 when director Alfred Hitchcock planned to use Mount Rushmore in his thriller North by Northwest. The movie’s climactic scene featured Communist agents chasing stars Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint across the faces.

The National Park Service was worried about such a depiction from the beginning. Officials signed an agreement with film studio Metro-Goldwin-Mayer in which producers promised that no violent scenes would be filmed”near the sculpture [or] on the talus slopes below the sculpture,” or on any simulation or mockup.

Hitchcock was upset with the situation and considered pulling the movie. But when he and film crews arrived to shoot scenes on Sept. 16, 1958, there were no problems. The Park Service even granted MGM permission to take several still images of the memorial before they headed back to California. That led to controversy when Hitchcock filmed the famous chase scene against a backdrop that was created using those images.

Park Service officials argued that Hitchcock had violated their agreement and that audiences would believe those scenes had been staged on the actual memorial. They demanded the removal of a credit line acknowledging the cooperation of the Interior Department and the National Park Service in filming at Mount Rushmore. The feds sought further help from South Dakota Sen. Karl Mundt, who in 1939 had successfully pulled from distribution a government-produced film called The Plow that Broke the Plains because of its inaccurate portrayal of the Midwest and his home state.

By then, however, little could be done. The credit line was removed, and the scene remained. In a 1991 article by Todd Epp for South Dakota History, Nicole Swigart, a seasonal interpreter at Mount Rushmore, wondered what Borglum would have thought.”It’s just my opinion,” she said,”but Borglum probably would’ve liked how the memorial was shown in North by Northwest. He liked publicity.”

Cecelia Tichi, author of Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Places, says the Hitchcock episode likely began the era of satirical depictions of Mount Rushmore, however two years earlier, the cover of the February 1957 issue of MAD Magazine featured a smiling Alfred E. Neuman sculpted at the foot of Rushmore.

Once the Rushmore image was out, it became nearly impossible to police its every use. In 1970, the band Deep Purple released an album called Deep Purple in Rock, which included sleeve art depicting the five band members carved into the mountain in place of the presidents. A Colgate-Palmolive television commercial from 1995 used Theodore Roosevelt to sell toothpaste. Computer graphics showed Roosevelt breaking out in a toothy grin after his teeth had been power washed. That image transitioned to a man using Colgate toothpaste.

Marty Two Bulls rarely draws Mount Rushmore, but he turned to the four faces to help illustrate opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline in 2016. Two Bulls grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in editorial cartooning in 2021.

An episode of the Fox animated series Family Guy parodied the North by Northwest chase scene in 2005. A huge Lego Mount Rushmore stands at California’s Legoland, complete with a crew cleaning Washington’s left ear with a giant Lego Q-tip. One online retailer offers a Mount Rushmore dartboard (you’ll hit the bull’s-eye by firing a dart at the left corner of Jefferson’s mouth). Small replicas are offered on several websites that feature other figures in place of the presidents — stars of classic and modern horror films, Disney characters and the Golden Girls.

Closer to home, a logo of Custer’s Mt. Rushmore Brewing Company and Pounding Fathers restaurant features the four faces, plus an arm added to Washington and Lincoln. Both men are gripping a pint.

The image of Mount Rushmore appears today in ways that Robinson and Borglum likely never imagined. So how much is too much? Is there a line? What makes people care?

ìPeople are fickle,” says James Popovich, who served as Mount Rushmore’s chief of interpretation for 20 years before retiring in 2004.”Some will say it’s just in fun and others will say it degrades the memorial. There are thoughts on both sides, and you have to respect them.”

In his two decades at the memorial, Popovich saw incredible demand for Mount Rushmore imagery in advertising. That usage sometimes rubbed people the wrong way.”People want to use any kind of logo from a national park, or Mount Rushmore especially, because it’s such an iconic symbol of America,” he says.”They want to use them in advertising or in any way to attract people to their business. So people do feel really particular about making sure the memorial is protected and safe for everybody to see and to see it the way they think it should be.

ìThe park service people, I think they feel a little unhappy about it when they first see it, but even me, as I saw it over time, I began to recognize why people do it. It sells literature, T-shirts, cups and hats, and that’s what they’re in business for, too.”

The memorial has also become a favorite for cartoonists, whose riffs on Rushmore have appeared in newspapers and magazines for decades. Jeffrey Koterba is a nationally syndicated cartoonist. He grew up in Omaha and spent 31 years with the Omaha World-Herald, where he drew more than 12,000 cartoons. Today his work is distributed through Cagle Cartoons and appears in 700 to 800 newspapers worldwide. He says Mount Rushmore is a natural fit for cartoonists because it’s recognizable — a trait that he thinks is becoming rarer.”When I was first starting out in cartooning, you could reference a film or a book, and even if you hadn’t seen the film or read the book, you at least had some understating of what it was, and I could use that for a cartoon,” Koterba says.”But today, there aren’t that many things that are so quickly identifiable in American culture. To me, Mount Rushmore stands pretty much at the top of the list. Everyone knows what that is.”

A notable Rushmore cartoon of his was born out of the federal government shutdown in late 2018 and early 2019. Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln gaze at a blank space on the mountain where Roosevelt should be.”Teddy’s been furloughed,” Jefferson quips.

As Mount Rushmore gradually solidified its place in modern popular culture, cartoons became much more widespread, appearing in national publications like The Saturday Evening Post.

Koterba put a lot of thought into that cartoon — the recognizable image, the implications that a government shutdown could have on the memorial itself and his audience’s potential reaction.”It’s my job to look for an image, or something using very few words, to get the idea across in a fast way,” he says.”They say the average reader spends 7 seconds with a cartoon. I thought, ‘What is something we all recognize as a symbol of our country and is somewhat related to the government?’ And I thought it was funny. I am going for a joke, not just for the sake of the joke, but ultimately to make a point.”

And then there’s the art itself.”I chose Teddy because visually, where it landed seemed like a good place. You wouldn’t want to do either president on the end. It made it more glaring. And it’s my job to take the reader by surprise. You don’t expect to see that image missing one of the faces.”

Koterba’s cartoons have featured the Statue of Liberty, George Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War and the Mona Lisa. Locally, he’s drawn several cartoons featuring The Sower, a prominent sculpture atop the state capitol in Lincoln. He doesn’t recall any negative feedback in using those as vehicles. That could be because his audience is worldwide. Local readers may be more inclined to object with what they see as an unfit portrayal of a memorial or point of pride in their own backyard.

ìWhen I’m coming up with a cartoon idea, it’s coming from a good place with good intent, based in journalism, based in fact,” Koterba says.”Yes, it’s my opinion, but I’m basing my opinion on fact as I see it. If I’m setting out to make a point that I believe is a valid point, I have to make people think. How can I portray that in a cartoon and get you to think about something in a different way? I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind, just add my voice to the conversation.

ìI have respect for monuments and paintings and symbols and the American flag. It’s never my intent to rile people up,” he says.”But if it’s a symbol that people recognize and I can use it as a vehicle to make a point, then I think it’s fair game. I don’t see it as such a sacred thing that it is above being able to be used for satire or cartoons.”

Maybe it’s true that Borglum — ever the publicity seeker — would delight in the universal access to his grand creation that the 21st century allows, and that millions of people around the world can see it in periodicals, on television, in movies and on the internet, portrayed both solemnly and respectfully and occasionally with tongue planted firmly in cheek. He might even think it’s worth celebrating.

Where are the party hats?

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Doane’s Favorite Places

By Paul Higbee

Doane Robinson began his career in law, but eventually he became a poet, writer, publisher and state historian.

It’s an eight-minute walk in Pierre from Doane Robinson’s former home on Wynoka Street to the state capitol building, where he once had an office. Eight minutes, that is, if you walk with a sense of purpose.

And it is impossible to think of Doane Robinson ever moving without a sense of purpose. In the early days of South Dakota statehood he was South Dakota’s idea man, and he ranks among our most prolific writers. Usually men of letters leave behind books, and men with big ideas leave thinking that spurs others into action over time. Certainly Robinson’s legacy includes books and inspiration, but he also left South Dakota beautiful buildings at Gary, Pierre and Hisega, as well as a solid foundation for a department of state government. Oh yes … there’s also that sculpture of four presidential heads blasted from mountain granite near Keystone.

Robinson’s grandson, Will Doane Robinson, a retired teacher in Rapid City, remembers long walks along Wynoka and beyond with his grandfather in the 1930s.”A very, very nice man,” he describes him, and other neighborhood children concurred, often tagging along on walks. At the time they had no real idea of who their older friend was. Professionally Doane Robinson was a homesteader, teacher, lawyer, poet, editor and South Dakota’s first state historian. In his personal life he was a devoted family man who was widowed young. In his spare time he sometimes tinkered trying to invent a perpetual motion machine.

Born into a farm family near Sparta, Wisconsin in 1856, he was christened Jonah LeRoy Robinson. Two childhood incidents impacted the rest of his life. First, younger sister Sadie couldn’t pronounce Jonah and called him Donah, later shortened to Doane. He answered to the name the rest of his life. The second event, says great-granddaughter Vicki McLain, was much darker. Typhoid fever hit his family. No one died, but the family struggled for years to pay medical bills, keeping them in poverty for most of Doane’s childhood. Forever after, Robinson believed debt had to be avoided if at all possible.

He possessed an amazing memory, claiming he could recall incidents that happened before age 2, and maybe even before age 1. Robinson seemed strangely attuned to history-in-the-making. He remembered his parents discussing news that Abraham Lincoln had been elected president the month after Robinson turned 4. His parents were Democrats and he recalled they were unimpressed with the Republican Lincoln. Later he heard talk of distant fighting as the Civil War played out, and Robinson remembered news of Lincoln’s assassination — his mother worried Democrats would take the blame. Much later Robinson decided”in some ways the truth about Lincoln had been withheld from me,” and he committed himself to reading political theory. He became a Republican but, he wrote,”will give my support to another party any minute I am convinced that the sum of happiness will be enhanced by it.”

During his teens he worked hard on the farm, was able to run the place on his own in the event of family emergencies, and he worked equally hard in school where he honed his love of words. In his early 20s he taught school, homesteaded near his brother’s place in Minnesota, and began studying law at the University of Wisconsin. All the while he fretted about Jennie Austin, a Wisconsin girl he greatly admired and found beautiful, but who was a teenager too young for him.

Robinson fell in love with a spot he saw while traveling on the Crouch railroad line. He named it Hisega, and soon build a lodge there featuring a wraparound porch. Photo by Paul Horsted

Of course, Jennie matured. She became a teacher herself. The two decided their affection was mutual in 1883, the same year Robinson got serious about finding legal work in western Minnesota or across the border in Dakota Territory. He hadn’t earned a law degree but had learned enough to feel confident he could offer quality legal services — not an unusual course of action at the time. He considered setting himself up in Ortonville, Minnesota, but didn’t like the town. Then he visited Watertown”and made up my mind I had found the place I was looking for.” He opened a Watertown law office in September of 1883.

Months later he bought one-third interest in the Watertown Daily Courier.”The law is a jealous mistress and must come before anything else in your life,” Robinson would one day counsel his son Will, an attorney. By buying into the newspaper and, in fact, becoming its editor, Robinson demonstrated an unwillingness to focus on the law alone. The result, he decided later, was failing to be”much shucks” as a lawyer.

In December of 1884, Watertown’s young lawyer and editor rode the rails to Wisconsin to marry Jennie. Then the couple came home to Dakota Territory. Son Harry was born in 1888, and Will came along in 1893. In those years Robinson learned he could supplement his family’s income nicely by selling poetry to magazines across the country. He actually attracted a national following. The Boston Herald noted that”perhaps no one of the younger poets of America has so quickly established himself in the hearts of the common people.” Robinson came to know South Dakota in part because of requests to travel from town to town and recite his verse. His dialect poetry, recreating the speech patterns of the state’s immigrants, often for humorous effect, was well received. He also toured other Midwestern states. Even after he became state historian, Robinson remained a poet, and found he could sometimes combine verse and historical interpretation. An example is this poem about W.H.H. Beadle, Civil War veteran and pioneering educator who championed South Dakota School and Public Lands for generating public education funds:

Man of vision! Man of mission,

Patriot, soldier, scholar, seer.

Man of action! Man of purpose! Duty led

in thy career.

Forward looking; self forgetting; unwaged

drudge for learning’s gain;

South Dakota reaps the harvest planted by

thy care and pain.

In 1894 he moved his young family to Gary, a railroad town in Deuel County, close to the Minnesota border. He bought the Gary Interstate newspaper.”Getting out an edition of the eight page newspaper was frequently a family affair,” son Will recalled in an excellent little biography of his father.”The press was an old Washington hand press.” Jennie positioned the newsprint in the press and Doane swung a big lever to apply pressure and make the imprint. At age 6 Harry removed the finished newspapers from the press and stacked them.

After the town of Gary lost its status as the seat of Deuel County, Robinson urged the state to locate the School for the Blind there. Today the campus is the Buffalo Ridge Resort and Business Center.

The year after the Robinsons moved to town, Gary lost county seat status to Clear Lake. But the new newspaper publisher had an idea: Why not lobby the state to build a School for the Blind on the former courthouse grounds? Robinson did some research and determined it cost South Dakota $2,000 per student, every year, to send children with visual impairments to out-of-state institutions, in the era when it was assumed students with disabilities learned best in segregated environments. Robinson’s idea won statewide support and ground was broken in 1899. Students arrived in 1900. Vicki McLain thinks perhaps there was more to her great-grandfather’s passion for the school than commerce for Gary.”When he was studying law in Wisconsin,” she says,”he temporarily lost sight, apparently because of severe eye strain. He recovered but never took eyesight for granted.”

Over the next several years the school evolved into a pretty campus a couple blocks north of Gary’s business district. Services moved to Aberdeen in 1961 and the campus fell into disrepair, but more than 40 years later Joe Kolbach completed a beautiful restoration, creating Buffalo Ridge Resort.

Even as he was publishing the Interstate and advocating for the school, Robinson nursed a pet project, one he believed in so much that he was willing to sometimes serve as an”unpaid drudge,” to borrow a phrase from his Beadle poem. The idea was a magazine, the Monthly South Dakotan, that would heavily emphasize the young state’s history. Issues were produced over a period of several years and wherever Robinson moved, the magazine went with him. The Robinsons moved to Yankton where he bought controlling interest in a morning paper, The Gazette, and then it was on to Sioux Falls where Robinson hoped to find more ad revenue for the Monthly South Dakotan. Next the family made Aberdeen its home, and Robinson published the Brown County Review.

ìHe had a thousand irons in the fire,” Will wrote. As for the Monthly South Dakotan, he added, it claimed a loyal readership willing to pay for subscriptions, but ad revenue constantly fell short. The publication folded in 1904, and by that time Robinson’s life had changed drastically. In 1901 he was selected Secretary of the new South Dakota State Historical Society, a branch of state government. Now he had the opportunity to publish articles of the sort he prepared for the Monthly South Dakotan, but at state expense. After a few years in the position his income would allow for a very comfortable lifestyle. It should have been a happy time, but in 1902 Jennie died of acute bronchitis. Who else but Robinson, with his head for historical dates, would note that Jennie died 19 years to the day after she and Doane decided they were in love?

Robinson advocated for the stately Soldiers and Sailors Memorial in Pierre after World War I. It once housed the state’s history museum. Photo by Chad Coppess/S.D. Tourism

ìOh, my dear boys,” Robinson later wrote his sons,”I can never tell you how dearly I loved your Mama, not only those nineteen years, but long before, and every moment since.” He was 45 and never remarried.

Sadie, the sister who gave him his name, moved in to help run the household. The family relocated to Pierre and Robinson arranged for construction of the home on Wynoka Street. Future governor and U.S. senator Peter Norbeck would be a neighbor on Wynoka, and became Robinson’s good friend and ally.

Robinson perhaps occasionally lost himself in work as he grieved Jennie. He helped plan the state capitol building and wrote 1905’s Brief History of South Dakota, more commonly called”the little red history book,” which for decades was the standard volume schools used to teach about South Dakota’s past. Most important, though, Robinson got the State Historical Society off to a strong start, publishing the first volumes of South Dakota Historical Collections, the biennial series of papers that most every South Dakota historian has referenced.

ìHis was the foundation we’ve built on ever since,” says Jay Vogt, current State Historical Society director.”In his time, he was much more hands-on than we’re able to be, doing most of the research and writing himself.”

Indeed, when something big developed, such as the discovery of the Verendrye plate that proved French trappers passed through the state in 1743, Robinson jumped into action and researched, wrote and edited until he had 300 pages for Historical Collections. He also gathered South Dakota newspapers and indexed them, along with government documents, and he took special interest in seeking out American Indian historical perspectives. He considered it a great honor, before his state historian years, to have interviewed Hunkpapa leader Gall, one of the victors at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

While no one ever questioned Robinson’s work ethic, he has sometimes been criticized for not being an academically trained historian.

ìBut you have to put that criticism in context,” says Vogt.”At that time, in all states, history organizations were kind of amateur clubs, made up of people who had interest and maybe connections to historical sources. Doane Robinson brought a wide range of professional experiences to his work, and he possessed great curiosity.”

For many years his office was on the capitol building’s ground floor, along with a little museum. When the legislature was in session, lawmakers knew the state’s best writer was close at hand if they struggled with a bill’s wording.

After railroad tracks spanned the Missouri River and were extended west to Rapid City in 1907, Robinson had easy access to the Black Hills for the first time. The region offered intriguing history, and it was a perfect place to relax. In 1908 Robinson arranged a camping adventure for 17 friends, relatives and Pierre colleagues. The party stepped off the Crouch Line train in a beautiful canyon west of Rapid City and pitched tents. Robinson loved making up words and announced he would call the spot Hisega, a name derived from the initials of six women in the group: Helen, Ida, Sadie, Ethel, Grace and Ada. Everyone loved the place, talked it up back in Pierre, and Robinson devised a time-share scheme. If enough people contributed $100, he would build a mountain lodge for them at Hisega. The big structure with wrap-around porches awaited visitors the next summer, and it still greets guests today.

A building of an entirely different style that stands as a Doane Robinson legacy is the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial, down the front steps and immediately across the street from the state capitol. Robinson pushed for the building after World War I, and it took more than a decade to raise funds and get the stately memorial finished. In addition to honoring South Dakotans who served and died in military service, the building housed the state’s history museum for many years and was usually referred to as the Robinson Museum.

Robinson dreamed of carving into Black Hills mountains. Newspapermen called the idea ridiculous, but Robinson partnered with Gutzon Borglum and history was made. Photo by S.D. Tourism

Of course, when it comes to tangible legacies, nothing tops Mount Rushmore Memorial.”My grandfather thought the Black Hills were beautiful, but that not enough people would visit just because of that,” says Will D. Robinson.”There had to be some other reason. I can show you the spot on the Needles Highway where his Model T Ford touring sedan got hot one day, and he sent my dad to bring water from a spring. When my dad got back to the car, my grandfather was looking at the Needles, thinking how they could be carved by a sculptor.”

That was 1923. Robinson talked to people who might help, especially Senator Norbeck, and sometimes took heat from South Dakota newspaper editors who considered the scheme ridiculous. But in short order internationally renowned sculptor Gutzon Borglum was on board and in 1927, as Robinson looked on, President Calvin Coolidge was present for a ceremony launching the project. Only the location wasn’t the Needles but nearby Mount Rushmore because, Robinson’s grandson understood, the Needles spires contained too much feldspar and Borglum didn’t want to alter that stunning piece of God’s handiwork.

Borglum also didn’t want to carve figures related to the American West, as Robinson proposed, but instead presidents. In Borglum, Robinson met a man whose vast vision matched his own. In another way, though, the men were polar opposites. Borglum liked to move ahead without much thought about costs, while Robinson insisted on budgetary constraint. As an executive of the original association formed to oversee Mount Rushmore’s creation, it fell to Robinson to confront the sculptor at times about spending. He was happy to pretty much leave the project in 1929, content in knowing his role as instigator had been successful. Robinson was back at the mountain on July 4, 1930, as a speaker when the Washington head was dedicated. He was 73 and had retired as State Historical Society Secretary six years earlier.

In the 1930s Robinson had more time for his walks and young friends on Wynoka Street, and he kept writing. Unlike Borglum and Norbeck, he lived long enough to see Mount Rushmore in its final form. He also saw his son Will become head of the State Historical Society in 1946. Doane Robinson lived a few weeks past his 90th birthday and his grandson recalls his mind and memories were as sharp as ever toward the end. He had witnessed America’s evolution from Abraham Lincoln to the atomic age. No one observed South Dakota’s first half century more intently.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Slight of Hand

By John Andrews

Luigi Del Bianco, an Italian stone carver from New York, served as chief carver on Mount Rushmore. After years of lobbying by the Del Bianco family, Luigi was honored on Sept. 16 with his own plaque at the national monument.

Editor’s Note: Luigi Del Bianco, chief carver on Mount Rushmore, was officially honored for his work on the monument with a special ceremony and the unveiling of a plaque on Sept. 16. Here is our story about Del Bianco and his grandson Lou, who worked for years on his family’s behalf to ensure that Luigi was recognized for his important role in creating the national monument. The story is revised from our May/June 2014 issue. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

In 1985 Rex Alan Smith published The Carving of Mount Rushmore, considered by many Rushmore researchers to be the definitive account of how perhaps the greatest sculpture in the world emerged from Black Hills granite. Smith expertly details the struggles between temperamental sculptor Gutzon Borglum and the Mount Rushmore Memorial Commission, which oversaw the project. There are stories from the men who worked on the mountaintop and the boosters who navigated Mount Rushmore through its darkest days, knowing it would transform South Dakota forever.

Nowhere in the book’s 416 pages of narrative, photographs, bibliography and index will you read the name Luigi Del Bianco, a classically trained Italian artist specifically recruited by Borglum to be the monument’s chief carver from 1933 to 1940. When Del Bianco’s son Caesar and grandson Lou read Smith’s book, hoping to learn more about Luigi’s contributions to the memorial, they were astonished to find nothing.”He was really the artist who brought the faces to life,” Lou Del Bianco says.”The workers did a wonderful job roughing them out, but you need an artist to bring out the emotion in the faces, and that’s what my grandfather did.

“It’s like leaving Joe DiMaggio out of a book about the New York Yankees. It’s like he wasn’t even there.”

So the Del Bianco family embarked upon a mission to give their patriarch the recognition they believe he deserves for helping create one of the world’s most familiar monuments. Their quest has taken them to Mount Rushmore, on several trips to the Library of Congress and up the ladder of the National Park Service, seeking to change years of firmly held policies regarding how the men who made Rushmore are credited — all to little or no avail. After 25 years of lobbying, it leads to one question: Was Luigi Del Bianco just another laborer on the mountain, as his absence in the book suggests, or should he be credited as the man who brought Mount Rushmore to life?

Lou Del Bianco was 6 years old when his grandfather died of silicosis, a deadly lung disease contracted after decades of inhaling microscopic particles of silica sent airborne as he carved stone. It’s especially cruel that a man’s lifelong avocation and passion would eventually cause his death. When Luigi Del Bianco was born in tiny Meduno, Italy in 1892, it seems he was destined to carve stone. A family story says that as a boy Del Bianco made a small dog from a piece of wood. His father, also a carver, was so impressed that he sent his son to a school in Austria that offered general studies and special courses in stone carving.

Del Bianco patched a portion of Jefferson’s lip when workers encountered a dark strip of feldspar.

Del Bianco stayed in Austria as an apprentice after graduation and spent time studying classical art and architecture in Venice before immigrating to the United States. He had been born into a long line of carvers, and he had many cousins working in a quarry in Barre, Vermont. He joined them in 1909, but returned to Italy to fight with the Italian Army in World War I. Del Bianco immigrated to America permanently in 1920.

As he toiled in the Vermont quarries, he became friends with another stonecutter named Alfonso Scafa from Port Chester, New York. Scafa had cut stone for Gutzon Borglum, who had a studio in nearby Stamford, Connecticut.”You should meet Borglum,” Scafa told Del Bianco,”because you have a lot of talent.”

The two artists were introduced and forged a lifelong friendship. Del Bianco moved to Port Chester, and after meeting and marrying Scafa’s sister-in-law, Borglum offered to house the newlyweds for a year in the honeymoon cottage on his estate.

Del Bianco began a monument company in Port Chester, but he also developed a working relationship with Borglum that lasted 20 years.”They argued quite a bit, but it was part of their relationship,” Lou Del Bianco says.”They had great mutual respect for one another, and in the end they loved each other.”

The artists worked together on the Wars of America memorial, a huge bronze in Newark, New Jersey, that honors the country’s war dead. Because of Del Bianco’s well-defined Roman facial features, Borglum used him as a model for 20 of the 42 human figures depicted in the piece.

Borglum also brought Del Bianco to Georgia to work on Stone Mountain. The project on the outskirts of Atlanta was supposed to be Borglum’s crowning achievement. In 1915 the United Daughters of the Confederacy asked Borglum to carve a likeness of Gen. Robert E. Lee into the face of the granite uplift. It may have seemed an impossible notion, but the idea suited Borglum perfectly. He believed that American art should be,”built into, cut into, the crust of this earth so that those records would have to melt or by wind be worn to dust before the record could, as Lincoln said, ‘perish from the earth.'”

Del Bianco carved Lincoln’s eyes with a clever trick that Gutzon Borglum knew would give them life.

Borglum had an even grander vision for Stone Mountain, and planned an elaborate carving of Lee with a column of Confederate soldiers. Work began in 1923, but constant disagreements between Borglum and the Stone Mountain Association combined with a lack of funds led the artist to leave the project in 1925. Fortunately for Borglum — and eventually for Del Bianco — Doane Robinson had already contacted the artist about a new project in the Black Hills.

Robinson, South Dakota’s state historian, wanted something that would bring people to the Hills. He envisioned full-length likenesses of the country’s founding fathers carved into granite spires called the Needles. Robinson was aware of Borglum’s work at Stone Mountain and invited the artist to scout locations in the Black Hills.

After a few visits Borglum abandoned the idea of carving on the Needles and settled instead on the granite of Mount Rushmore. He fashioned a scale model of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln and devised a method to transfer its measurements to the mountaintop. With a skeleton crew of fewer than two-dozen men, the first bits of granite were removed in October 1927.

Work progressed slowly until 1929 when Borglum hired a crew of former miners to help rough out the heads. Rex Alan Smith described what a visitor to Mount Rushmore in 1930 would have seen:”you can tell that it is supposed to be Washington, but the face is heavy-featured and lumpish and the eyes are not yet alive, nor the mouth. It appears that way to others, too, and as [Congressman] William Williamson has just noted in his diary, ‘It lacks expression. It is little more than an image in its present state. Power is lacking.'”

Borglum knew it too.”Somebody has to put life and expression into carved faces,” he said.”That’s why more good mechanics don’t turn out to be good sculptors.” He needed someone who understood the art of stone carving and could make the granite faces seem to gaze over the landscape. He thought he found the right man in Hugo Villa, another Italian sculptor who had assisted Borglum in Connecticut. But Villa soon became one of many men who resigned over wage disputes during the 14-year project.

In 1933 Borglum offered the chief carver’s job to Del Bianco.”It was something only an artist could do,” Lou Del Bianco says.”A lot of the other workers were involved in rough cutting the features, but the chief carver brought refinement of expression. There was only one chief carver on the whole work, and that was Luigi.”

Del Bianco helped transfer measurements from Gutzon Borglum’s model to the mountaintop.

Borglum was convinced Del Bianco was the man for the job.”Bianco has all of Villa’s ability plus power, honesty and dependability,” he wrote to the Mount Rushmore commission.”We could double our progress if we could have two like Bianco. Now I have decided we must keep Bianco and keep him happy. If he were working for me I would pay him eleven or twelve dollars. I want him to receive a dollar an hour. You may charge me with the difference. The help he is, the ability to understand is worth much more to the work.”

Del Bianco spent eight seasons working on Mount Rushmore. In 1935 he moved his entire family — which included wife Nicoletta and sons Silvio, Vincent and Caesar — to a cabin in Keystone with mixed results.”My grandmother did not like living out there, being uprooted from her New York family and friends,” Lou Del Bianco says.”Culturally it was a shock to her. She was always frustrated because they had no Italian ingredients for her meals. But the people were always very accommodating and thoughtful.”

The boys — especially Vincent — adapted to life in South Dakota quite well. They rode horses, swam in Battle Creek, attended a one-room school with the children of other Rushmore workers and became friends with Native Americans. For the rest of his life, Vincent proudly displayed the scar on his thumb, evidence that he had become blood brothers with an Indian boy.”He had wonderful memories of living how he supposed people had lived in pioneer days. He did not want to come back to New York.”

Nevertheless, when the 1935 season concluded, the Del Bianco family returned to New York and Luigi alone came every summer through 1940, staying at a small boarding house near the foot of Mount Rushmore. He worked on refining the Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln heads and quickly gained Borglum’s trust.”He is worth any three men I could find in America,” Borglum wrote.”He entirely out-classed everyone on the hill, and his knowledge was an embarrassment to their amateur efforts and lack of knowledge, lack of experience and lack of judgment. He is the only man besides myself who has been on the work who knows the problems and how to instantly solve them.”

Del Bianco’s problem-solving abilities were challenged when workers roughing out the Jefferson head encountered a dark strip of feldspar on the upper lip. Left untreated, millions of future visitors would get the impression that Jefferson had a cold sore. Del Bianco instructed the men to cut out the dark stone. Then he used a piece of granite from the rubble pile below the carving and shaped it to fit the space. Today the repair is hardly detectable, even to the maintenance crews that regularly inspect the heads.

Perhaps Del Bianco’s greatest contribution, and a point of pride until the day he died in 1969, was carving Lincoln’s eyes. Borglum put great thought into making Lincoln’s eyes as lifelike as possible.”Constantly sketching in a notebook whose tooled leather covers were worn by time and use, he studied the Lincoln head in the angled light of dawn, the brightness of midday, the shadows of evening,” Smith wrote.”He studied it from viewpoints in the canyon, Mount Doane, and the tramway cage. He viewed it from his studio window and, as ideas and inspirations came to him, he telephoned instructions from there to Lincoln Borglum on the mountain or even directly to carvers on the Lincoln head. Much of this time and study he devoted to Lincoln’s eyes and to the special method by which he was to give them, as well as those of Rushmore’s other figures, a lifelike quality rarely seen in sculpture.”

Del Bianco returned often to his home in Italy to visit family, including cousin Luigia Del Bianco.

Borglum’s plan was to carve each pupil several feet across and deep enough to always be shadowed. In the middle, he left a rectangular shaft of granite. Their tips catch the sunlight, and from a distance provide sparkle to Lincoln’s eyes.

Borglum relied on Del Bianco to carry out the vision.”I could only see from this far what I was doing, but the eye of Lincoln had to look just right from many miles distant,” Luigi told an interviewer in 1966.”I know every line and ridge, each small bump and all the details of that head so well.”

Borglum’s intent for Mount Rushmore was to carve the figures to the waist, but plans changed upon his death in 1941. Money was again scarce and it seemed ever more likely that the United States would enter World War II. That summer work on Rushmore stopped for good, and the 400 men who helped create it slipped into obscurity.”There was public recognition of the leaders,” Rex Alan Smith wrote.”Borglum was made a national figure because of his Rushmore work, and he knew that so long as the monument should endure, he would be immortalized as its sculptor. [Sen. Peter] Norbeck, [John] Boland, and the others also received public credit while the work was going on, and knew, as well, that their names would be indelibly written in its history. Rushmore’s workmen, on the other hand, were anonymous. The newspapers did not know their names, nor would the monument’s future viewers. They were Rushmore’s unknown soldiers, and they knew it.”

After Mount Rushmore, Luigi Del Bianco returned to Port Chester. He carved over 500 headstones that still stand in cemeteries in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. He also created art; mostly busts and human figures that today belong to his descendants and private collectors. A permanent exhibit of his work is housed in the Italian American Museum in New York’s Little Italy. He spoke rarely about working on Rushmore, and after his death his family knew few details. His only grandson and namesake first discovered the connection when he found an old Mount Rushmore brochure that belonged to Luigi.”I was such a shy kid but I wanted right away to tell my second grade class about it,” Lou Del Bianco says.”I combed through the pages looking for him and couldn’t find him. I just wanted to find his face or an image of him at the mountain, and he wasn’t there.”

As Washington’s face emerged from the mountain, observers noted that it lacked expression. “It is little more than an image in its present state,” said Congressman William Williamson. “Power is lacking.”

His grandfather’s role at Mount Rushmore was little more than a conversation starter until Lou was in his 20s and began talking to his uncle Caesar, who wanted to know more about what his father had done. That’s when they discovered Smith’s book — with its emphasis on former miners and no mention of Luigi.”That really raised a red flag with us,” Lou says.”That’s only part of the story. They had to be trained, had to be instructed. And it wasn’t only Gutzon Borglum, but my grandfather was also a main teacher of these men.”

They traveled to Mount Rushmore in 1988, but found nothing in records housed at the memorial. Then they met Howard Shaff, who had recently finished his biography of Gutzon Borglum called Six Wars at a Time. Shaff directed the Del Biancos to the Library of Congress, which houses Borglum’s papers. As they dug through the folders, finding letters written by Borglum praising Luigi, they gained a clearer picture of his importance to Rushmore.”He wasn’t just the chief carver,” Lou says.”He was vital to the work. When Luigi would quit over wages, Borglum would say that all work has to stop.”

Luigi’s daughter Gloria attended Mount Rushmore’s 50th anniversary celebration in 1991 and met George Rumple, who started on the monument in 1932 and was a foreman when work ended.”He was not only a stone carver, he was a genius,” Rumple said of Del Bianco.”He was one of the top men. I think he could have taken Mr. Borglum’s place and completed the monument himself.” Now the Del Bianco family was beginning to realize how important Luigi was to the creation of Mount Rushmore. They just had to share it with the world.

Every year, roughly 2 million people stroll up the Avenue of Flags toward perhaps the greatest sculpture in the world. On the way they pass a shiny stone slab on which are etched the names of 395 people who worked on Mount Rushmore. Luigi Del Bianco’s name is in the second column, 13th from the top. It’s in accordance with National Park Service policy.

“We try to recognize all the different workers on the monument,” says Maureen McGee-Ballinger, chief of interpretation at Mount Rushmore.”Mr. Del Bianco had significant contributions, as did William Tallman and Lincoln Borglum. There were many people involved in the sculpture, and if you think about it, 90 percent of the work was done with dynamite. So the people who drilled the holes and placed the dynamite were also significant workers.”

Lou Del Bianco offers an expected and politically correct response:”I respectfully and stridently disagree with policy, and I hope to change it.” He becomes more passionate as he explains his family’s position.”My biggest argument is that you have to stop calling him a worker,” he says.”He was a classically trained artist that Borglum brought in. For the past 25 years they’ve basically said that they just don’t give one worker credit over the others. So a gentleman considered a worker who ran the elevator tram that hauled supplies to the top of the mountain is being put into the same category as my grandfather, and that to me is just not right.”

Lou Del Bianco created a one-man show about his grandfather’s time working on Mount Rushmore, which he performed at the monument during the summer of 2011.

At the same time, Del Bianco doesn’t want to give the impression that he’s trying to overshadow Borglum.”As much as I know my grandfather was a big part of Mount Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum was the vision,” he says.”He’s the reason there is a Mount Rushmore. My grandfather idolized him.”

Luigi Del Bianco still looked up to the man he called”the master” even in old age.”It was a sad, sad day when my master died,” Del Bianco said in 1966.”The world lost a great genius.”

Still, Lou Del Bianco thought he might be making headway in 2011. He works as a storyteller, creating shows for elementary school audiences around the Northeast. He wrote a one-man show about his grandfather called”In the Shadow of the Mountain” and spent a day performing it at Mount Rushmore.”There was a very palpable response from tourists and even the rangers,” he says.”They’d come up afterward and say they had no idea. They would go over to the big plaque with the workers’ names and point him out. They all promised they would talk about him more in their walking tours. I really felt like we were making some headway, but that all just shut down. The Mount Rushmore people have all been cordial and very polite to me, but they are holding fast to their policy that there’s no ‘I’ in team.”

Despite the setback, Del Bianco won’t quit because he can sense support from his grandfather.”I think he’d be thrilled,” he says.”And I think I figured that out at Mount Rushmore the day before my performance. I went to the sculptor’s studio where he worked with Borglum measuring points and talking. Borglum talked to my grandfather all the time to bounce ideas off him. All the tourists were milling around, and there’s a giant window toward the monument next to the models. I looked up at the faces and realized, ‘I’m really here. I’m going to do this show, and I’m going to bring him to life.’ And for a second I saw him up there on a scaffold, nodding his head and saying, ‘Thank you.’ I just lost it. I broke down and cried. It was a huge release of tension. I felt like I got my answer from him.”

Interest in Luigi’s story is accelerating. Lou Del Bianco wrote a screenplay that he is currently shopping and a book about Luigi is scheduled for release in 2014. Mount Rushmore’s Joe DiMaggio may finally get his due.

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Pennington Revisited

By John Andrews

Ten years ago, Jerry Wilson, the former managing editor of South Dakota Magazine, wrote an article about the incredible geographic diversity found in Pennington County. Its western edge begins in the heart of the Black Hills. As you travel east, the second largest city in South Dakota — Rapid City — sprawls along the eastern foothills. The landscape gradually gives way to ranch country, the Badlands, the Buffalo Gap National Grassland and the Lakota culture of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which sits directly across Pennington’s southeastern boundary.

We last visited Pennington County several months ago for a family vacation, and you’ll not be surprised to learn that all of those characteristics remain true. The Badlands haven’t disappeared and the Black Hills are still there, though there have been some monumental changes since the county was created in 1875. In its 142 years, Pennington County has become South Dakota’s prime tourist destination, with millions of travelers making plans to visit every year.

Badlands National Park protects over 240,000 acres of rugged landscape that spills into Pennington County.

Tourism likely wasn’t on the minds of territorial legislators when they created Pennington, Lawrence and Custer counties in one fell swoop, but current governor and county namesake John Pennington saw the move as way to help his friends and line his pockets. The governor named several of his closest allies in Yankton to lead offices in the new county rather than fill those positions with people who lived in the area. The slight became worse when the new officials chose to stay in Yankton instead of moving west. Rumors of corruption escalated even further when Pennington selected Sheridan over Rapid City as the new county seat. It was believed that Pennington held real estate near Sheridan, and its value was sure to increase with the town’s elevated status.

Locally elected officials soon replaced Pennington’s appointments, and the county seat was eventually relocated to Rapid City. But the governor remained unpopular in the Black Hills until William Howard succeeded him in 1878. Shady as his dealings may have been, we do hold a soft spot for Pennington since we publish South Dakota Magazine in his home, an 1875 brick Italianate building on the east end of Yankton’s Third Street. It’s the only territorial governor’s home remaining in South Dakota. Readers are welcome to stop by for a tour when they’re in town.

Our trip into Pennington County began on the Badlands Loop Road, a 31-mile detour off Interstate 90 that provides several scenic overviews of a landscape millions of years in the making. The kids enjoyed venturing out onto short trails, taking note of the”Watch for Rattlesnake” signs. Every now and then they would head off-trail, skipping over narrow chasms and climbing precarious points.

Mount Rushmore draws nearly 3 million visitors every year.

The Badlands Loop Road met Interstate 90 again at Wall, which meant a stop at Wall Drug. We spent a couple of hours perusing the many shops. I don’t think the kids believed that it all began with signs for free ice water, enticing motorists to stop at the town’s tiny drug store. I was impressed by the huge collection of original Western paintings that hang throughout the complex.

Our first morning in Rapid City began with coffee at the historic Fairmont Creamery building. Constructed in 1929, the space has undergone extensive renovations and now hosts several businesses, including Pure Bean.

Fully caffeinated, we made our way to Mount Rushmore, the grand jewel of tourism for Pennington County. Roughly 3 million people visit the national memorial every year. I’ve written a few stories covering different angles of Mount Rushmore, but it was nice to simply view the granite heads from the observation deck and to stroll along the Presidential Trail through the pines and see the sculpture from new perspectives.

Ellie Andrews served time in Presidential Pawn’s fictitious jail.

Back in Rapid City for the afternoon, we explored the lively downtown district, anchored by the new Main Street Square. Children laughed and splashed in the fountain while families lounged in the green space. We strolled the vibrant and ever-changing Art Alley, where business-owners gladly allow the drab back halves of their buildings to become colorful street paintings. We saw the world’s smallest taxidermied dog inside Presidential Pawn and enjoyed a meal at the Firehouse, Rapid City’s original fire station converted into a restaurant and brewpub.

For part of our trip, we stayed at Newton Fork Ranch, a former working ranch that has been converted in a series of cabins set about a mile outside of Hill City. From here, we had easy access to Prairie Berry Winery, the Miner Brewing Company and the 1880 Train, which travels round trip from Hill City to Keystone along the old Chicago, Burlington and Quincy line.

We took advantage of other popular stops in Pennington County. We traveled through Bear Country and saw mountain lions, timber wolves in captivity, and bears as they sauntered past our car. There were doubts about whether or not some in our party would be able to successfully navigate the crooked cabins of the Cosmos Mystery Area, but once the surroundings stopped spinning and the nausea became tolerable, everyone completed the tour. The Cosmos is a very weird place where tennis balls appear to roll uphill, and uneven ground proves to be completely level. Two college students discovered the peculiar place in 1952 as they searched for land on which to build a summer cabin. They immediately noticed the unusual forces and created demonstrations that have confused visitors ever since. But it really isn’t for everyone. Several people on our tour seriously struggled with balance and a few even mentioned headaches.

Joe Andrews enjoys a leisurely ride on the 1880 Train.

That sounds like a busy trip, but we truly only scratched the surface of things to do in Pennington County. We missed the amazing museum at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and Reptile Gardens just south of Rapid City. We could have spent a day at Pactola or Deerfield lakes or made the pilgrimage to the top of Black Elk Peak, the highest point in South Dakota and the tallest peak in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains. When we were there, the promontory was still known as Harney Peak, in honor of Gen. William Harney, a 19th century military commander stationed in the area. But in August 2016, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names changed the moniker to Black Elk Peak for the legendary Lakota holy man whose vision quest atop the mountain was immortalized in John Neihardt’s classic book Black Elk Speaks.

Missing out on all of those other activities simply means another trip is in order, perhaps in the summer of 2017. And I bet the ponderosa pines, the rugged Badlands, doughnuts and coffee at Wall Drug and the four granite faces of Mount Rushmore will still be there, waiting for us.

Editor’s Note: This is the 32nd installment in an ongoing series featuring South Dakota’s 66 counties. Click here for previous articles.

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The Rushmore Essayist

By John Andrews

William Andrew Burkett spent five years as a special agent investigating fraud for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He worked with a U.S. Senate committee to help investigate bribery of IRS officials, leading to several convictions and the dismissal of IRS staff members. He established several sound and successful California banks. Always an advocate of healthy monetary policy, Burkett testified before Congress on banking reform and regulation. And until the day he died in 1999, he said he owed his lifelong success to a component of Mount Rushmore that never became reality.

Burkett was in law school at the University of Nebraska in 1934 when he heard about a nationwide essay contest. Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor in the midst of shaping Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills, sought submissions that summarized the history of the United States in 500 words. He intended to smooth a granite section 120 feet high and 80 feet wide on which to carve the essay. Borglum thought future generations might be as baffled by Mount Rushmore as contemporary historians were about the sculptures on Easter Island.”You might as well drop a letter in the postal service without an address or signature as to send that carved mountain into the future without identification,” Borglum said.

Borglum had originally asked President Calvin Coolidge to write the entablature. But when Coolidge submitted his first two paragraphs, Borglum edited them so heavily that the former president refused to continue. After Coolidge died in 1933, Borglum asked newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst to advertise an essay contest in his papers. Hearst agreed and said he would provide cash for prizes and scholarships. Students in several age groups submitted thousands of entries. Burkett was the winner in the college division.

In typical Borglum fashion, however, he rejected all the winning entries and said he would write the entablature text himself. But as work on the monument progressed it became clear there would be no room or money to create elements in Borglum’s original vision, including the entablature and a great Hall of Records behind the heads.

Burkett used the scholarship he won to attend law school. The Nebraska native moved to California, where he became a successful financier and patron the arts. He continued a relationship with Mount Rushmore, serving on several boards. In 1975 he donated to the memorial a large bronze plaque on which was inscribed his winning essay from 1934. It hangs today on the Borglum View Terrace.

He so loved Mount Rushmore that he wanted to be buried near the monument. When he died in 1999, however, he was laid to rest in Monterey, California.

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Iron Mountain Road

By Bernie Hunhoff

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2006 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

The average South Dakotan likes black coffee, thick steaks and straight roads. But we make an exception for Iron Mountain Road, one of the most crooked 17 miles you’ll ever drive.

Iron Mountain Road is part of a highway trilogy–along with Custer State Park’s Wildlife Loop and the Needles Highway. The three together are called the Peter Norbeck Scenic Byway, a route that was proclaimed one of America’s top 10 scenic drive by the Society of American Travel Writers.

All three roads (70 miles total) are must-drives, but Iron Mountain is a lengthy, two-lane demonstration that road construction can truly be an art form. Norbeck, who is almost every historian’s all-time favorite South Dakota politician, helped select the route in 1933, as Mount Rushmore was being carved.

Norbeck, then a 63-year-old U.S. senator, personally explored Iron Mountain, looking for views that best showed off the Black Hills landscapes and the emerging faces at Rushmore. Others wanted the road to skirt the peak, but Norbeck insisted on scenery over economy. Already in poor health when he was scouting the path, he died just three years later.

His road squeezes through three stone tunnels, spirals down three pigtail bridges and winds round and round to the 5,445-foot summit where a small parking lot allows visitors to get out from behind the wheel and enjoy a panoramic view of the mountains, including Mount Rushmore.

“I was there as a boy when they were building it,” said Bob Hayes, a retired mining engineer.”They hired miners to do much of the work because it involved drilling and blasting. My father knew the miners, so we would sometimes go watch. I remember being in the tunnels before they were finished. They looked like cave openings.”

Hayes recalled that the workers didn’t seem to appreciate the importance of their task.”Like Mount Rushmore, they weren’t that excited until later. They thought it was just a job. It was later that they realized they’d done something great.”

Although Norbeck gets much deserved credit for the highway because he brought both the political leadership and vision, many others were involved. Gutzon Borglum, chief sculptor of the four presidential faces, saw Iron Mountain Road as”an integral part of the memorial,” according to Gilbert Fite, author of Mount Rushmore.

Also deeply involved was C. C. Gideon, a self-taught builder and designer whose handprints can be found on major projects throughout the southern Black Hills. Gideon built the Game Lodge and designed the artist’s studio at Mount Rushmore after Borglum waste-basketed drawings by the National Park Service architects.

Gideon and Norbeck were a good team; Gideon had the ability to get Norbeck’s dreams not only to paper, but even to completion. The best examples are the pigtail bridges of Iron Mountain Road. The two men decided, after numerous trips on horseback and afoot over the mountain, that the road must be tunneled through the mountain on the way to the peak. Their ideas clashed with all practical principles for road construction in the 1930s.

Finally, the pigtail bridge concept was devised, but state engineers wanted the supports built of concrete and steel. Norbeck envisioned a rustic look that would accent the forest; he turned to Gideon, who designed the bridges of massive wood posts and steel straps.

Gideon’s granddaughter, Marilyn Oakes, operates Buffalo Rock Lodge Bed & Breakfast with her husband, Art, near the south end of the road.”Grandpa was a humble and quiet man,” she said.”I didn’t grow up in South Dakota, but we came back every summer for vacations and got to know him. In my heart of hearts, I see those two guys [her grandpa and the senator] riding on horseback in the Hills, laughing and planning and slapping each other on the back as they agreed on where to take the road.”

Marilyn’s guests at the lodge get an insider’s history of the road that will take them to Rushmore.”The first thing I tell them is that it is narrow and winding to force people to slow down and enjoy the beauty,” Oakes says.”They could have gone around the mountain very easily but they chose this route.”

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Borglum’s Last Christmas

By Robert E. Hayes

Editor’s Note: The author, Bob Hayes, grew up in Keystone. He worked as a mining engineer for 40 years before retiring to his hometown, where he has been an active participant in history gatherings. This story comes from “Collected in the Alex Johnson Hotel,” a group of tales gathered at the West River History Conference that appeared in the July/August 2006 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum often entertained his workers at Mount Rushmore with lavish dinners in the boarding house near the mountain or at the Alex Johnson Hotel in Rapid City, or at picnics at his Hermosa ranch.

My father, Edwald Hayes, ran the tramway up and down the mountain for eight years. As part of the Mount Rushmore family, I attended many of the parties. I especially remember the Christmas of 1940 in the old studio building at Rushmore, where Dad played Santa Claus. It was a role he would play in Keystone for more than 50 years.

Mother took my four-year-old sister, Judy, and me to the party. Of course, Dad did not go with us. When we got home, Judy was excited to see Daddy. She ran jubilantly to him shouting,”We were at Rushmore and we saw Santa Claus, and he had shoes just like yours!”

That party was perhaps Borglum’s last. He died the following March in a Chicago hospital.

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Photographing Our Famous National Memorial

By Chad Coppess

Thousands of photos of Mount Rushmore National Memorial are taken each year. However, most of those photographs do not take into account that the carvings on Mount Rushmore are best photographed in the morning. The heads face southeast, so receive sunlight best from sunrise through approximately 10 am.

Sunrise can give the faces a pleasing orange or golden cast, but time of year has a large effect on shadows that form on the mountain at that time of day. Mid-summer sunrise will cast a shadow from the Lincoln head that will completely cover Roosevelt’s face. In early winter the sun has moved far enough south to eliminate the shadow almost completely.

Late afternoon and evening places the heads in full shade no matter what time of year you visit.

For an angle on Rushmore that’s a bit out of the ordinary, try these spots:

  • The profile of Washington’s head can be isolated against the sky at a turnout on Highway 244 about 1/2 mile west of the memorial parking area.
  • The Presidential Trail, which makes a loop from either side of the main viewing platform, leads to the bottom of the rock rubble pile below the faces. This gives the mountain carving a grand “monumental” feel as you look steeply up at the faces.

Two spots on the Presidential Trail are especially noteworthy:

If you took the left side branch of the trail from the viewing platform, just before you reach the rock pile you will see a short staircase leading downward to the left. It leads underneath two huge boulders leaning on each other. Through the crack between them you can frame the Washington and Lincoln heads.

A short walk past the boulder crack (or at the top of the steep staircase climb if you started from the right side of the viewing platform) is another short staircase leading upwards toward the carvings. Rounding a large rock you will come to what the park rangers call the “Hot Tub Terrace,” evidently because it would be an ideal spot for a backyard spa. There is an aspen tree here that provides some nice foreground contrast to all the rough granite piled around it. The tree also creates one of the few places to shoot fall colors with the faces at the appropriate time of year.

Chad Coppess is the senior photographer at the South Dakota Department of Tourism. He lives in Pierre with his wife, Lisa. To view more of his work, visit www.dakotagraph.com.

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Bringing Life to Rushmore

By John Andrews

Every year, millions of people gaze upon the four faces at Mount Rushmore. Most visitors could tell you that Gutzon Borglum designed them. But almost nobody knows the Italian immigrant who gave them life.

Luigi Del Bianco was Mount Rushmore’s chief carver from 1933 to 1940, but his role in creating the monument was nearly forgotten. When his son Caesar read Rex Alan Smith’s 1994 book The Carving of Mount Rushmore, he was shocked that his father’s name was nowhere to be found.

“That frustrated my uncle and myself so much that we went to the Library of Congress to look through Gutzon Borglum’s papers,” says Lou Del Bianco, Luigi’s grandson and Caesar’s nephew.”We found correspondence from Borglum about my grandfather’s importance, and how he couldn’t find anyone else in America to do this work. Whenever he quit the monument because of problems with wages, all work would have to stop. That’s how important he was. He was really the artist who brought the faces to life. The workers did a wonderful job roughing them out, but you need an artist to bring out the emotion in the faces, and that’s what my grandfather did.”

Lou Del Bianco has been an actor and storyteller for 25 years. He created a one-man show and a website to tell his grandfather’s story, and will present it inside Borglum’s studio at Mount Rushmore on Sunday, July 3.

Lou learned about his grandfather’s work in second grade, when he found a tattered Mount Rushmore brochure.”From then on, it’s been a dream of mine to find out what he did and get him more recognition,” he says.”I feel like my entire career has led me up to this moment.”

Luigi Del Bianco studied stone carving in his native Italy. He settled in Port Chester, N.Y., after World War I, and began working in Borglum’s Connecticut studio. They worked together for the next 20 years, a remarkable stretch considering Borglum’s proclivity for firing people at the drop of a hat.”They argued quite a bit, but it was part of their relationship,” Lou says.”They had great mutual respect for one another, and in the end they loved each other.”

When Borglum made Del Bianco chief carver at Mount Rushmore, he said Luigi was”the only stone carver on the work who understands the language of the sculptor. He is worth any three men I could find in America.”

Del Bianco saved Jefferson’s face by almost seamlessly patching a crack one foot wide in his lip, and made Lincoln’s eyes come alive.”I could only see from this far what I was doing, but the eye of Lincoln had to look just right from many miles distant,” Luigi told an interviewer in 1966.”I know every line and ridge, each small bump and all the details of that head so well.”

After Mount Rushmore’s completion, Del Bianco returned to Port Chester, where he carved tombstones and set statues. He rarely discussed his work in South Dakota, but his craftsmanship on a Black Hills mountain will exist for generations.

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The Summer That Made the Hills

By John Andrews

Of the millions of summers the Black Hills have seen, the summer of 1927 was surely the most eventful — and perhaps cemented the region’s status as the popular tourist attraction that it is today.

Much of the credit goes to President Calvin Coolidge, who arrived in the Hills for a three-week vacation in June 1927 and liked the cool mountain air, trout-filled streams and forested hills so much he stayed three months. And wherever the president went, the media followed, so newspaper readers around the country read stories that summer filed from western South Dakota, a faraway place still unknown to many.

Coolidge’s presence also helped kick start Mount Rushmore. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum had toiled on the monument for two years and had already held a dedication ceremony. But he took advantage of having the president in his backyard and staged a second, more widely publicized dedication in August. That turned the nation’s attention to the project and won the approval of Coolidge, who later supported legislation funding the project.

Unfortunately Coolidge’s relationship with the eccentric artist later turned sour. After the president’s retirement, he asked a visitor to his New England home how far he thought they were from the Black Hills.”About 1,500 miles,” the man responded.

“Well,” the reticent Coolidge retorted,”that’s about as close to Mr. Borglum as I care to be.”

The Coolidges stayed at the Game Lodge in Custer State Park, and the president used offices at Rapid City High School. Mrs. Coolidge knitted on the lodge porch and enjoyed nature walks, though she once got lost briefly, causing the president to scold the First Lady’s security agent. A creek running through the park was later named for her. Photographs showed the president enjoying great success trout fishing, though it was later revealed that Black Hills boosters stocked the streams, virtually guaranteeing Coolidge a fresh catch every time out.

Though Coolidge didn’t attend the groundbreaking ceremony, construction of the Hotel Alex Johnson also began during the summer of 1927. The stately Alex Johnson was designed to honor two groups: German immigrants through its German Tudor architectural style, and Native Americans. Alex Carlton Johnson, vice president of the Chicago-Northwestern Railroad and the hotel’s namesake, deeply appreciated Native culture. The hotel’s lobby is filled with Native relics and symbols, including a chandelier made of war spears. It’s become a popular destination for Black Hills travelers and dignitaries.

To help Coolidge remember his summer in the Hills, locals gave him a pair of boots and a 10-gallon hat, which he sported on a much-publicized horseback ride up Mount Rushmore. A modern-day homage to the president is his bronze statue at the southwest corner of Fifth and Main streets in downtown Rapid City, part of the City of Presidents project. Coolidge is beaming, holding his hat and standing next to a saddle, a reminder of one of his happiest summers and one that significantly shaped the Black Hills that we know today.