FactSentinel

Mount Rushmore was designed and carved under the direction of Gutzon Borglum, an American sculptor born in Idaho to Danish immigrant parents. Work began in 1927 and ended in October 1941, after Borglum's death in March of that year. His son, Lincoln Borglum, oversaw the final stages. The workforce consisted of roughly 400 men, mostly local miners, laborers, and craftsmen, who used dynamite, jackhammers, and hand tools to shape the granite into the likenesses of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lincoln. Records from the National Park Service and the project's own documentation do not identify Native American artists as designers or lead carvers.

The confusion likely comes from the monument's location in the Black Hills of South Dakota, land sacred to the Lakota Sioux, who call the mountain Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, often translated as Six Grandfathers. The United States promised the Black Hills to the Lakota in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, but the government seized the region after gold was discovered there. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the land was taken illegally and that compensation was owed. The Lakota have refused the payment, which has grown with interest, and continue to seek return of the land.

Another source of mix-up is the Crazy Horse Memorial, also in the Black Hills. It was begun in 1948 at the invitation of Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear, but it was designed by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who was not Native American. It remains unfinished and is a separate project from Mount Rushmore.