A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore

So much of American history is painful to look at. This writer eases our suffering by creating a wonderfully written and interesting story. The building of Mt. Rushmore in the Black Hills near Rapid City, South Dakota, is peopled with monumental characters whose force of will brought the sculpture into being. It was an ambitious and challenging project. It is timely for such a book to be written when many political figures crave the type of immortal memorial which Mt. Rushmore represents.||It is fascinating to learn of the community promoters and their search for the project leader, which they found by error. They settled on Gustave Borglum when they mistakenly thought that he was the better-known Borglum brothers.||The project offer came propitiously for Borglum because he had just been kicked off the Stone Mountain Ku Klux Klan sculpture for questionable financial dealings. Borglum was close to the Klan and had grandiose ideas for building American History from his viewpoint. The Klan was also very active in the Black Hills.

Thus, the two memorials have kinship with a particular point of view about the history of this country.|This book contains many stories. I found the history of the relationship of the Native Americans to the Black Hills and the manifest destiny that drove them away from their spiritual center, the focal point of these historical myths, which Mt. Rushmore represents.