On the corner of Mount Rushmore Road and Main Street, a diminutive Andrew Jackson scowls and crosses his arms; on Ninth and Main, a shoulder-high Teddy Roosevelt strikes an impressive pose, holding a petite sword. As one drives farther into the Black Hillsβa region considered sacred by its original residents, who were displaced by settlers, loggers, and gold minersβthe roadside attractions offer a vision of American history that grows only more uncanny.
Exit here! The source from which so much strange Americana flows is Mt. Rushmore, which, with the stately columns and the Avenue of Flags leading up to it, seems to leave the historical mess behind.
Past Mt. Rushmore is another mountain, and another memorial. After seventy-one years of work, it is far from finished. All that has emerged from Thunderhead Mountain is an enormous faceβa man of stone, surveying the world before him with a slight frown and a furrowed brow. Decades from now, if and when the sculpture is completed, the man will be sitting astride a horse with a flowing mane, his left arm extended in front of him, pointing.
It will be the largest sculpture in the history of the world. Yet, to some of the people it is meant to honor, the giant emerging from the rock is not a memorial but an indignity, the biggest and strangest and crassest historical irony in a region, and a nation, that is full of them. He moved to South Dakota in , and began acquiring land through purchases and swaps. A year later, he dedicated the memorial with an inaugural explosion.
In the early days, Ziolkowski had little money, a faulty old compressor, and a rickety, seven-hundred-and-forty-one-step wooden staircase built to access the mountainside. Ruth told the press that Korczak had informed her that the mountain would come first, she second, and their children third. He made models for a university campus and an expansive medical-training center that he planned to build, to benefit Native Americans. By the time of his death, in , there was no sign of the university or the medical center, and the sculpture was still just scarred, amorphous rock.
