The mountain is a bare massive outcropping of solid granite Ancient and very dense the stone was formed deep within the earth as a great upwelling of hot molten rock slowly cooled and crystallized Over eons as the land rose to form mountains the softer rock above and around it gradually eroded away until it was exposed about sixty million years ago Now jutting from a pine-covered ridge on the flank of Harney Peak in the rugged and scenic Black Hills of South Dakota it stands nearly six thousand feet 18,000 meters above sea level a blocky irregular flat-topped crag about one thousand feet 300 meters long and four hundred feet 120 meters wide The vertical slab of its southeastern face forms a cliff three hundred feet 90 meters high On a crisp clear morning in 1885 a young lawyer from New York gazed across the valley toward that spectacular cliff
furrowed cracked darkened and stained by 600,000 centuries of weather Charles E Rushmore was visiting the Black Hills for his company which owned tin mines in these ore-rich mountains What is its name he asked Bill Challis a local prospector and guide answered Never had any but it has now we’ll call her Rushmore Fifty-six years later obscure Mount Rushmore had been transformed by a great artistic and engineering project into an important American patriotic shrine and tourist attraction For there in the years between 1927 and 1941 four gigantic faces were blasted drilled and carved into the ancient cliff Mount Rushmore National Memorial is the world’s most colossal stone carving and it is meant to celebrate the basic principles and highest ideals of American society The faces are those of four important presidents of the United States George Washington Thomas Jefferson Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt men whose achievements represent the founding expansion preservation and conservation of America Its creators called the monument The Shrine of Democracy Carved with great sensitivity and nobility of spirit in spite of their monumental scale the four faces seem to emerge from the living rock and gaze serenely out over the American landscape into infinity
SOUTH DAKOTA Grand River Moreau River MISSOURI RIVER Cheyenne River Big Sioux River PIERRE James River BLACK HILLS RAPID CITY KEYSTONE MOUNT RUSHMORE White River THE NEEDLES MISSOURI RIVER Sioux FALLS BADLANDS
