The Messed Up History Of Mount Rushmore

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The iconic heads of four United States presidents loom over the Black Hills in South Dakota. It's a popular place for millions of people to visit every year. A family traveling through the plains might stop to check it out and take a photograph that'll be immortalized over the fireplace, or wherever people typically keep those types of photos. For many white Americans, Mount Rushmore is as fine a sight to see as any. To many Native Americans, not so much.

To the Great Sioux Nation, Mount Rushmore is the symbol of a dark, treacherous past full of stolen land, broken treaties, and a fierce fight to keep their traditional way of life in the face of an invading government. Each presidential face that was carved into the sacred Black Hills comes with its own sordid past. Each symbolizes unique slights committed toward Native peoples. Most Americans have little clue about the very real and messed up story of Mount Rushmore's past or how it has affected the indigenous people of the area into the present, and knowing the truth could forever change the way they look at the towering monument. But maybe that's a good thing.

The first break in the treaty happened after gold was discovered in the Black Hills. General George Custer led an expedition to find the precious metal in the summer of 1874 specifically in those sacred hills. Since the gold-hunting expedition was meant to be in Native American territory, it draws a pretty specific conclusion: the US government was looking to break their treaty with the Sioux.

Custer's expedition was successful, according to Britannica, and this success led to an influx of white colonizers who were trying to strike a fortune the following year. Smithsonian Magazine puts the number of white miners at around 800, while Britannica estimates it was in the thousands. The Sioux weren't happy about this, as no one would be, and skirmishes broke out in the area. Prospectors and settlers were under attack, so the government passed a decree that forced the native people to stay on their reservation or be punished with military might.

Eventually, the skirmishes broke became war, and the Sioux got Custer back at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The US government responded by redrawing the boundaries originally set by the Treaty of Fort Laramie. The new boundaries "legally" granted the Black Hills to the US.

The mountain that became Mount Rushmore had no name that the colonists knew of, or so it's said. In reality, the Sioux people called the giant, holy hunk of stone "Six Grandfathers." There seem to be conflicting accounts of where the Sioux name came from. According to Black Hills Pioneer, the name was in reference to the four directions plus earth and sky. The book The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings says the name came from a vision had by Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux holy man, and references five ancestors and himself as the sixth grandfather.

The name "Rushmore" came about from a joke. It wasn't actually supposed to be named that. According to Cabinet Magazine, a lawyer by the name of Charles Rushmore had visited the mountain and asked his guide what its name was. The guide replied that the mountain had no name, so they'd just call it Mount Rushmore from then on. And, unfortunately, they did. Well, not the native peoples of the area. They still tend to refer to it by its traditional (proper) name.

Rushmore began to receive calls once the monument was publicly announced. People wanted to know what fantastical things he must have done to find his name on such an epic landmark. Out of what we can only assume was embarrassment, he donated $5,000 to the project.

The further into Mount Rushmore's history one digs, the more messed it up it becomes. The presidential monument seems to have been created just to insult the Native Americans who once inhabited the lands without restriction, or at the very least, it was poorly thought out. Unfortunately, Mount Rushmore's designer's ties to the Ku Klux Klan don't support the latter.

Gutzon Borglum worked on another famous monument before working on Mount Rushmore: Stone Mountain. If you don't know about the Stone Mountain carving, it's the largest Confederate memorial in the country. While working on Stone Mountain, Borglum made friends with the local Grand Dragon. According to History Collection, Borglum would become a member of the Klan on Stone Mountain and remain a member for the rest of his life.

Though it's argued that Borglum was only affiliated with the Klan to further his career, willing association with a white supremacist organization kind of makes anyone a bad dude. Other sources, such as Vice, argue that Borglum chose each of the presidents based on their role in "manifest destiny," which both makes sense when you look at each's history and is absolutely disgusting.

We might as well explain why every president on Mount Rushmore was a messed up choice. We'll go left to right to make it easier to follow. Thomas Jefferson is known for many roles throughout early American history, from the man who drafted the Declaration of Independence to the guy who fathered several illegitimate children with a woman he kept as a slave. One thing he isn't as well-known for, but definitely did, is setting the groundwork for removing Native Americans.

Jefferson might have been the third president, but he was the first president to put forth broad policies to remove the indigenous people from the newly fought-for and purchased lands. He pushed further and further west, according to Indian Country Today, believing that the already inhabited lands belonged to white Americans because, um, magic, or something. Expanding American territories with the Louisiana Purchase is one of the reasons Bolgrum chose him to be on the Rushmore monument.

The third US president was talking about removing Native Americans before the US was even founded. He was known to find the indigenous people fascinating at different times of his life but ultimately decided that getting rid of them and obtaining their land was in the best interest of national security. He even devised a dubious plan to force the natives to sell their lands by driving them into debt via trading posts.

We all know that Abraham Lincoln did great things for the United States. He was the commander-in-chief during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed people previously enslaved. To many Native Americans, though, Lincoln was far from the hero he's made out to be in the textbooks.

For starters, Lincoln issued the Homestead Act in 1862 that allowed any citizen to claim land as their own, provided that they never took up arms against the Union. The act took the land out from under the indigenous people who'd inhabited it for centuries. Within a few months, the Pacific Railway Act was put in place, granting land and loans to the building of a transcontinental railroad. With both acts, not only was land distributed to an invading government, but the traditional ways of the indigenous Americans would forever be disrupted by western culture.

More atrocities were committed directly that cost the indigenous people their lives, such as removing the Navajo and Apache from New Mexico via a 450-mile march. According to Washington Monthly magazine, around 2,000 members of these tribes would die before a treaty was established. Under Lincoln's command, 303 Dakota men were sentenced to death for the outbreak of the Dakota War. Lincoln did pardon most of the men but still ordered 38 to be hanged on December 26, 1862. Yet, most of his face is now on a sacred Sioux mountain.

The fight for the Black Hills, including the Six Grandfathers, continues today. It's part of the reason the Sioux have never cashed that big check the government gave them. They never intended to sell the hills, and they'd very much like them back. They were promised them with the Treaty of Fort Laramie, after all.

The Supreme Court totally agreed that the Black Hills were illegally seized from the Sioux. Of course, that wasn't until 1979. The court also decided that giving the tribe back its lands would be totally impossible because of time or some other lame excuse. Shortly after (1982), one representative of each tribe that made up the Great Sioux Nation got together to form the Committee for the Return of the Black Hills. They fought for a decade trying to get the Black Hills and part of the originally promised lands back under Sioux ownership, but multiple attempts were blocked at different governmental levels, according to Cabinet Magazine.

South Dakota representatives fought the Sioux's rightful claims tooth and nail. Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota formed the Open Hills Association in 1990 specifically to fight any attempts by the Sioux to regain the Black Hills, according to Native American Roots.