If we were angels, falling to earth — or space travelers, maybe, gliding down in a shuttlecraft — the Black Hills would be hard to miss. Eons of geographical grinding have left the small patch of Dakota mountains looking like an archery target, ring inside ring, when seen from above.
Admittedly, it’s a target that has melted a little in the sun, drooping down into an oval and canting over to the west. But out of the rough Western prairie — those 500 little-known miles of American landscape between the Missouri and the Tetons — the Black Hills appear like . . . like . . . like an invitation, I suppose. Like a summons and a promise, marking the skyline beyond the Badlands. Like a target for angels, as they descend to earth.
Not that the Black Hills are enormous, when compared with other National Parks, National Monuments, National Wildernesses, National Forests, and National Recreation Areas. (The United States protects its scenic geography with a confusing swirl of designations, managed by an even more confusing swirl of federal agencies.) East to west — from the point at which it rises out of the prairie in Rapid City, to the point at which it falls again to high plateau in Wyoming– the old mountain range is only about 70 miles across. North to south, it reaches perhaps 120 miles, from the far edges of the forest north of Wyoming’s Devils Tower to South Dakota’s Angostura Reservoir (the region’s largest lake, formed by a 1949 dam across the Cheyenne River narrows).
Of that area, just over 1.25 million acres, approximately 2,000 square miles, are designated as the Black Hills National Forest. Down in the southern part of the hills, Wind Cave National Park adds 30,000 acres of protected land and Custer State Park another 70,000. Still, within its narrow bounds, the region is varied enough to have three National Monuments. On a visit, you might see Jewel Cave (two of the world’s ten longest caves are in the Black Hills). And you probably should see Devils Tower, the first American site to be named a National Monument. But you must see Mount Rushmore — the wonderful and goofy, ludicrous and glorious, monument of four presidents’ heads, carved on the side of a mountain.
The huge sculpture is overexposed, overwrought, and overdone, yes, and yet somehow it remains a powerful thing to see. An occasion to contemplate history, hubris, patriotism, and fame. Mount Rushmore rarely repays a second visit. There’s only so much a rock tableau can tell you, after all. But the first visit — how could you miss it? Those stone faces are the nation, gathered into a single symbol and cast up in the grandest of scales. Every American should visit Mount Rushmore, even if it’s only once.
On Harney Peak –at 7,242 feet, the tallest mountain in the Black Hills — there’s a stone-built lookout tower, perhaps two miles from Mount Rushmore. And on the wall of the tower, there’s a bronze plaque that declares the peak “the highest point east of the Rocky Mountains and west of the Pyrenees Mountains of Europe” (helpfully locating the Pyrenees for the tourists who didn’t realize they could have gone to Spain or France instead of, you know, South Dakota for vacation). It’s false, of course, or at least it’s true only in a narrow, special-pleading sort of way. But the plaque does express how unexpected the Black Hills seem as one drives across the country: how they rise up to fill the horizon with the dark line that gave the hills their name.
The central dome of the Black Hills forms an inner bull’s-eye of gray Harney Peak granite, 1.8 billion years old. Around it, there’s a lower ring of metamorphic rock, over 2 billion years in the making. Around that, the hills form yet another lower ring –limestone, for the most part, carved into caves by ages of water beneath the surface. And then comes the Red Valley: a kind of race track, supported by a hogback ridge, that encircles the Black Hills with a narrow loop of shale and dusty red sandstone.
Covered with Ponderosa Pine and Black Hills Spruce, nearly a monoculture of those dark evergreens, the Black Hills are the oldest mountain range in North America. They must have been enormous, once, but the long geological eras have worn them down to small mountains and crumbly, soft stone. You’d never mistake them for the newer ranges of the far West. The Rockies, for instance, are around 140 million years old, and the Sierra Nevada much younger. Those western mountains always seem sharp and juvenescent, their flashy gray like silver. They look as though they would cut you if you ran your hand along them, and their peaks rise like proud fortresses in the forever war against the encroaching pine.
In the Black Hills — as in the Ozarks and portions of Appalachia — the plants and stones meet on an older, less bombastic battlefield; they have reached the stage of comfortable quarrel, a kind of détente, and though the trees must eventually win, grinding down the last of the hills, they seem content, as you walk among them, to share the landscape for now and let nature take its course. The ancient Dakota granite of the central Black Hills looks as though it would come off in dust and specks of mica if you brushed against it — which is part of what led to the carving of Mount Rushmore, thanks to a curious figure named Doane Robinson.
Back in the 1920s, Robinson was a lawyer with enough time and interest to study South Dakota history and be named the 40-year-old state’s first official “State Historian.” And one day, his mercurial attention was caught by the bas-relief of Confederate generals taking shape on the side of Georgia’s Stone Mountain. He proposed that South Dakota make an answer to that Southern monument — with the Needles, strange spikes of granite that rise in the central Back Hills, being carved into the figures of people important to the history of the state and the opening of the West: Lewis and Clark, for example, along with Red Cloud and Buffalo Bill.
He soon roped into the project one of South Dakota’s senators, the political powerhouse Peter Norbeck, together with the European-trained American sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had recently left the Stone Mountain project in a huff. It was Borglum who explained to Robinson that the rock of the Needles was just too soft and weathered to carve, and the project was shifted to Mount Rushmore, about five miles away. Somewhere in those five miles, the purpose of the carving was also shifted, with the local heroes of Robinson’s plan dropped in favor of Borglum’s preference for national figures.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln were selected as the main models, with Theodore Roosevelt tucked into the fold of the mountain. Borglum wanted to carve more than just the 60-foot heads of the presidents, but a lack of funds — matched by difficulties with the stone and impatience with how long the work was taking –scaled the project back to its present design of faces with a hint of shirtfronts. Begun in 1927, the monument was completed in 1941.
The sculpture may have benefited from the truncation of its sculptor’s idea. During his studies in Paris, Borglum gained a strong feeling for looming monumentality from his friend and teacher Auguste Rodin, but most of his surviving pieces lack a sense of narrative (else he probably wouldn’t have put Teddy Roosevelt between Jefferson and Lincoln). Even more, as the architectural critic Catesby Leigh points out, his sculptures lack geometry –any kind of classical arrangement of balanced weights and proportioned heights. His North Carolina Monument at the Gettysburg Battlefield, for example, is top-heavy enough that its battered Confederates look as though they are about to slam into the base of Cemetery Ridge, rather than join General Pickett in charging up it. His Aviator memorial at the University of Virginia presents a wingèd nude looking less like a man taking flight than like a man about to crash to earth.
With Mount Rushmore, however, the unfinished base helps emphasize the monumentality of the faces. If the carving had been carried down to the figures’ waists, as Borglum planned, the sculpture would have had to take responsibility for its strange proportions and awkward grouping. The lack of geometry would have translated into lack of balance. Instead, with their bodies only hinted, the strong faces seem to begin in the mountain itself, as though American history emerged from American rock. Happenstance helped make Gutzon Borglum a better sculptor than he knew, and Mount Rushmore is his masterpiece.
The Black Hills are rich, old country. The canyon along Spearfish Creek in the north and the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs in the south. Jewel Cave and Wind Cave. Devils Tower and the buffalo that roam through Custer State Park. The granite of the Needles and the inner peaks, the limestone ring that surrounds them, and the outer loop of red sandstone — the Black Hills, with its National Forest, National Monuments, and National Park contain a hundred places worth visiting. A hundred targets at which to aim. Mount Rushmore is only one, but it’s the one that has to be visited first.
Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
