Doane Robinson and the Idea That Became Mount Rushmore
The colossal heads on the mountain began as a promotional notion in the mind of a state historian who never picked up a chisel. Doane Robinson, who held the post of South Dakota’s official historian in the early 1920s, was looking for a way to draw travelers off the new highways and into the Black Hills. What he proposed was modest by the standard of what eventually got built, and quite different in its details, but the impulse behind it, that a carved mountain might bring the country to South Dakota, is the seed from which Mount Rushmore grew.
Robinson was a man of letters and a tireless promoter of his adopted state’s history. By the early 1920s the automobile was beginning to remake American travel, putting scenic touring within reach of ordinary families, and Robinson understood that a region with an attraction worth the drive could capture a share of that traffic. The Black Hills had scenery in abundance, but scenery alone was a common commodity. Robinson wanted something singular, something no other place could offer.
A monument in the Needles
His original idea was rooted in the granite spires of the Hills, the slender weathered pinnacles that rise in clusters in the high country. Robinson imagined figures from the history of the West carved into those natural columns, heroic shapes that would turn a stretch of strange rock into a gallery of frontier legend. The figures he had in mind were drawn from the romance of the region, the explorers, the chiefs, the riders of the old West, the kind of subjects a state historian would naturally reach for.
To turn the idea into stone he needed a sculptor of real ambition, and he began writing letters in search of one. The correspondence eventually reached Gutzon Borglum, an American sculptor with a taste for the monumental and a track record of enormous, controversial projects. Borglum was intrigued, and he came west to see the country Robinson was describing.
The idea outgrows its author
Borglum’s involvement changed the project almost at once, and not in ways Robinson had foreseen. The sculptor looked at the Needles and judged them unsuitable, too thin, too fractured, the grain of the rock too unreliable for the kind of work he wanted to do. More than that, Borglum had grander ambitions than a row of regional figures on slender spires. He wanted a subject of national scale and a canvas to match, and he went looking through the Hills for a massive, sound, well-lit cliff that could carry faces visible from far off.
He found it in a granite face that caught the morning and midday sun, and he settled on a theme that reached well beyond the frontier romance Robinson had first sketched. The figures would be presidents, emblems of the American republic itself, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. The local tourism scheme had become a national monument, and the quiet historian’s notion had been carried off in a direction he could not have predicted and did not fully control.
Robinson’s place in the story
There is a certain irony in how the credit settled. The mountain that resulted bears another man’s name and is forever associated with Borglum’s vision and labor. The presidents were Borglum’s choice, the engineering and the years of dangerous work belonged to the sculptor and his crew, and the public memory of the project tends to begin with the artist on the cliff. Robinson, who started it all with a letter and an idea, can be easy to overlook.
Yet without him there is no reason to think any of it would have happened. He identified the opportunity, he understood what the new age of automobile travel might mean for a remote state, and he had the persistence to chase down a sculptor capable of something extraordinary. That the project grew far past his original conception is, in a way, the measure of how good the underlying instinct was. He set out to give travelers a reason to turn toward the Black Hills and toward the towns like Rapid City that served them, and he succeeded beyond anything he had imagined. The idea was his. The mountain became something larger.