The Workers Who Carved Mount Rushmore
Gutzon Borglum gets his name on the mountain, but he did not swing the drills. The faces on Mount Rushmore were brought out of the granite by working men, most of them from the Black Hills towns nearby, who climbed the cliff in leather harnesses and spent their days suspended hundreds of feet above the valley floor. Several hundred passed through the payroll over the fourteen years of carving, though the crew on any given day was far smaller.
Many of them came to the work because other work had dried up. The carving spanned the Depression years, and a steady job on the mountain, even a dangerous one, was worth holding. A number of the men had mining backgrounds, which suited the project well, since carving Mount Rushmore was less like traditional sculpture than like quarrying with great care. They knew rock, dynamite, and the discipline of working underground or on a face. Borglum’s son Lincoln, who learned the trade on the mountain himself, later helped finish the work, a story told in Lincoln Borglum and the completion of Mount Rushmore.
How the work was done
The labor divided into a few distinct jobs. Drillers did the bulk of it, lowered over the edge in bosun’s chairs, steel seats hung from cables, working handheld jackhammers against the rock while dangling in space. Winch operators on top controlled the cables, raising and lowering men they often could not see. Because shouted instructions were useless over the noise and distance, the crews relied on call boys, usually young men or boys perched where they could relay messages between the men on the face and the hoist operators above.
Most of the mountain came down by explosive. The powdermen were among the most skilled on the site. They drilled and packed charges calibrated to blast away tons of granite while leaving only a few inches of stone above the final surface Borglum wanted, a margin thin enough that a careless charge could ruin months of planning. After the heavy blasting, drillers worked the remaining rock by a method called honeycombing, boring rows of shallow holes close together so the stone between them could be knocked away with hand tools. The last layer was smoothed with a small handheld tool until the granite took on the finished texture of skin.
The faces themselves were laid out by transferring measurements from Borglum’s studio models using a pointing system of booms and plumb bobs, scaled up roughly twelve times onto the cliff. The men on the ropes worked to marks the pointers gave them, trusting that the proportions would resolve into a face only fully visible from the ground.
Danger and pay
The work was plainly hazardous. Men hung over a long drop in all weather, surrounded by dynamite and the dust of pneumatic drills. That dust raised the long-term risk of lung disease, a danger not well understood at the time. Yet across fourteen years of carving, no worker was killed on the mountain, a safety record that owed something to luck and something to the care of the powdermen and winch crews.
The pay was decent for the region and the era, better than many alternatives in the depressed economy of the western Dakota towns, though the work was seasonal and stopped whenever federal funding ran short. The men would be laid off, scatter to other jobs, and return when the money came through again. Some worked nearly the whole span of the project; others stayed a season and left.
When the carving ended in 1941, the workers went back to mines, farms, and trades across the Hills, and many stayed in the area for the rest of their lives. They left behind a monument that drew, and still draws, the travelers whose visits helped build the economy of nearby Rapid City. The four heads on the cliff carry the names of presidents, but the hands that uncovered them belonged to ordinary people who knew the mountain as a workplace before it was a landmark.