USA - Headstrong

 July 25-26

Hello everyone!

This is mainly a blog about heads. 

Mount Rushmore National Memorial

Crazy Horse Memorial

Those are some very famous, chiselled heads. What you can’t see there is how my head was feeling at Mount Rushmore - and for the rest of that day - after going for drinks the evening before. Apparently I ended up doing shots of fireball whisky with strangers. People were surprised I made the 8am bus.

All of this happened in a new state: South Dakota,
known as...The Mount Rushmore State. Of course.

But you don’t need to know about that. I’ll tell you about Mount Rushmore instead. Four Presidents - Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln - carved high into the side of a mountain in the Black Hills. They were chosen to commemorate the founding, growth, preservation and development of the United States.

Washington for the birth of the country, Jefferson
for its expansion with the Louisiana Purchase

Roosevelt for its development with the Panama Canal,
Lincoln for its preservation during the Civil War

There has never been a President Rushmore. That name, then. Mount Rushmore was named after Charles E. Rushmore, a New York attorney, in the late 1880s. He was in the Black Hills on business when he inquired about the mountain's name. A local guide suggested naming it after him. Ignoring any previous names given to what was the sacred mountain of the Native American Lakota Sioux, Mount Rushmore stuck.

Rocky Mountain goats can sometimes be seen on top of the heads

If the face were a true scale, Washington
would be 465 feet (141 metres) tall

The idea of shoving four presidents into a rock face (it was supposed to be more than just their faces at its inception) came in 1923, from a state historian called Doane Robinson. The idea was simple and blunt: tourism. Again, completely ignoring any claims from the Lakota Sioux. The actual design started two years later, with the sculptor being a man called Gutzon Borglum. 

When walking towards the mountain,
you pass the flag of each state

Over time, cracks have appeared that need maintenance

Borglum first sculpted models in his studio, with one inch equalling one foot on the mountain. He then used a complex method to measure on the mountain, which allowed him to know how much stone to remove. Dynamite took away 900 million pounds of rock, allowing the team to then chisel away at the facial features. 

90% of the rock was removed using dynamite

Behind Lincoln's head, there is a real-life secret vault called the
Hall of Records, which features historical essays, pictures and documents

Over $1 million later (that’s a lot by today’s value) and 14 years later, the faces were complete. They did a pretty good job.

2 to 3 million people visit every year

I would have appreciated it more - and
taken more varied pictures - if I felt 100%

There have, of course, been more than just four Presidents of the United States of America. 47 at the current count. 45 of them are immortalised on the main street corners in nearby Rapid City. They don’t create a statue of them until the person can no longer be president, owing to death or completing two full terms, meaning that Biden and Trump don’t have statues yet. 

Relatively ancient: Martin Van Buren

Modern: the statue of George HW Bush

Rapid City was a cute little place. Not that little, actually, with 75,000 residents, but it had a charm to its main streets. It also had bars and, a short Uber ride away, a karaoke joint. But we’re not talking about that. It hurts to remember the size of those fireball whisky shots. Extreme freepouring.

This is Rapid City's oldest brewery,
located in a former fire house

We were confused as to why this
president had a Burger King hat

There is another large head in this area. It belongs to someone who would have been furious at the concept of Mount Rushmore: the one known as Crazy Horse. 

As you can see, it is a work in progress

There is one day a year where they allow people
to hike up to the upper echelons of the structure

Like Buffalo Bill, this was a name which I was aware of without really knowing why. Heading to the Crazy Horse Memorial - crucially the afternoon before fireball-gate - helped me get a better understanding. 

Crazy Horse belonged to the
Lakota, one of three Sioux tribes

His original name was Curly - I think
'Crazy' works better for a warrior!

After the white Americans found gold in the Black Hills, they broke the treaty they signed with many Native American tribes a few years earlier in 1868. That treaty helped to define boundaries for the Sioux reservation. Furious, they and some other tribes attacked US government forces at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. It was a resounding victory for Native American forces, who had been led in part by…Crazy Horse.

This map shows the Great Plains, where many
Native American tribes lived nomadic lives

This picture, from the Buffalo Bill Museum
in Cody, depicts the Battle of Little Bighorn

The man, who never even contemplated signing a treaty with the white man, was a hero. He was actually killed only one year later, stabbed in the back - metaphorically and literally - by a government soldier whilst standing under a flag of truce, at which people were supposed to be seen as safe.

These are artefacts from the Little Bighorn battlefield

No one knows where Crazy Horse is buried -
one theory is underneath this tree in Nebraska

There are a few interesting things about this memorial. Firstly, it’s not finished, and will take another 25 to 30 years to finish. It also refuses to take any government money, in part because they don’t want that to be used as a possible means of washing away the misdemeanours of the past. It has been run by the Ziolkowski family since the beginning of the project in 1948.

These pictures chart the progress - the head
was revealed on the 50th anniversary, in 1998

This is from the road, quite far from the memorial
itself, so you can appreciate the size

This is the world’s largest sculpture in progress, and some of the facts about its size are incredible. All four heads at Mount Rushmore would fit into the head of Crazy Horse, which admittedly goes back quite far. The nostrils alone have a diameter of 30 feet (over 9 metres) each. It will be even taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza and the Washington Monument.

The face is over 87 feet tall - the Rushmore faces are 60 feet

This poster shows the projected dimensions,
including a 44 foot feather headdress atop his head

What’s even more bizarre here is that no one is completely sure what Crazy Horse actually looked like. When the project was first considered, two warriors who fought with Crazy Horse at Little Bighorn - so now ancient - described him and a portrait was created. The two fighters were said to have been struck by how much it looked like Crazy Horse. Well give them the benefit of the doubt.

This man's name was Red Cloud

Some of the more intricate carving is done by
ropes like this and pulleys inside the rock

When finished, it will look phenomenal. One can only hope that it gets the same respect and number of visitors as nearby Mount Rushmore. Frankly, it’s not even the bare minimum that could be done after the treatment of all Native American tribes, not just the Sioux. Maybe if they could remove a hangover from fireball whisky shots while they’re at it…

A scaled model of what hopefully will be there in the future

I wonder whether Calvin Coolidge approves of the heads -
he was US President when the Rushmore project was started

Some of us are a bit worse for wear in this picture!

Love you all,

Matt