Episode Details

Hidden in the rock behind Abraham Lincoln's head is an unfinished vault, the remnant of a planned Hall of Records. This episode treats Mount Rushmore as a biography, beginning with the mountain the Lakota knew as Six Grandfathers, tied to Black Elk's vision, and the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that guaranteed the Black Hills in perpetuity until Custer's 1874 expedition confirmed gold and Congress abrogated the treaty in 1877.

We follow the casual renaming after visiting New York attorney Charles E. Rushmore, Doane Robinson's 1923 scheme to lure automobile tourists with carvings of Old West figures in the Needles, and Gutzon Borglum's takeover of the project, including his documented ties to the Ku Klux Klan and the Stone Mountain Confederate memorial. The conversation covers the 1927 to 1941 construction with dynamite and honeycombing, chief carver Luigi del Bianco's trick for lifelike eyes, the Jefferson face that had to be blasted off and restarted, the 1980 Supreme Court ruling that the land was taken illegally, and the untouched trust fund now worth over 1.3 billion dollars.

• Why Borglum chose granite that erodes one inch every 10,000 years
• How 400 workers removed 450,000 tons of rock with zero fatalities
• Why the presidents were never carved to the waist as designed
• Why the Sioux Nation refuses to accept the court-awarded money
• Why engineers say no new face can ever be added to the mountain