It is easy for any lover of water scenes to become enthusiastic as he describes the colorations of his favorite lake, so I shall merely state that Sylvan never looks the same in two consecutive moments. Not having the symmetry of natural lakes or the tremendous depths of glacial pools, this body of water plays the role of mirror to the fabulous rock shapes which surround it; and indeed it is a source of never-ending delight to watch the cloud and sun patterns as they wrestle with the shadows of the rocks on its surface.
For many years Sylvan Lake and its environs were operated privately. A hotel catered to the tourists who bounced over the privately built road in buggies and horse-drawn busses. In 1919 the property was purchased by the state of South Dakota, and since that time it has been operated as a public facility. When the original hotel burned, in the thirties, the state built with funds procured from the federal government a comfortable and modern hostelry, the most amazing feature of which is the expansive dining room with picture windows looking out over the lake to Harney Peak.
The hotel is small, as resort hotels go, containing only fifty rooms, and the tourist would do well to arrange for accommodations in advance of his visit. There are, however, a number of cabins operated in conjunction with the main building, and except at the height of the season rooms can probably be found in the annexes. Along the lake shore an excellent restaurant, independent of the hotel, serves the needs of the traveler who has only a few hours to spend at this stop.
Mount Rushmore
From Sylvan Lake around back of the north side of Harney Peak it is a drive of but a few miles to the second man-made wonder of the Hills—the Mount Rushmore Memorial.
Perhaps no one thing has done so much to make the Black Hills known throughout the world as this incredible undertaking—the carving in the natural granite face of a mountain of the faces of our four most revered presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. “Teddy” is included for his lasting service to the people of the United States as the president who saw the Panama Canal project through Congress and into being. The military and economic values of that enterprise so deeply impressed the sculptor of this mammoth frieze that he insisted upon elevating TR into the august company of the other three great statesmen.
The whole story of the memorial would fill several volumes, and indeed has already done so. Briefly, the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, wished to perpetuate a patriotic motif in stone figures so large that they would attract visitors from every corner of the country and impress upon them the glories of the democracy which the four presidents had done so much to build and sustain. The sculptor’s own words were: “I want, somewhere in America, on or near the Rockies, the backbone of the continent, a few feet of stone that carries the likenesses, the dates, and a word or two of the great things we accomplished as a Nation, placed so high that it won’t pay to pull it down for lesser purposes.”
The actual construction work started in 1926, and the formal dedication was made by President Coolidge in the summer of 1927. Between nine hundred thousand and a million dollars went into the gigantic task, including money for supplies, wages, and the sculptor’s own personal needs during the fifteen years he spent on the project. He died in 1941, and the work was completed a few months later by his son.
The immensity of the undertaking can be grasped when the dimensions are noted. The face of each of the figures, for example, measures sixty feet from chin to forehead.
The rough carving was done by dynamite. Borglum, working from a carefully constructed model, would mark on the sheer sides of the great mountain the lines where he wanted the stone peeled away. Then a blast would be set off in the hope that the rock displacement would approximate the lines marked out, and from that point the work had to be done by hand. At first, taking lessons from the miners working for him who had many years of experience in blasting the hard granites of the region, Borglum was able to reach only within a foot of the final figure by dynamiting. As he became more proficient in the use of the explosives he got to the point where his original blasts would shed the stone to a matter of an inch or less from the final cut surface. The head of Washington was finished in 1930, that of Jefferson in 1936, that of Lincoln a year later, and that of Theodore Roosevelt, the final figure, in 1941.