Once before I had something of the same intense, emotional shock. That was when I stood in front of Stone Mountain and listened to Helen Plane pleading with me to cut into the wall the story of Lee and his associates.
Such thoughts passed through my mind as we lay prostrate to rest in the sun on the top of Mount Rushmore. Here great masses of rock of new dimensions, of greater hardness, rose above and about me. I was conscious we were in another world. We could imagine clouds moving over us and around us in stately dignity, or driven by hurrying winds out of the north, or falling as rain or snow against the chill white cliff. And there a new thought seized me—a thought that frightened me and was to redirect me and dominate all my carving: the scale of the mountain peak!
We were 6,200 feet above sea level—500 feet above the surrounding cliffs. We looked out over a horizon, level and beaten like the rim of a great cartwheel, 2,000 feet below. We had reached up toward the heavenly bodies; we were looking at the forms removed from the detail of earth in the valleys, with crude colossi piercing the sky. I had worked seven years on Stone Mountain without real consciousness of this changing relationship of lofty mountain forms isolated in space. And it came over me in an almost terrifying manner that I never had sensed what I was planning. Plans must change. The vastness that I saw here demanded it.
The Rushmore elevation is the highest elevation of granite, except near-by Harney Peak, between the Rocky Mountains and Europe. It is a hard formation called pegmatite, peculiar to the Black Hills, and on Rushmore it is of a finer, more even grain than that of surrounding rocks.
Once there was a sea in this region, then rising tracts of sediments compressed into complicated folds. At some remote time the earth’s interior intruded upon the sedimentary folds, pushing steadily upward beneath the surface, and so formed in time the granite batholith of the Harney Peak region. The overload above the granite must have been of great height before it was destroyed by erosion. It was torn down and now lies scattered across the Bad Lands and in valleys all the way to the sea.
There is no telling when Mount Rushmore was exposed to the sky. Dr. O’Harra believed it to be one of the oldest mountain formations in the world—older than the Alps or the Apennines or the Pyrenees or the Caucasus—older, even, than the Himalayas. Said Dr. O’Harra:
Mount Rushmore, placed near the center of the Black Hills, in the heart of the continent, midst a galaxy of the world’s profoundest splendors, where every stone shows an imprint of sanctity and every bush is aflame with glory, for thousands of years, yes, for millions of years, has surveyed its entrancing surroundings and with uncovered head has looked into the benign face of a kindly creator.
So now a mountain had been discovered such as the sculptor had never hoped to see. There remained the twin problems of getting the means to carve it and a majestic design to put on it. Senator Norbeck, notified the next day, was cautious. He declared flatly that the location wouldn’t do. It was inaccessible. There were better cliffs and he could point them out. He and the sculptor met in Keystone, twenty miles from Rapid City, and spent another day in the hot sun looking for the cliffs that Norbeck remembered. After that the senator gave in.
The parks of South Dakota were Senator Norbeck’s hobby. He had antagonized farmers by including their lands in park areas, and he had schemed to find money in the state and national treasuries that could be used for landscaping them. Virtually every road in the Black Hills and Bad Lands is his creation. If he needed a new one, he could make it. So he wasn’t much worried about the remoteness of Rushmore.
“We’ll get a highway up to it,” he said. “Now, what are you going to put on it?”