Mount Rushmore is a well-known monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota that features the countenances of four U.S. presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln. What is not so well known is that the process of creating this national treasure was not exactly an uneventful one. Mount Rushmore was the project of the visionary sculptor John Gutzen de la Mothe Borglum, who was born in Idaho but studied sculpture in Paris in his youth and befriended the famous French sculptor Auguste Rodin. In 1927 Borglum was granted a commission by the federal government to create the sculpture on Mount Rushmore. Though he was nearly sixty years old when he started, he was undaunted by the enormity of the project and the obstacles that it engendered. He optimistically asserted that the project would be completed within five years, not caring to recognize the potential problems that such a massive project would involve, the problems of dealing with financing, with government bureaucracy, and with Mother Nature herself. An example of what Mother Nature had to throw at the project was the fissure that developed in the granite where Jefferson was being carved. Jefferson had to be moved to the other side of Washington, next to Roosevelt, because of the break in the stone. The work that had been started on the first Jefferson had to be dynamited away. Mount Rushmore was not completed within the five years predicted by Borglum and was in fact not actually completed within Borglum's lifetime, although it was almost finished. Borglum died on March 6, 1941, at the age of seventy-four, after fourteen years of work on the presidents. His son, Lincoln Borglum, who had worked with his father throughout the project, completed the monument within eight months of his father's death.
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