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Matthew Davis, "A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Stephen
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- [00:30]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
Stephen
Hello and welcome back to New Books in the American West, a channel on the New Books Network of podcasts. My name is Steve Housman. I'm an assistant professor of environmental history at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, and I'm your host. For today's interview and this episode, I'm speaking with Matthew Davis. Matt is a writer whose work has appeared in a whole variety of outlets, including the Atlantic and the New Worker and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. And he served for seven years as first the founder and then the director of the Alan Chu's International Writers center at George Mason University. And we'll be discussing his new book, A Biography of a the Making and meaning of Mount Rushmore, which came out with St. Martin's Press very, very recently. Just a couple months ago, here in 2025. Welcome to the New Books Network. Matt, good to have you here today.
- [02:32]
Matthew Davis
Well, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on.
- [02:34]
Stephen
Stephen, why don't we start, as we always do on this podcast, by just hearing a little bit about who you are. I'd love to hear a little about your background and in particular, how did you become interested in writing and especially nonfiction and historical writing.
- [02:49]
Matthew Davis
Yeah, thank you for that. You know, I sort of have a mixed background in journalism, creative writing, and international relations. And, you know, I started writing like many writers do at a pretty young age in terms of high school and then moving on to college where I studied journalism and always knew from that point that I wanted to engage in some forms of writing. And I wasn't quite sure which directions to go. Fiction, nonfiction, and when I was in college, I had an experience at a lecture that was given by this great American writer named William Lees Tiete Moon, where he asked us to envision the land in which we were sitting in fifty, one hundred, a thousand, a million years ago. And it really conjured in me this idea of place and history that has stuck with me for decades now at this point. And when I finished college, I went off to join the Peace Corps in Mongolia. And so my first book was about Mongolia and about the land of Mongolia, the history of Mongolia, in ways that sort of echoed what William Lee's Tien Moon was talking about. And I wrote the majority of that book when I got my Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa, and I studied nonfiction writing. And that was for me, a really eye opening experience. I came at it more from a journalistic perspective and less from an artistic perspective. And many of the students who were with me at Iowa, many of the teachers, really were able to expose me to a different sort of view and approach to nonfiction writing than I had been taught in college and usually had worked in and really expanded what it is that I think I could do as a writer. But I also had an experience at Iowa in which I worked for a time at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and saw firsthand the great value of cultural diplomacy and wanted to study that more formally and so moved to Washington, D.C. to get a Master's in International Relations from Johns Hopkins here in D.C. and that was also an incredibly eye opening experience and really opened up a portal for me into the region of the Middle east and also a way to think a little bit about trying to establish a cultural diplomatic program more formally, which is What I did at the Alan Shoes International Writers Center, I got back to D.C. after bouncing around it for a couple years. One year in Las Vegas, one year in the Middle east, and I finally resettled in Washington. I decided to start this center. And that's what I was doing for a number of years in Toll. This idea of writing a book on Mount Rushmore came to me, and when I ended up selling the book, it was an experience where I kind of had to decide if I was going to direct the center or write this book, because it was hard to do both at once. And so I came to write the book. And I think from the question of how I got into historical writing, I am not a trained historian. I'm not like you that has a Ph.D. in history. And I come at this much more from a generalist perspective, but with a great deal of, I hope, research chops and also looking at history through place. I did that in Mongolia. I did that here in the book about Mount Rushmore. And that idea of looking at place to talk about so many other kinds of stories, whether they're stories of history, stories of people, stories of culture. That's what really attracted me to the Rushmore story, and that's what really attracts me to many other kinds of projects that I'm interested in, whether they're writing projects or, quite frankly, reading projects.
- [06:50]
Stephen
Well, you were saying a moment ago that you're not a trained historian and you don't have a PhD like other people might, but that you hope this book is very well researched and everything. And I'll say myself, as someone that's also working on a book about the Black Hills right now, as I was reading this, this is the kind of book that I'm trying to write, both in terms of the story that you tell and in terms of the richness and the depth of the research and everything, and the sense of place. Like, you hit the nail on the head on all of those things in my perspective. So thank you.
- [07:19]
Matthew Davis
Well done in that regard. Yeah, that means a lot. I appreciate that.
- [07:23]
Stephen
Yeah. So you mentioned a couple times a moment ago about you had this moment of choice, right? Either going stay director of this writing institute or you're going to write this book. What brought you to that path? What brought you to the topic of Mount Rushmore? What made you want to write about this place in particular?
- [07:44]
Matthew Davis
So it's hard to. Five years ago, both seems like a blink of an eye, but also like an eternity in terms of what we've been through as a country and as A world in five years. But if you remember back to the summer of 2020, the COVID pandemic was just getting underway. We're just three months into Covid, and in the United States, at least, there was a great deal of discussion around American history. I mean, Black Lives Matter protests were raging across the country. There was a lot of discussion about, in particular, the Confederate memorials and monuments that were scattered across the American south and other parts of the country. But really, what a lot of that conversation came down to was, what is American history? How is it told? How is it memorialized? So these were all the kinds of questions that were sort of in the cultural dialogue at the time. And from a personal perspective, my second son was born in June 2020. So right as the COVID pandemic was sort of underway. And at that time, I Live in Washington, D.C. my wife and I could not get to the hospital because the roads were all blocked because of protests. And Trump had brought in not just the National Guard, but many other arms of police and military to sort of try to quash the protests and also quash our way to the hospital. I'm not sure he had us in mind when he was doing that, but so for me, this moment of time was very a combination of personal and political. And on July 3, 2020, when my son was just a month old, we have an older child who's also a boy who's a couple years older. We were mostly hanging out at our house. And on July 3, 2020, Donald Trump went to Mount Rushmore as president of the United States to both celebrate Independence Day through fireworks, but he also gave a speech, and that speech really was sort of his response to a lot of the conversations and discussions that were being had in the United States at that time. What is American history? How is it told? How is it being memorialized through monuments and memorials? And his vision of these answers, his answers to those questions, I thought were interesting and a little bit too narrow for my liking. But also for me, the larger question became, why did he decide to give that speech at Mount Rushmore? What was it about those four granite faces that literally framed his speech? And so I did a little bit of a deep dive into the memorial, sort of why it was in the Black Hills, who sculpted it, what its initial ideas were? And as you know, Stephen, you just like, Rushmore is an endlessly fascinating place. And I think, and the Black Hills in particular, are an endlessly fascinating place. And the main reason for this, I think, is from the outside, Rushmore can seem a Little bit vanilla, but when you go into and unpeel the different layers behind it, it really is at the epicenter of so many of our American myths and sort of these really important historical threads that course through our country. Whether that's our westward expansion, our really fraught relationship with Native communities, our search for gold, these gigantic, huge, ambitious creative projects we want to achieve. And these sort of really important words like freedom, liberty, democracy, that course through us as Americans. It coursed through the memorial as well. So all that was sort of wrapped into this sculpture that's in the Black Hills. And it just really, as a writer, allowed such so many different tangents to go down that it just became endlessly fascinating in terms of both the research and the writing.
- [11:47]
Stephen
So as a book of historical nonfiction written with a kind of public audience in mind and coming out now with an academic press, this is a book that you have a lot of leeway for how you wrote this book in a way that someone like me, who's writing for an academic press maybe doesn't have quite as much. And you're a bit of a character yourself in the book. You write from a very personal perspective, which, again, not to butter you up too much, I really appreciated that and loved reading it from that perspective. So at the start of the book, you begin with this sort of mini introduction where you describe a little bit of your kind of positionality. I guess we could say your. Your relationship to the Black Hills and the people who call it home. So I wanted to ask you about that. Why did you include that in the book? And what is your relationship with this place, with the Black Hills, personally?
- [12:37]
Matthew Davis
So, you know, just to comment on your. Well, first of all, thank you. But to comment on your. You know, my place in the book. I think one of the things that I became very conscious of as I was studying creative writing at Iowa is the positionality of the I in terms of a lot of nonfiction writing. And I. I'm a big believer that, you know, especially if you're not. I mean, this is not an academic book and it's not an academic press. And so the terms are a bit different, but especially in the kind of work that I was doing, I think it's. It's disingenuous not to put the eye or not to have the person be a sort of. They don't have to be a character, but an intellectual character, I think, are sort of the books that I think are the kinds that I like to read and the kinds that, obviously, with this one, I like to Write. And then in terms of my relationship to the Black Hills, I thought it was really important to be upfront about who I am and my experiences in the hills. And I think this is because, as you know, Stephen, the people who are from the hills, people who are Native American that live or whose family have spent thousands of years, generations in the hills, or people whose families are non Native, but have spent generations in the Black Hills, What I have learned over the years of doing this book is that there is a complexity of emotion that is there that is very tied to not just the land, but to the history of the land that people in that region have that I could never be able to tap into. And I think that it was important for me to make that clear from the start. And that's why I really, you know, I don't think that people who are from the area could write kind of a book like I did, with a little bit of distance to it, emotional distance to it. Cause it would just be too hard to do. And so that segues into your second question about what is my relationship to the Black Hills? And I love going to the Black Hills. I love being there. They are, as you know, a really beautiful place to be. I think the people that I've met there are really fantastic. One of the great joys of having done this book is to have built a little bit of a community in Rapid City and the larger Black Hills. And so, even though I'm not from there and I'm not Native American, I do feel a little bit of an attachment to the hills. And, you know, that's not to say I would never claim to be from the hills or never claim to have any kind of connections to them in that way, but I think they're a really special place in the United States. And what are the. I mean, you probably would understand this, Stephen, but I think, you know, as I'm talking, people in the hills will probably be like, don't say that too much. We don't want people to come here. You know, so, like, I think there's a sense that the hills value themselves as kind of a counterpoint to maybe what parts of Montana or Colorado or, you know, even Idaho are becoming, where people are just, you know, moving into these areas that are physically beautiful and offer different kinds of lifestyles. And the hills are that. But they're not overrun like those other places are.
- [15:58]
Stephen
It's true. I mean, and that's especially ironic as we'll get into in a little bit, given the original goal of Mount Rushmore to bring people to the hills and to boost the economy. And now it's like, well, stay away a little bit. Like, let's keep this place, this sort of special isolated location a little bit. So let's get to the book and I want to kind of continue a little bit from my last question and talk about the place itself. So I'm sure some other folks who are listening in our conversation right now have been to the Black Hills or from familiar at least with Mount Rushmore and a little bit of what this place is like. But for those that are less aware or you know, this is their first time encountering this story. Can you talk a little bit just about the Black Hills themselves? Where are we? What is it like there? Let's say, for instance, you were to take a drive around the Black Hills and visit Mount Rushmore. What would you see? Who might you meet in the area and what kind of feelings or emotions or to use a kind of contemporary term, what kind of vibes might this place evoke?
- [16:57]
Matthew Davis
So one of my favorite drives to do actually is driving west towards the Black Hills. And the Black Hills are in the western South Dakota. So let's say, excuse me, let's say you're driving west from the Missouri river, say, and you're driving towards the Black Hills. At some point as you're driving, you'll begin to see the shadows of the hills in the distance. Because what you're driving through is pretty flat prairie land. And there are hills, of course, and there are some rivers that are coursing through, but really you have an unbroken view of the horizon. That horizon more and more becomes the blackness of the hills, which is how they get their name, right? The Lakota call them the Hisapa or Pahasapa, the Black Hills of Black Ridge. And it is such a perfect name because from that distance you do see this sort of black oasis that's on the horizon. And when you go into the hills, the hills are not black, right? There's Ponderosa pine is the predominant tree. That's what makes them from a distance, seem black. But those are green and they're everywhere and they're closely nestled together to form almost a consistent canopy of pine trees that are really only interrupted by these billion year old blocks of granite. So that sort of combination just makes it incredibly beautiful, incredibly. Just compact. You feel like you're just nestled in this little area. And if you know the history of history of spirituality, the drives through the Black Hills are some of the most spectacular drives I think you can do in the American west that don't involve towering mountains because a lot of the roads are narrow. You're really winding through just very majestic views, very majestic trees, and into Rushmore itself. I mean, the drive. It's funny you asked that, because I made it a point. Every time I visited the Black Hills or to do research, I would literally get off my airplane, and usually I was renting a car. So I'd rent a car and drive straight to Mount Rushmore because. For two reasons. One, I loved the drive through the hills. But then I also really loved just how Rushmore always centered me for this project. And why it does is you will get. It depends on what season you're going to Mount Rushmore. The vibe you're going to get from there is completely different depending on when you go. And I mean, summer obviously is the busiest time to go there, and I went there plenty of times in summer. And when you get there in summertime, you're going to see just a very broad representation of Americans. Many people go to Mount. Millions of people go to Mount Rushmore every year. And in the summertime, you're going to see families, you're going to see veterans, you're going to see foreign visitors. A lot of people from India go there, actually. And so you're going to see a pretty. And one of the things that always strikes me about Mount Rushmore, I mean, I do think that there is a sense that a lot of the visitors are pretty representative of slices of the United States. It could be pretty diverse in ways that I was not quite expecting when you go there. So you'll see a ton of visitors. You will see park rangers, you'll see people who are, like I said, veterans of foreign wars who are there. You'll get a lot of sort of the kind of kitschy Americana that you're used to in some of these sites. Keystone, South Dakota, which is the town that is closest to Mount Rushmore, is chock full of tourist traps, whether for eating or for drinking or for trinkets or what have you. So you'll get that flavor as well. And in the summertime, at the very least, you really do get the sense that this is kind of an overwhelming tourist attraction. And that changes a bit in other seasons. I mean, fall is my favorite time of year to be there. The weather in the Black Hills is usually just gorgeous. The crowds are a little bit more thinned out in the wintertime. I actually really love going to Rushmore in the wintertime because no one's there, and it's Usually very cold. The sculpture itself just sort of feels different because usually there's a gray sky and a wind and just really offers a moment of more contemplation and introspection than I think the other months do. So I think it depends on when you go. And really, the emotions or feelings that Rushmore evoke obviously depends on what you're doing there and whose perspective you want to inhabit and what you think about the fact that Rushmore is there and what you think about its representation of American democracy, all that stuff. But generally speaking, what it's meant to invoke in people is a sense of awe and is a sort of sense of patriotism in our country. And I think for the right. Sometimes it plays the right notes, and it can definitely do that in people.
- [22:25]
Stephen
It's true. This is such a cliche to say, but I think it really rings true for Mount Rushmore. The place is a real kind of Rorschach test that you look at it and you see sort of whatever it is that you are primed to see, at least at the outset. And then when you start to dig beneath the surface, I think that some real kind of truths and complexities come out. But, I mean, you were talking about seeing all kinds of people at Mount Rushmore from all kinds of backgrounds. And it's the kind of place where, especially if you go during peak season, you're just as likely to see someone in, like, a MAGA hat as you are wearing one of those shirts you get at gift shops that say, like, original Homeland Security, with a picture of, like, four Native Americans on horseback holding rifles, like, right next to each other at the exact same place. Like, it's. It really is this kind of cross section zone of North America and the United States and the world. Really.
- [23:11]
Matthew Davis
It is. And I think Rushmore has become more MAGA over the years, ever since Trump spoke on July 3, 2020. And I think that's undeniable. But it's also not strictly a MAGA place, and we can get into that maybe a little bit later, I think. But there is really a wide cross section of people that are there. And obviously, people don't wear their political beliefs on their sleeves unless they're literally wearing political paraphernalia. But I think that just from an appearance standpoint, in terms of young, old, different colors, different kinds of accents even, I think you are getting a pretty broad visual representation of the United States.
- [24:01]
Stephen
Well, let's get into the history of this place a bit. And I want to ask you, you know, admittedly this is too big a question for one short answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway. And that is, what's the deep history of this place? Who has lived in the Black Hills historically? Who lived there prior to, say, the late 19th century? And what kind of meaning did they make of this place?
- [24:28]
Matthew Davis
Well, there have been many different Native American tribes who have called the Black Hills home. I think, gosh, I'm forgetting the archaeological record here for a moment. But if memory serves, and Stephen, please correct me if I'm wrong, because I know you've done a lot of work on this, too. I think most archaeologists will say that people have lived in the Black Hills for tens of thousands of years. Maybe. Is it 15,000 years or is that too long? Well, the holidays have come and gone once again, but if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift. Well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless.
- [25:06]
Stephen
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- [25:07]
Matthew Davis
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- [25:11]
Stephen
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- [25:17]
Marshall Po
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- [25:19]
Stephen
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- [25:23]
Matthew Davis
Per month when network is busy.
- [25:24]
Stephen
See terms. No, I think it's about 15,000. And it's the kind of date that new archaeological records are constantly pushing back as well. So it's really one of those places where the time immemorial sort of Norman or, you know, phrase really kind of fits because it's like 15,000 years, maybe even more. You know, we'll talk again sometime later and we'll probably be 20,000 years at that point.
- [25:45]
Matthew Davis
Yeah, yeah. So that gives you a sense for how long people have lived in the Black Hills. I think when you're Talking about the 19th century, who you're talking about is really the Lakota, who at the time that the United States was interested in the Black Hills, were really the predominant Native American tribe, not just in the hills, but in the broader Great Plains and for the Lakota and for many other tribes in the area, but the Lakota specifically, you know, the Black Hills were, as they call it, the heart of everything. That is right. It was the central location for them spiritually, practically. I mean, their origin story is from there. I mean, they believe they entered the earth through Wind Cave, and Wind Cave is now a national park. In the southern stretch of the Black Hills. But it's that kind of cosmological connection to the hills that the Lakota have, and it's an incredibly spiritual place for them. Lots of sacred landmarks are in the hills or very close by. In a very practical place, too. I mean, so much of food, fauna, or sorry, not fauna, food, clothing, medicine was taken from the hills and utilized in the hills. And I think that's a really vital point of conversation for the larger history of Mount Rushmore. And I think that specifically for Rushmore itself, I want to say that there are about 20 tribes that sort of claim historical affiliation with that area. But obviously, if you're going back 15,000 years, what that tells you is that just people have lived in and been a part of the hills for hundreds of years, and the American part of the story is only the most recent part of the story.
- [27:47]
Stephen
Well, let's talk about that American part of the story. I delineated kind of pre. Late 19th century a moment ago. What changes in the late 19th century? How does this place fall into American hands?
- [28:02]
Matthew Davis
So this is where gold comes in in 1874? Well, it's important to take a little bit of a step back and just say, as the United States, as we all know, was trying to push west, there was a little bit of a hiccup with the Civil War when things were way more focused on the east and the war that was between the Confederacy and the United States. But after the Civil War, there was again, sort of a little bit of a push west to. To try to settle military forts, to settle Americans, to really take advantage of what people were finding in different sections of the country with regards to gold and other minerals. And the area where the Lakota inhabited was no exception to that. And there were a lot of American military forts and American immigrants who were trying to settle on Lakota land. And the Lakota, led by the great leader Red Cloud and the military leader Crazy Horse, began to attack those forts and those Americans. And quite frankly, the United States could not defeat the Lakota. And so they had to sort of sue for peace. And what came of that was the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which, among many, many other things, gave the Lakota a very wide swath of land that includes what is today all of western South Dakota, which includes the Black Hills, which includes, of course, Mount Rushmore. And what's key to this treaty is not only the land that was given, but there are strict rules about who was allowed to enter that land. And no Americans were allowed to enter the land that was given to the Lakota. The only ones who could were representatives, official representatives of the United States government. And so what happens is, in 1874, just a short six years after that treaty was signed, George Armstrong Custer leads a military expedition through the Black Hills. And the reason that's given is because they're looking for a military fort, a place to put up a military fort. But everyone knows that the real reason why Custer is there is to try to find gold. The United States has just entered its kind of initial Great Depression, and there's a sense that gold would not only offer practical outcomes in terms of money, but also morale outcomes in terms of boosting national morale. And so Custer leads the first expedition of white Americans, or white people, I should say, through the Black Hills. And his company does. His expedition does find gold. They don't find a lot of it, but they find enough hints of it to create a massive gold rush into the Black Hills. And Ulysses S. Grant, who's the president at the time, he actually had done a pretty commendable job of disallowing Americans to enter the hills. He was sticking to the treaty. He said it was illegal to go in. But when gold was found and there was a huge clamoring to get in there to try to find out what else was there, he just kind of threw up his hands and said, okay, well, we'll let miners go in. What this means is that we're going to have to put all the Native Americans on reservations, because otherwise there'll be just a ton of conflict. And so he orders the military to put Native Americans on federally run reservations, and that those who refuse to go peacefully should be basically rounded up and put there forcefully. And so that's where you get the second really important element to the story, which involves Custer. Again, Custer is leading his seventh Calvary in June 1876 to get these recalcitrant Native Americans onto reservations. And he encounters a lot of Lakota Northern Cheyenne in Montana, what is today present day Montana, at the Battle of Little Bighorn, which the Native Americans call the Battle of Greasy Grass. And Custer obviously loses that battle badly. He dies. A lot of his seventh calvary is wiped out. It's a really, really wonderful victory for the Lakota, but it kind of comes with a bitter edge, because when the United States learns what happens, they are outraged and they feel the Lakota have broken the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie and they want revenge. And so they take over the hills and annex them just a short couple months later in early 1877. And so from that moment on, the Black Hills are occupied, taken over by the United States. And it's this. And we can get to this later, potentially. But. But that moment is so important for the larger story of Mount Rushmore, because the Lakota have maintained for over 100 years that the United States broke that treaty illegally, took the land, and quite frankly, the American legal system has agreed with them. And it's a real. Not just point of contention for the Lakota, but a real sense of identity and political identity in particular, that this treaty that had given them this land was. Was. Was. Was broken.
- [33:14]
Stephen
Well, I want to jump over some. Some history here and bring us to the kind of early decades of the 20th century so that we can zoom in on Mount Rushmore itself. You know, that's all really important context for understanding the, you know, why Mount Rushmore becomes this kind of contentious and complex place. Something I want to circle back to later, but let's talk about this mountain and this monument. So in the early decades of the 20th century, where does this idea come from? What are the origins of Mount Rushmore as a monument? Where do they emerge from?
- [33:49]
Matthew Davis
So this is my favorite part of the story, because they emerge not from the federal government, not from the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, but they emerge from the South Dakota State historian, Doane Robinson, who is kind of a Renaissance man. He's a lawyer, he's a journalist. He's interested in the kind of alfalfa that farmers are growing, interested in the design of the South Dakota State flag, of the kinds of bridges that are being built over the Missouri River. But at this time period, in the early 1920s, Doane Robinson is very concerned about his state's economy. There was a huge boom in South Dakota during World War I, when European markets were trashed because of the war, and American markets took their place. And so South Dakota's economy really went skyrocketing. But when World War I ended and European markets healed and American commodities and agriculture weren't as needed worldwide, it slumped and tanked. And really, South Dakota and other Midwestern states entered the Great Depression about a decade before the rest of the United States. And so Dylan Robinson is sitting there seeing all this, and he's trying to conjure a way that South Dakota can diversify its economy. And he lands on tourism. He thinks that with the number of car tourists that are driving around this region now, that automobiles are becoming more affordable, more popular, he thinks that what South Dakota should do is to carve sculptures into the Western South Dakota, Black Hills into the Black Hills that are representative of the American West. So sculptures that represent figures like the great Lakota leader Red Cloud, or Custer, or Lewis and Clark or Sacagawea. These are the ideas that Doane Robinson has. And. And he thinks that by carving these sculptures in the hills, you will really create a tourist attraction that these drivers will want to go to. And while they're there, spend money in the other Black Hills towns, spend nights in hotels in the area. And, boy, was he a visionary, because that's exactly what has happened 100 years later. Mount Rushmore generates millions of dollars for the western half of South Dakota and millions of visitors every summer, every year. And so, for me, what's interesting about this origin story is that it's very economic centric, and it's very apolitical in a way. I mean, there's not a sort of more grandiose idea beyond carving these figures and getting people to go there. And that's the initial idea of Russian war. But that changes when Gunston Borglum is hired to sculpt these figures.
- [36:26]
Stephen
Right? Which brings us to Gutzon Borglum himself, the kind of indelible figure of Black Hills, or, excuse me, of Mount Rushmore lore. For better or for worse. Let's talk about Borglum. Who was Gutzon Borglum? What was his personality? And to kind of put a finer point on the question, what does his idea for the monument and how it differs from Robinson's, what does it kind of tell us about the meaning behind Mount Rushmore?
- [36:57]
Matthew Davis
Borglum is one of the more fascinating characters that I've ever come across. He's born in what is today Idaho. He's born in a Mormon family. His parents were immigrants from Denmark who were Mormon, and his father married two sisters, and Gunson was born to the younger of the two sisters. And in Mormon Idaho, that was totally fine. But as the family moved further and further east for work, that became both legally and problematic, and it became culturally problematic. And so, at a certain point, when Gunsen Borglum's a young boy, his birth mom is forced to leave the family, and he never sees her again, which is an incredibly traumatic experience. And he spends the rest of his childhood mostly in the middle part of the United States. He has formal schooling, but not a ton. He doesn't really have a ton of formal art training, but he's obviously this very talented, very curious, very determined boy and young man. And his big sort of moment comes when his family moves to Los Angeles, which is a very youthful city at that time, and he becomes much more focused on artwork and finds a teacher who will eventually become his first wife. She's much older than he is. He also finds patrons who encourage him to travel to Europe and study art more formally there, which he does. And so he studies in Europe, Studies maybe too strong of a word. He lives in Europe and just sort of through osmosis, takes in what he's experiencing there. And the most important person for him in this period is the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rodin's personality as an iconoclast was something Borglum really admired, and his ideas behind sculpture was something that Borglum really admired. And Borglum left the United States a painter, came back as a sculptor. And throughout the early part of the 20th century, Borglum's one of the United States more prominent monument sculptors. He's doing a lot of different monument work. And eventually he gets asked to carve the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial outside of Atlanta, Georgia. And this is really a huge inflection point for Borglums life and really influences Mount Rushmore. Borglum was asked to go there in November, excuse me, asked to go there in the summer of 1915 and accepted the commission. And a few months after he did, the Ku Klux Klan is reborn on top of Stone Mountain. And the clan has a deep influence in this memorial that's being built. And Borglan has a deep relationship with the Ku Klux Klan. Now, there's nothing I've seen that say that Borglum officially joined or downed a row, but he was certainly very friendly with its leadership, and he was certainly very willing to introduce those leaders to national American politicians. And Borglum also adhered to a lot of the clan ideology at that time, which was very anti immigrant, anti Semitic, anti Catholic. There were a lot of these beliefs that Borglum himself had. And. And I don't want to paint Borglum as sort of this with too broad of a bigoted brush, because one of the things that he deeply valued was the role of the individual. He was for individuals against governments, corporations, large art organizations. And so he championed these individual rights. And he was a big admirer of the United States of America, its political project. And sort of what it represented as what he envisioned was kind of the apotheosis of Western civilization. And so his personality was very abrasive. He was someone that by all accounts was very difficult to work with and to work for. He was also a great family man, valued his family a great deal, was a very talented artist. But he embodies so many of our contradictions as a country in many ways. And he was asked to carve Mount Rushmore in 1924. He was asked by Doane Robinson. Doane Robinson had first approached this Chicago based sculptor named Laredo Taft, who turned Robinson down. So Robinson turned his eyes to Borglum. And Borglum loved the idea from the start, and he loved it for a lot of reasons, but one of them was he was working at Stone Mountain at the time and he had the idea to really try to unify the country through a Southern memorial and a Northern memorial. And that was really what he wanted to do. Well, in 1925, Borglum was fired by the Stone Mountain Memorial association over financial disputes. The KKK was hoping. I mean, it's such a bizarre story, Stephen, but basically the US treasury was printing a coin to honor the Confederacy of the United States. And the money from that coin was going to be given to the Stone Mountain Memor association, which was ostensibly the kkk. And the KKK wanted Borglum to take. They didn't want him to be as ambitious in his sculpture than he had wanted to be. And they said, listen, we'll give you x thousands of dollars if you can just do a minor sculpture and we'll take the rest of the money. And so the KKK wanted to be funded by the federal government, but Borglum refused. And he said, no, I had this vision, I want to do this. And so they fired him. And when Borglum learns that he's fired In February of 1925, he smashes the Stone Mountain Memorial models that he had created. The Memorial association gets wind of this and sends police officers to arrest him. And there's this amazing scene where Borglum is being chased by police officers on a February night in Georgia, and he's trying to escape into South Carolina before he's arrested. And he does. He escapes, eventually gets to North Carolina, where he sort of of literally receives refuge from the governor there. He's a wanted fugitive from Georgia, but he's in North Carolina. And six months after that, he's on top of Mount Rushmore, dedicating the memorial for the first time. And his vision of Mount Rushmore changes because of his being fired from Stone Mountain. I mean, now there's less talk about unity and more talk about this idea of American empire and sort of building something that is not just a tourist attraction, but that represents what in his mind is the greatest political system ever created in the form of the United States of America. And so he literally wants to build an homage to American empire, American exceptionalism and American Democracy in the Black Hills.
- [43:58]
Stephen
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot in Borglum that, to put it mildly, I would say, I do not admire. But he's a fascinating character, and anyone that's writing about the Black Hills, you can't help help but encounter him. And the stories that spin out from his life are just wild. I'm so glad that we got to talk about his flee from the law in Georgia. That's a story I like to tell because it's pretty unbelievable.
- [44:22]
Matthew Davis
It's crazy. It's crazy. And I think the other thing that's crazy about it, too, is, like I said, just the timing of all this. Right. I mean, it's the fact that just six months later, he's dedicating Mount Rushmore. And the other thing that we can talk about maybe later on, too. But just like the fact that none of that history is at all mentioned in Mount Rushmore is. It's totally excised. They do not want people to know that Borglan was a fugitive from the law, that he was deeply involved in the kkk, that he was working on Stone Mountain. All that stuff is absent from Mount Rushmore. And it's a real problem, in my opinion, because I think literally, without Stone Mountain, there is no Mount Rushmore.
- [45:02]
Stephen
Well, let's talk a little bit about the process of. Of building the memorial itself. How do you carve a mountain? How was Mount Rushmore actually built and constructed? Who's involved in that process? And what did that process? What did it actually do in the work entail?
- [45:21]
Matthew Davis
So it took an incredible amount of faith for this project to go forward. Excuse me, to go forward and to happen. I mean, if you look at pictures of Mount Rushmore before construction began, you're really hard pressed to envision what it would become. But Borglum had a vision, and he learned at Stone Mountain that the best way to attack a mountain was through dynamite. And so he began to blow off different parts of the mountain to get a carvable granite. And Borglum had models in mind for what he wanted the mound to look like. He created them through sculpture. And I think this is the important part in terms of the actual process of the construction of Mount Rushmore, because Borglum today, you would use technology to get at and understand how you would measure and what is in the mountain, do environmental studies, all this stuff. Those are not available to him. So he uses a classic system called the pointing system, which is literally used to build so many monuments in antiquity. And he wants to build faces that are about 60ft big. And so to do that, he has to have a model that's about six feet tall. And so he literally builds these models that are six feet tall and transposes every inch of the model to a foot on the mountain. And he starts with the nose of George Washington and sort of goes from there to blast, to drill. I mean, the people who are working on this memorial, there are two different kinds of workers. The workers on the mountain, who are the sculptors and the carvers and the dynamiters. And even there were young men, young boys in these winch houses who would be responsible for lowering these men on chairs to carve the mountain. And when the people needed to go up, they would shout, up. And the winch house boys would pull them up, down if they needed to go down. It is such a crazy process, Stephen. And the fact that a lot of the people that worked there tended to be from the area. Many of them were unemployed minors. Many of them were ranchers, local ranchers who needed extra work. And so there were not, you know, they had no real background in art or in engineering or even in carving. I mean, so it's kind of, you know, what they had a lot of was gumption. Because what was so fun for me is to read some of the oral histories around these workers at Mount Rushmore who would emphasize that it was not for everyone. Some people were really too afraid to go into these chairs and dangle hundreds of feet above the ground and carve. But that's what you had to do. And the process was laborious. It was not a smooth process. There were errors that were made. The initial vision of Mount Rushmore was to have Jefferson to the left of Washington, not to his right. And so there was an error that had to be covered over there. There were different parts of different faces that needed to be redone. I think what you clearly see, from what I've heard, is that the first two faces, Washington and Jefferson, there were a lot more errors on those faces than there are on Roosevelt and Lincoln, the last two faces. And that's because they learned how to do this a lot better. And also because I think there was more photographic representation of the two older men. So they had a better idea of what they wanted to do. But primarily just the process of doing it became something that they became more comfortable with.
- [48:59]
Stephen
You know, you were talking about the workers a moment ago, and something that I've been really amazed by in my own research on Rushmore and the Black Hills is just the sense of pride that these workers had. I mean, you know, you have a lot of these people in their old age. They'll be talking to newspapers or giving interviews and talking about how this is sort of the. The kind of centerpiece of their life. Looking back on it, in some cases, these are very old men who are like. Like, you know, dying of silicosis that they got from breathing in air at Mount Rushmore that was being, you know, blasted off of the mountain and into their lungs. And they're talking about how this was something that, you know, they'll. They're on their deathbed, and they're so proud that they had a role to play in this. So it's a real point of pride for these people to have gotten this job in the midst of the Great Depression and have created this lasting monument.
- [49:45]
Matthew Davis
That's right. Yeah. I think that's it. And there was. There was a real sense of camaraderie and Bohemy, if I'm reading some of the oral histories. Right. I mean, not for everyone. I think there were famously, Borglum orchestrated and organized a baseball team. Mount Rushmore baseball team. There were. One of my favorite stories that I read about was some workers snuck onto Porglums Ranch and, like, stole a couple cattle to have a barbecue with some of the workers. So these were young men, in many cases, working on this mountain. And I'm sure there was a lot of friendship and hijinks that ensued, and certainly a point of pride as well.
- [50:33]
Stephen
So as we approach the end of our conversation here, and there's so much more we could talk about. I mean, I think we're both kind of, again, to use a modern phrase, kind of Black Hills pilled at this point. So something that we could both just talk about. Endless. But I don't want to keep it for too much longer. But I did want to talk a little about Mount Rushmore today in the late 20th and here in the early 21st century, and how and why Mount Rushmore is such a complex place today. So I'm trying to frame this as a question. Why is Mount Rushmore such a complex place today? How does the place. Or does it reconcile its different complex meanings, Things, if that's a question.
- [51:19]
Matthew Davis
No, it is the question, because I think what you have. I mean, listen. So for the first parts of Rushmore's existence, it was a pretty uncomplicated place. And it became to be more complicated as our understanding of history grew, certainly as Native American political consciousness became more to the forefront. There have been protests at Russian war in 1970 and beyond with the American Indian movement. And other organizations. I think the biggest thing is just the real sense of. To go back to the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, how that was broken. And in 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the United States illegally took the Black Hills and ordered the United States to pay the Lakota $102 million, which the Lakota refused to take because they want the land back. And that money has occurred, accrued to over a billion dollars today. And still they don't want the money, they want the land. And that just is one element to its complexity. And the other complexity to this is just what the memorial signifies, what it represents and what stories it tells. And I first saw Mount Rushmore in the spring of 2000, and at that time, there was really nothing at the memorial that talked about the Native history of Mount Rushmore. And Gerard Baker was the first superintendent of Mount Rushmore. Sorry, first Native American superintendent of Mount Rushmore in 2004. And when he got the job, with the support of the National Park Service, he began to change that, and he began to introduce sort of not just native history to Mount Rushmore, but native culture, native stories. And I think it really widened the aperture in a way that Mount Rushmore needed to. And you can't visit Rushmore today without getting some part of that story. But the question is whether that's enough that's going on there, whether it really tells the full story of Mount Rushmore. And to do that, I mean, this was always Baker's argument, and I had some wonderful conversations with him for writing this book. His argument was always that if you're going to tell the Rushmore story properly, people are going to leave upset because it's an upsetting story. How the Black Hills came to be in American hands, what happened after they came to be in American hands in terms of the taking of more Native American land, the placing of Native American children in Indian boarding schools, residential boarding schools, the massacres that took place like a Wounded Knee, which is not too far from Mount Rushmore. That has to be part of. Of your telling. And there's certainly, under this Trump administration, there is no desire to sort of tell those deeper stories. And many people ask the question, well, why tell those stories? And why can't we just have a place that is uncomplicated, that's there in the hills that we can see and feel patriotic about and enjoy? And I think for people that want that, then perhaps Rushmore can be that uncomplicated place. But I think for many of us, and I think this is True for all, not all, but for many Americans, people want that full story of the history so they can make their own kinds of decisions. And I think that that's really what, in my opinion, could make Mount Rushmore even more extremely. What's the word I'm looking for? It can make it even more extremely complicated, but also important to really these fraught discussions we're having as a country right now about our history. I mean, there's a real opportunity. I think that was the word I was looking for. There's a real opportunity for Rushmore to embrace so much of. Of not just the history, because the history, in my opinion, is not that complex. It's pretty clear cut. You don't have to do a lot of digging to understand what happened to the Hills and what happened to the Lakota and what happened to the United states in the 19th century and beyond. But the emotions behind those histories are incredibly complicated, especially in the Black Hills. So it could be a place where you can have all that and let people sort of struggle with those and come to their own conclusions. And so, I mean, in terms of thinking forward for the memorial, I would love to see it become such a place like that, where people really have to wrestle with the great sides of our country and the not so great sides of our country and to sort of understand that it's okay to have that kind of complexity and, and maybe it should be there at Mount Rushmore, which, as we talked about at the beginning of this conversation, does reflect so much of the myths of American history.
- [56:31]
Stephen
I want to ask you, as again, we begin to wrap up here, just one question about the future of Mount Rushmore, because I feel like the future of the mountain and the monument is constantly being bandied about. I mean, as I spent. Spent 20, 24, 25 as a research fellow at Mount Rushmore, I flew out there about once a month from my home on the east coast and, you know, had made relationships with people at the Park Service that work there and just people in the community generally. And walking around the monument, you know, either if you're with Park Service officials, they'll get asked this question, or you'll just hear people talking about it amongst themselves, you know, oh, are they gonna. Are they gonna carve Trump's face up on the mountain as a fifth face on Mount Rushmore? And then. And on the flip side to that, you'll find some activists, native and non native alike, who talk about blasting the faces off of Mount Rushmore entirely and getting them off of there. So the future of the monument is something that is bandied about quite a bit. And so while I'm not going to ask you to make predictions because who the heck knows what's going to happen, what do you see as possible futures for the monument? Or maybe a better question is what would you hope to see for the future of the monument? And you touched on this a moment ago, but maybe elaborate a bit more.
- [57:44]
Matthew Davis
So very briefly. Most geologists, as you know, Stephen, say there's no room for a fifth phase, but that has not stopped Trump from doing things like wrecking the east wing of the White House. You can see situation where that might happen, blowing it off the mountain, that also could potentially happen. I think that what I would like to see is a little bit of an extension for what I was talking about earlier. And, and honestly, the best idea that I've heard came from someone I was talking to in Rapid City not too long ago last month. And their idea was just to stop managing it, to let the memorial just fade, to have a lot of interpretive programs there that talk about how Mount Rushmore came to be, its place in the Black Hills, the history of the Black Hills, the history we just were talking about between, you know, the Lakota and the United States, why the memorial was built, what it was supposed to represent, what it could represent, and just sort of have it be a place that, as I was saying a moment ago, can really reflect so many of the complicated, contentious emotions behind the history of this place. And, and I don't know if that would ever happen. I think that would be a scenario where you would have to have so many different stakeholders agree to something like that. But I think that that would be something that I would be, when someone told me about this idea they had, I would be very interested in sort of seeing that occurrence and I think.
- [59:34]
Stephen
As a long term goal, kind of a stretch goal that seems not completely outside the realm of possibility. And I think that Mount Rushmore and the people that work there are really trying in a difficult set of circumstances. I mean, it's a place that is so politically loaded and fraught and anything that they do is so under the microscope. And I'm sure, or I would imagine that you recently, having visited there, have seen the new video that they show in the sort of visitor center about the history of the place, which is such an improvement over the old, old Tom Brokaw narrated one that they used to have as of even like two years ago. So I think that there's moves, slow, halting, tentative moves in the direction that you are describing.
- [60:15]
Matthew Davis
I'm glad you mentioned that because I totally agree. I mean, the old video was terrible.
- [60:19]
Stephen
It was so bad. Oh, my goodness, I could not believe it.
- [60:22]
Matthew Davis
This one is better. But I think it's still, you know, I think it still comes up short. Right. Like I said a moment ago, there's. I am done with the. I think it does a better job of contextualizing the mountain in terms of Native history and how it came to be in American hands. But I'm tired of the lionization of Gunsen Borglum and of his work on Mount Rushmore. I think that is still so prominent in the story that Rushmore tells itself, that it really does it a disservice in its historical whitewashing. And that's the next frontier for me, is to sort of. Of be able to sort of come to terms with who Borglum was politically and especially his work again at Stone Mountain, and sort of, you know, listen, I don't think that artists are complicated people, and not all fantastic artists are good people, but I think that to sort of disregard the politics behind all this stuff is just a missed opportunity.
- [61:28]
Stephen
Well, on that point, I want to ask one of my kind of summary, sort of concluding questions that I ask all of my guests, and that is to imagine yourself rather than as the writer of this book, instead, as someone who has read this book and maybe puts it away, back on their bookshelf, and then returns to it or thinks back on it a few years later, a few years on down the line, what would you hope they come away from this book? Remembering or understanding?
- [61:55]
Matthew Davis
So I think two things. One, first, a lot of our discussion has centered on the really wonderful area of the Black Hills and its complicated history. And I'd love for people to understand that a lot better. But I think more broadly speaking, too, I think the biggest takeaway I'd love people to get is that even though our national memorials and monuments are either carved into granite or made of marble or concrete, these really solid materials, that their meanings are not static and that they evolve a great deal. And to sort of reflect on that. The reasons why memorials are created oftentimes speak more about the times in which they were created, rather than the times that they are made to represent. And what that means is that those histories change as we change. Our interpretations of those histories change as we evolve. And that whether it's Mount Rushmore or the Lincoln Memorial or the Vietnam Memorial, these memorials, these monuments do shift as our perceptions shift. And that's great. That's how it should be, embracing complication.
- [63:04]
Stephen
Basically, and coming away from this book feeling like even a place that on its surface is so apparently simplistic, or is trying to be simplistic as Mount Rushmore really cannot be and should not be.
- [63:15]
Matthew Davis
Yes.
- [63:17]
Stephen
For my last question before I let you go, Matt, you're a writer by trade, and I know this book has not been out for very long, but I always like to get a preview from my guests of any projects that they might have coming down the line. I know you have a lot going on in your life right now, but is there anything that you've been working on or that you plan to work on that you'd like to talk a bit about?
- [63:39]
Matthew Davis
Yeah, my next big project is to make sure that we all get to. We're moving to London in a couple weeks. So my next big project is to make all of our stuff, all of my kids and all of our things get to London in one piece in a few weeks. But after that, I'm not quite 100% sure. I'm thinking that there will be another project for me in the Black Hills that I'm working on with a potential co author, but that's in its very early stages and without having his approval a little bit loathe. Talk more about that.
- [64:14]
Stephen
That. Well, if that comes to fruition, I always like to have fellow Black Hills heads on the show, so maybe we'll have you both on the podcast to talk about it.
- [64:24]
Matthew Davis
That sounds great. Well, thank you, Stephen. This has been a wonderful conversation. I'm looking forward to your own work, and it was so much fun to talk with someone who has such a great understanding of the issues that the book was exploring.
- [64:37]
Stephen
Oh, thank you so much, Matt. And just to send you on your way, let me just remind everyone that I've been talking with Matthew Davis, who is a writer whose work has appeared all over the place in the New Yorker and the LA Review of Books, among other outlets. He served for seven years, first as the founder and then as the director of the Alan Choose International Writers center at George Waste University. And we've been discussing his most recent book, which is called A Biography of a the Making and meaning of Mount Rushmore, which came out earlier this year in 2025 with St. Martin's Press. Thank you so much for joining me today, Matt. It's been a pleasure. Pleasure.
- [65:10]
Matthew Davis
Thanks so much.