Books: "A Biography of a Mountain" by Matthew Davis

 

A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore

By Matthew Davis

St. Martin's Press; 336 pages, including one map and 8-page photo insert; hardcover, $30.00; EBook, $13.99; available today, Tuesday, November 11th

Matthew Davis is the author of When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Writer's Tale, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica. He has been an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, a Fellow at The Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, and a Fulbright Fellow to Syria and Jordan. 

Mount Rushmore is one of America's most treasured monuments, a sculpture in South Dakota that features the faces of four of America's greatest Presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.

In the insightful new book A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore, Davis shows it is much more than that, as he delivers a comprehensive history of it just in time for its 100th anniversary. He spent two years reporting and conducting research, in which he visited the Black Hills of South Dakota and the Great Plains, speaking with both Native and non-Native Americans, men and women, getting their perspectives, to bring this complicated and nuanced story of the mountain to life.

It has also been a political flashpoint in recent years, including a ban on fireworks there on the 4th of July, and whether they should be restarted for both environmental and cultural reasons, as well as legislation that has been introduced to include President Donald J. Trump on Mount Rushmore.

Davis illustrates how it has always been a symbol of American ideals, so much so they had three dedications within five years of its opening, starting with the first one on October 1, 1925, and the theme was Empire. The most remarkable part that day was how people got there, as the roads leading from Rapid City to Keystone. People walked or rode horses three miles to the base of the mountain, and were treated to an elk lunch.

The second dedication occurred on August 10, 1927, and it was for Patriotism, marked by a speech from President Calvin Coolidge, who spent the summer at Black Hills with his wife. Coolidge signed the federal legislation that funded, and ultimately saved, Mount Rushmore, which, Davis notes, was ironic because he was a fiscal conservative.

The third dedication was on July 4, 1930, where it was deemed The Shrine of Democracy. It also marked the revealing of George Washington's portrait, which was hidden under a 40-by-72-foot American flag. There were introductory remarks from the president of the new Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission, Joseph Cullinan. This commission had been legislatively enacted by Congress, with the potential for $250,000 in federal money, and jumpstart Mount Rushmore's construction. Progress was also visible in the five years since the first dedication, as there were graded roads from Rapid City to Keystone, and from the mining town to the memorial.

There is a reason this the most-debated monument in the United States. Gerard Baker, the first Native American superintendent of Mt. Rushmore, shared this sentiment about it with Davis, "Well, most people want to come to a national park and leave with that warm fuzzy feeling with an ice cream cone. Rushmore can't do that if you do it the right way. If you do it the right way people are going to be leaving pissed." Baker served from 2004 to 2009, and he forever altered the histories that are told at memorial. He is in poor health at the moment.

Davis also captures the Native American story, from the tragedy at Wounded Knee to the Land Back movement of today, alongside the narrative of the growing territory and state of South Dakota, particularly the economic and political forces that shaped the reasons for the Memorial's creation in the first place. 

There is also a focus on the horrors of Indian Boarding Schools, for which he Remembering the Children Memorial is being developed in Rapid City, South Dakota, honoring those who died there. The process of its development is far different than the creation of Mount Rushmore.

Gutzon Borglum's design and meaning of Mount Rushmore were fluid, as he didn't see monuments and memorials as static objects. However, because of him, there are heavy ties between Mount Rushmore and Stone Mountain, the Confederate Memorial built in Atlanta.  sculpted Rushmore and was the initial artist for Stone Mountain, and his links to the KKK, though known before, have a particular emphasis in this book.

In this excerpt, Davis writes that the inspiration for this book came after President Trumo visited Mount Rushmore on July 3, 2020: The early summer  had felt chaotic and existential, not solely because of the pandemic or the protests. Through debates over  American history and how to memorialize it, deep fissures in national identity were exposed, revealing a country unable - and in some quarters unwilling - to confront the darkness of our national past. So that night, providing his answer to those debates, President Trump gave a speech with a singular vision of American history, its narratives, and its role in our democracy. He had chosen Mount Rushmore as the setting, and when I read about the event, his speech's tenor and tone, I wondered what it was about the four granite faces that reflected his version of American history.

For most of my professional life, I had spent time living in, writing about, and working with countries and cultures different from my own. Mongolians. Syrians. Deaf American. When I founded an international literary organization in 2016, my attention often turned to writers across the world and the issues their prose and poetry explored. I wasn't uninterested in American history, politics, or culture, but I preferred gazing abroad instead of within.

The summer of 2020 altered my focus, and Trump's visit to Mount Rushmore captivated me. I did some cursory research: how Rushmore's place in the Black Hills of South Dakota has served as a point of pain for generations of Native Americans, especially those belonging to the Oceti Sakowin and the Lakota Nation; how its sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, was a famed though flawed artist with controversial politics and a combative personality; how Rushmore's construction was a publicly funded feat of engineering and endurance.

I would learn more in the coming years - rustle through archives and books; spend time in South Dakota and the Greater Plains; and, most importantly, hear the stories of women and men who have influenced Rushmore's evolving meaning today: an Ogala and Sicangu Lakota woman who leads an effort to remember the children who died in the Rapid City Indian Boarding School; the president of the Mount Rushmore Society whose family's roots in the Black Hills originate before Dakota statehood; the first Native American superintendent of Mount Rushmore; and the Oglala Lakota leader of an organization who champions the Land Back movement. Men and women who, that July 3 evening, as I sat on the patio with Laurel, were congregating in different ways in the Black Hills, an evening that would forever change their lives and that of the memorial.