Workers detonate the final charges on Mount Rushmore, completing a monument that used 450,000 tons of dynamited granite to carve the 60-foot faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Borglum, who died months earlier, never saw the finished work; his son Lincoln oversaw the final touches on land considered sacred by the Lakota Sioux.
Gutzon Borglum began work on Mount Rushmore in 1927 with a budget and timeline he blew through repeatedly, funded by a patchwork of federal appropriations pushed through by South Dakota's congressional delegation. The original plan called for full figures down to the waist; lack of money and stone quality forced the scaling back to just the faces.
Nearly 400 workers, mostly local miners skilled with dynamite, did the bulk of the removal — 90 percent of the mountain was carved away with explosives, with finer detail work done by jackhammers and hand chisels. Remarkably, no workers died during the fourteen years of blasting on a sheer granite cliff.
Borglum died in March 1941, leaving his son Lincoln to finish the project. When the last dynamite charges fell silent on October 31, the monument was never fully completed to Borglum's original vision — no bodies, no inscribed Declaration of Independence text he'd envisioned. It stands today on land seized from the Lakota after the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty was broken, a fact that makes the monument, for many, a monument to conquest as much as democracy.