Moving Mountains

“When people first see Mount Rushmore, most are shocked by its size, though not in the way they expect,” Matthew Davis writes in A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore. “Most find it smaller than their minds had conceived.”

I experienced the same disorientation when I first encountered the monument. The familiar sculpture called “Mount Rushmore” is only a small part of the mountain Mount Rushmore, which itself is only a small section of South Dakota’s Black Hills. It’s hard to keep the monument in perspective as a physical object; the image of the presidential faces is carved as deeply, if not more deeply, into each American imagination as it is into the billion-year-old granite.