Mount Rushmore

Jesse Larner
January 2002     ISBN: 1560254637

In this travel narrative combining extensive research with personal experience in the American West, Jesse Larner investigates the complex histories that have been edited out of the standard guidebooks and texts when it comes to telling the story of Mount Rushmore.

This includes the tale of how the land on which Rushmore stands was expropriated from the Lakota Sioux in 1877, abrogating a major treaty, as well as the story of the sculpture's creator and ideologue, Gutzon Borglum, a leader in the Ku Klux Klan, who saw in the expansion of European settlement across the American West the fulfillment of white racial destiny.

Rushmore is prefigured in the story of Custer, who sealed the fate of the Black Hills when he discovered gold there in 1874. Larner traces the meaning and evolution of the Custer battle commemorations, and pursues the ways in which Custer's defeat, the killings at Wounded Knee, and Rushmore, are linked in the story of the Indians' loss of the Black Hills.

Mt. Rushmore and the Romance of Conquest also traces modern political uses of the monument, from cold war television broadcasts to Boy Scout conventions to political campaigns. Larner examines Rushmore's semi-religious status as the national Shrine of Democracy, and contrasts this with political restrictions on the practice of Indian religions in the Black Hills.

Larner also explores previous works on Rushmore that have avoided its message of conquest, books that focus instead on a simplistic narrative of national glory.

Jesse Larner is a graduate of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He lives in New York City, where he translates avant-garde Polish poetry.