The carving of Mount Rushmore

1927–1941 · Event

Four hundred workers with dynamite and jackhammers cut four 18-metre presidents into a granite cliff in the Black Hills of South Dakota — land the Lakota hold sacred and never ceded, which keeps the monument argued over as fiercely as it is photographed. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum died months before the money ran out; the faces were declared finished as they stood.