“The Six Grandfathers”

It’s generally believed that Mt. Rushmore was an unremarkable pile of rock before the famous sculptures of presidents were done.

Gutzon Borglum and his son, Lincoln Borglum, did the work starting in 1927, and it was completed in 1941. The Borglums and their crews blasted more than 400,000 tons of stone off the face of the mountain in the Black Hills in Keystone, SD.

Here’s the unfamiliar back story: It wasn’t always called Mt. Rushmore (The granite bluff was named after Charles Rushmore, a wealthy New York lawyer, in 1885).

The Lakota Sioux name for the mountain had been “The Six Grandfathers” (Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe).

It’s too bad the federal government didn’t authorize carving their likenesses into the face of the bluff.

N.B. The image is of Mt. Rushmore in 1905.

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Book review: The Snow Goose

…sensual drama, it’s eminently poetic…

by Paul Gallico

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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,

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No one remembers “The Six Grandfathers”