Mount Rushmore, South Dakota

Mount Rushmore was pretty amazing. It seemed smaller than you see in postcards but still pretty amazing. Mount Rushmore was originally thought of by Doane Robinson as a way to put South Dakota on the map.  Originally he wanted to carve local heroes into the mountain, but Gutzon Borglum vetoed that and decided that it would be better to carve the presidents as something that really represented America. He spent over a month looking around the Black Hills for the right mountain to carve in. After a while he set his eyes on Rushmore because it was a relatively flat cliff face, with few cracks, and it was soft granite which he decided would make the perfect place. Originally he was planning to do all of his carving by hand or with air powered drills until several local minors told him that it would take him several lifetimes to do the project he was planning by hand. They recommended blasting with dynamite. Originally Gutzon Borglum had assumed that blasting would just destroy the mountain, and you wouldn't have anything even close to a face. Then he learned about a thing called precision blasting. This is where you drill a hole in a certain depth and insert the proper amount of explosive then when you light it off you get a crudely

honeycombed shape.  When you chipped away the pieces that needed to be chipped you still had faces, but they were covered in little dimples that would be noticeable from the ground, and made it look like someone had slapped a golf ball on Rushmore. Seeing this, Borglum decided to use various small drills and sanders to remove all of the dimples, and that is what made the faces look so lifelike. The entire project took 14 years and 28 days to complete. The workers however didn't work every single day, and they almost never worked in the winter.  Surprisingly through this entire ordeal no one ever died. Some of the workers died of silicosis, (a disease from all of the granite dust in their lungs,) well after the project was complete, but during the actual blasting and carving no fatalities occurred.  Unfortunately Gutzon Borglum never lived to see the completion of his masterpiece, and he died almost 6 months before it was completed, and the project had to be taken over by his son.
Next Stop: Homestake Gold Mine