Granite Faces in the Black Hills: Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial

Tucked into the rugged spires of South Dakota’s Black Hills, two massive monuments rise out of stone, telling stories carved not just into granite but into the legacy of America itself. One, almost universally recognized. The other, still in the making, its shape emerging slowly from the rock—but just as monumental in vision.

We started with the familiar: Mount Rushmore, a mountain transformed into the visages of four presidents who each shaped the American experiment in different ways—George Washington for founding it, Thomas Jefferson for expanding it, Abraham Lincoln for preserving it, and Theodore Roosevelt for conserving it. Their faces, 60 feet tall, look out over the pine-covered cliffs like sentinels of a young nation's bold ambition.

This stop wasn’t just another history lesson—it was a reunion. Over the past year, we’ve stepped through the front doors of Washington’s Mount Vernon, Jefferson’s Monticello, and Lincoln’s humble Kentucky cabin. We walked the trails that Roosevelt once rode in North Dakota, where grief and open skies began to forge the conservationist and reformer he became. And now, here we were, gazing up at all of them together, chiseled into granite.

But even stone tells stories of change. We learned that Jefferson's face was originally carved on the other side of Washington—until engineers had to blow it up and start again. Nothing, not even a monument this colossal, goes exactly to plan. The mountain, the weather, the money—each played its part. The carving stretched across decades, from the roaring ‘20s through the Great Depression and wrapped just before World War II. Adaptation is part of every legacy.

A short drive away, we encountered a different mountain story—one far less known, yet still unfolding. The Crazy Horse Memorial is massive. Not just in scale—though, yes, it will be much larger than Mount Rushmore when complete—but in meaning. It honors Crazy Horse, the Lakota leader who stood his ground at Little Bighorn and who famously declared he would "never be found in a white man's prison."

Carved without public money, Crazy Horse is a symbol not just of one man, but of all Native American nations. It’s a collective act of endurance, as tribes united behind a vision that could outlast them. When finished, Crazy Horse will sit atop a horse, his arm pointing over his ancestral lands. At 600 feet, it will be the largest sculpture in the world—an entire mountain becoming memory.

The kids peppered us with questions. “Didn’t Crazy Horse fight the people who built Mount Rushmore?” “How can we honor both sides?” “Why does it take so long to carve a mountain?” (That last one is fair—turns out carving a horse and warrior from solid granite without federal funds may take a century)

There were hard truths to sit with. We had just visited Little Bighorn, where Custer and his men were defeated—and killed—by the forces led in part by Crazy Horse. It was a moment of victory for the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho... and also a moment of tragedy, war, and inevitable loss. There’s no neat bow to tie on that chapter of history.

Yet in the Black Hills, you can feel the weight of both legacies. The granite doesn’t flinch from contradiction. Washington and Jefferson brought ideals of freedom but held others in bondage. Lincoln freed millions yet presided over a brutal war. Roosevelt protected wilderness while pushing westward expansion that displaced the very tribes Crazy Horse fought to protect.

As we stood there, looking up at the stone faces and the massive, unfinished horse across the hills, we were reminded of something FDR said when unveiling Mount Rushmore: "May the future give us the benefit of the doubt."

We don’t get to choose what future generations think of us—but we can choose what we remember, what we teach, and what kind of legacy we pass on.

And perhaps that’s why these monuments matter. Not because they are perfect, but because they help us remember. Because they give our children a chance to ask hard questions. Because they tell stories—of nation-building, of resistance, of triumph and tragedy—and they invite us to keep writing the next chapter.

The mountains will still be here when we’re long gone. But the stories, we hope, will live on.