The News from Mount Rushmore

Does Native American Exhibit Belong at Mount Rushmore?

There aren’t any signs pointing Mount Rushmore visitors to the newest exhibit. Superintendent Gerard Baker prefers that visitors explore the national memorial’s grounds and discover the Native American heritage village on their own.

He isn’t going to tell them what to think of it, either, not like with the memorial’s museum that extols the greatness of the presidents enshrined on the mountain, and celebrates the feat of engineering that carved them into granite.

More than Rushmore: Take a South Dakota trip

CUSTER STATE PARK, South Dakota - The wild burro wouldn't take no for an answer.

We had already encountered grazing pronghorn antelope, packs of wild turkeys, prairie dogs, and enough bison to render us downright blase when yet another of the enormous beasts emerged on our four-day trip through the Black Hills of South Dakota.

But the snack-seeking donkeys were a tourist's dream, moseying up to the car window for a bite of carrots, Cheetos or whatever else was handy. The feeding frenzy is common in these parts: Moments later, a particularly assertive burro blocked our path down Wildlife Loop Road until we turned over more foodstuffs.

Eye of the Warrior

For the Lakota tribe of South Dakota, no ancestor is as important as Crazy Horse, who defeated General Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. So in 1948, when the tribe wanted to carve a likeness of the warrior astride a horse into a mountain in Black Hills National Forest, it hired sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who'd helped create parts of nearby Mount Rushmore.