Why Nobody Wants to Visit Mount Rushmore Anymore

In 1923, South Dakota's state historian Doane Robinson had a problem: tourists were driving past the Black Hills on their way to Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. His solution was the most expensive billboard ever built — a million-dollar sculpture carved into a mountain the U.S. government had seized from the Lakota Sioux just forty-six years earlier. The sculptor he hired, Gutzon Borglum, arrived fresh from a failed Confederate monument in Georgia and a documented association with the Ku Klux Klan. What followed was fourteen years of dynamite, Depression-era labor at eight dollars a day, chronic funding shortfalls, and an artistic vision that was never completed. Borglum died in 1941. The money ran out. The four presidential faces — originally planned as full torsos — were declared finished, and Mount Rushmore became the centerpiece of the great American road trip.For decades, the business model worked. Nearly three million visitors a year drove through Keystone, South Dakota, filled its hotels, and stood in the parking lot looking up. But Mount Rushmore's visitor numbers have been falling — down to 1.85 million in 2024, a drop of almost a quarter in a single year. The story behind the decline involves a 1980 Supreme Court ruling, a two-billion-dollar settlement the Sioux have never collected, a rival monument sixteen miles down the road, a parking garage run by a private corporation, National Park Service budget cuts, and a growing sense among Americans that the mountain they grew up admiring carries a history more complicated than any postcard ever suggested.This is the story of a tourist attraction that was always a business deal — and what happens when the deal stops making sense.Sources:Smithsonian Magazine — "The Making of Mount Rushmore" (2013) and "The Sordid History of Mount Rushmore" (2016)National Park Service — Mount Rushmore Memorial History, construction records, and visitor statistics (nps.gov/moru)PBS American Experience — profiles of Gutzon Borglum and Doane Robinson, including Borglum's Klan associations and Robinson's original tourism rationaleUnited States Supreme Court — United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980), full opinion and historical findings on the seizure of the Black HillsHoward Shaff and Audrey Karl Shaff — Six Wars at a Time: The Life and Times of Gutzon Borglum (1985), the primary biography documenting Borglum's correspondence with D.C. Stephenson and his involvement at Stone MountainRoadGenius / National Park Service Visitor Use Statistics — Mount Rushmore annual visitation and visitor spending data, 2008–2025