In the Shadow of Mount Rushmore

Residents of Keystone, S.D. (pop. 311), love the craggy mountain ridges and the pine and spruce forests surrounding their Black Hills home. They appreciate the town’s colorful history of gold, feldspar, and tin mining. But when it comes to pride, nothing tops Keystone’s reverence for nearby Mount Rushmore, three miles southwest of town.

That’s because the quartet of 60-foot heads—of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln—carved high into mountain granite, might not exist except for the blasting skills of Keystone’s gritty hard-rock miners 70 years ago.

Widely known sculptor Gutzon Borglum began creating the presidential likenesses with drills and dynamite in 1927. That same year, Bob Hayes was born. He grew up watching the sculpture take form as his father, the late Ed Hayes, assisted Borglum.

“Dad went to work at Mount Rushmore in 1932 for 35 cents an hour,” Hayes recalls, adding that the wage was contingent on his father supplying his own pick, shovel, and wheelbarrow. “Eventually he ran the hoist for a tramway that took supplies up to the mountain top, and later it carried carvers up, too. Once in a while I’d ride it so I could watch them work.”

In addition to the granite outcrop that was a sculptor’s dream, Keystone offered a work force of seasoned miners who knew how to cut through the hardest rock or blast away stone with precise dynamite charges. Between 1927 and 1941, thanks mostly to federal funding secured by South Dakota’s congressional delegation, nearly 400 workers found jobs helping create Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

“A good share of them had local mining experience,” says Hayes, a retired mining and safety engineer. “They usually lived right here, because people didn’t commute to work long distances like they do now. For the most part, I think they didn’t learn to appreciate what they brought about until years later.”

As work on the giant sculpture progressed, Keystone transformed itself from a mining town into a tourism town. In the early 1930s, residents Josephine Hesnard and Rose Reddick began selling pretty souvenir rocks, soda, candy, and gasoline in an open-air building to visitors coming to see the giant faces taking shape outside of town. Other tourist businesses followed and a quiet residential avenue evolved into a bustling street lined with gift shops, eateries, and motels.

Visitors still can get a feel of Keystone’s bygone days by glimpsing old mine tailings on the surrounding hillsides, or strolling among vintage wood-frame buildings in the old part of town. But today the mines are history and tourism remains the town’s primary industry.

On a summer afternoon, cars and campers from across the nation ply State Highway 16A, a sightseeing helicopter whirs overhead, and a whistle blast announces the arrival of an antique steam locomotive delivering more visitors. Two bewhiskered cowboy actors walk the strip, firing blanks and snapping a bullwhip in announcing their re-enactment of an 1870s shootout. More than 2 million people pass through town annually, but Keystone entrepreneurs aren’t presumptuous enough to claim their businesses are the big draw. Credit goes to the granite faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln.

While some motels, restaurants, and retail shops remain open to travelers year-round, the helicopter and locomotive go silent before winter snows fall, and the cowboy actors head to Arizona. Then, townspeople say, the quiet seems to invite them to rediscover the best part of living in Keystone: the stunning natural world of trees and rock outcrops, most untouched by miners or sculptors.

Paul Higbee is a freelance writer in Spearfish, S.D.

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