75 years on, Mount Rushmore still a boon for tourism, creativity

It was a historian's idea: carve gigantic sculptures into the granite pinnacles of the Black Hills of South Dakota, significant Western figures like Lewis and Clark, Buffalo Bill Cody, Fremont, Red Cloud and Sacagawea.

"In the vicinity of Harney Peak ... are opportunities for heroic sculpture," South Dakota Department of History Superintendent Doane Robinson wrote to a sculptor in Georgia in 1924.

The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, redefined the project entirely. Using jackhammers and dynamite, he began in 1927, first sculpting President George Washington, then Thomas Jefferson, followed by Abraham Lincoln and finally Theodore Roosevelt.