Welcome to Mount Rushmore! My name is George Washington.
I'm Thomas Jefferson. My name is Abraham Lincoln.
And I'm Theodore Roosevelt. We are the presidents of Mount Rushmore.
Over fifty years ago, our faces were carved into these rocks here in the western state of South Dakota.
You may be asking how the four of us got here.
Well, that is a long story that began in December of 1923 with a man named Doane Robinson.
Doane Robinson was a true lover of American history.
His dream was to capture western American history in the rocks of South Dakota in a way that had never been done before.
He wanted to create a memorial that would make South Dakota famous.
You see, before our faces were put here, many people had never even heard of South Dakota, let alone come here for a vacation.
But Robinson believed that people would love the mountains of South Dakota if there were something exciting to look at.
Robinson talked to everyone he knew and told them about his great plan.
Of course, some people laughed at him and said that his plan was foolish, but many others listened to him.
They agreed that carving the faces of famous Americans would be a great historical monument for the United States
and would bring many tourists to their small state.
Within a few months, Robinson had convinced many important men, and they decided to start the project.
Robinson found the only man in America that could do the job.
His name was Gutzon Borglum. He was the most famous American artist and sculptor at that time.
When Gutzon heard about this project, he was very excited and boarded the first train for South Dakota.
Robinson was thinking about carving the faces of Western heroes, such as General George Armstrong Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody, or Lewis and Clark.
However, when Gutzon Borglum arrived,
he told Robinson that he wished to carve the faces of more remarkable Americans that would illustrate the history of our country.
Naturally, he was thinking about the four of us.
There are many mountains in South Dakota, but most of them were not suitable to carve our faces into.
On some mountains, the rock was too soft or it had too many cracks in it.
In other places, there was not enough sunlight, so our faces would always be in shadow. Gutzon searched for the perfect location.
Then one day Gutzon came to a tall cliff that was surrounded by pine trees.
The name of the mountain was Mount Rushmore, near the little town of Keystone.
The rock was flat and hard, and it had the perfect amount of sunlight.
"Here is the place!" Gutzon cried. "I will carve America's history here."
It took Gutzon Borglum and 400 men almost 14 years to carve our faces into these rocks.
The workmen were miners who had spent their lives smashing rocks, so at first many of them considered it to be a normal job.
Since they were poor, they were happy to earn money to buy food for their families.
But as our faces began to appear, they became much more excited about their work.
They were not simply making money; they knew they were building American history.
Norman Anderson was one of the carvers that helped make our faces look true to life.
He was proud to say, "I put the curl in Lincoln's beard, the part in Teddy's hair, and the twinkle in Washington's eye."
But how did these workmen make us look so lifelike?
First, Gutzon made a statue of each of us, which he brought to the construction site.
Then, using special measurement instruments, the workmen made an exact copy of the statues in the rock.
The only difference was that the rock carving was 12 times bigger than the statues.
A protractor was placed at the top of the statues' heads and a bigger one near the top of the mountain.
To make Lincoln's eye, for example,
the workers would use a string attached to the protractor on the statue to measure the distance from the top of his head to the top of his eye.
Then they would use a string attached to the protractor on the mountain that was 12 times longer.
Gutzon Borglum died just before our faces were completed, so he never got to see his final masterpiece.
But his son, Lincoln Borglum, and the workmen spent one more year finishing this great piece of American history, which is now called Mount Rushmore.