Mount Rushmore, near Rapid City, South Dakota, is one of the places I'd like to visit some day. Situated in the state's Black Hills, the huge faces carved in granite depict four historically-significant US presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. This National Memorial was sculpted, after US government authorization, by Gutzon Borglum, but the use of federal lands whose ownership is disputed by Indians has made the project, starting in 1927 and completed 14 years later, somewhat controversial. My experiences with Mount Rushmore are tightly connected to the climactic scene in the great 1959 Alfred Hitchcock movie thriller North by Northwest, in which hero Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint flee there to escape the murderous bad guys, led by James Mason and Martin Landau. The irony of it all is that the actual "Mount Rushmore" footage was done on models created for filming in Southern California! Yes, I'd dig going over to South Dakota to check it out, as well as the nearby memorial to Crazy Horse that has been under construction since 1948 and still is far from completion. Anyway, Mount Rushmore was the setting shown in one of my seven Americana jigsaw puzzles, pictured above...
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