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More than 2 million people visit Mount Rushmore each year, making the towering presidential monument South Dakota’s biggest tourist attraction. The sculptor behind the visionary memorial, Gutzon Borglum, called it “a shrine to democracy,” with the carved granite faces of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln symbolizing the founding of the nation and its timeless values. From its controversial location to its starring role in a classic Hitchcock caper, here are six fascinating facts you might not know about Mount Rushmore.

Mount Rushmore Has Been Controversial From the Start

The idea for a monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota generated controversy even before the first blast of dynamite took place. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed by the U.S. government and Sioux nations, reserved the Black Hills for the exclusive use of the Sioux peoples. The mountain that became Mount Rushmore is a sacred site in Lakota culture (part of the Sioux); its name translates to “the Six Grandfathers,” representing the supernatural deities that the Lakota believe are responsible for their creation. But within a decade, the U.S. had broken the treaty, leading to skirmishes including the U.S. defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. The federal government used its loss in the battle to justify its occupation of the Black Hills (which was later found to be unconstitutional).

Despite this bloody history, South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson proposed the Black Hills as the site for a new tourist attraction. He contacted sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had recently been working on a monument to Confederate leaders on Stone Mountain in Georgia, and invited him to South Dakota. In 1925, Borglum began designing the colossal monument at Mount Rushmore (renamed for New York lawyer Charles E. Rushmore, who traveled to the Black Hills to review legal titles of properties in 1884). Once the project was approved and funded by Congress, carving commenced in October 1927.

Each Head on Mount Rushmore Is Over Five Stories Tall

With such a large canvas, chipping away with chisels was not going to cut it. Borglum used dynamite to blast away 90% of the granite rock face, which left between 3 and 6 inches of granite to be carved more finely. Workers suspended in slings from the top of the monument drilled a series of closely spaced holes to weaken the rock, then removed the excess chunks by hand. The detailed facial features were achieved with hand tools that left perfectly smooth surfaces.

In all, nearly 400 men and women spent over 14 years working on the monument. When the entire sculpture was completed in 1941, each presidential head measured about 60 feet tall. The Presidents’ eyes are roughly 11 feet wide, their noses measure about 21 feet long, and their mouths are around 18 feet wide. And because Mount Rushmore’s granite erodes extremely slowly — about 1 inch in 10,000 years — those features won’t shrink any time soon.

The Four Presidents Represent Specific Aspects of American History

The four Presidents depicted on Mount Rushmore were chosen for their key roles in American history. The carved face of George Washington, completed in 1930, is the most prominent figure on the memorial and represents the founding of the nation. Thomas Jefferson, dedicated in 1936, stands for the growth of the United States, thanks to his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and his roles in the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition. Borglum chose the figure of Abraham Lincoln, dedicated in 1937, to represent American unity for his efforts to preserve the nation during the Civil War. Theodore Roosevelt, finished in 1939, symbolizes the development of the United States as a world power (he helped negotiate the construction of the Panama Canal, among other achievements) and champion of the worker as he fought to end corporate monopolies.

Some Have Proposed Additions to Mount Rushmore

Various additions to Mount Rushmore’s pantheon have been suggested over the decades. In 1937, a woman named Rose Arnold Powell enlisted the help of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in her proposal to add the head of Susan B. Anthony, but Congress ultimately refused to allocate funds. Other suggestions have included the additions of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and even Barack Obama. However, the mountain’s original sculptor Gutzon Borglum insisted that the rock was unable to support further carving, and modern engineers have backed up that claim.

There’s a Semi-Secret Vault Behind the Sculpture

Borglum’s initial plans for Mount Rushmore called for a grand Hall of Records within the mountain behind Lincoln’s head. The 100-foot-long hall was planned to house the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and other documents key to the nation’s history. Borglum envisioned the hall to be decorated with busts of notable Americans and a gigantic gold-plated eagle with a 38-foot wingspan over the entrance. But the twin tragedies of Borglum’s death in 1941 and the start of World War II put an end to his vision. The half-excavated chamber sat empty until 1998, when officials placed 16 panels explaining the history of the monument and its sculptor — along with the words to the Bill of Rights, U.S. Constitution, and Declaration of Independence — in a box and sealed it inside the vault. The chamber remains closed to the public.

The National Park Service Didn’t Want Hitchcock to Film “North by Northwest” at Mount Rushmore

The climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest has Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant) and Eve Kendall (played by Eva Marie Saint) dangling over the precipice of Mount Rushmore as a villain tries to push them off. However, prior to filming, the National Park Service worried that the filmmakers would desecrate the monument. The agency made Hitchcock agree to strict rules, including promising not to shoot any violent scenes at Mount Rushmore or have live actors scrambling over the Presidents’ faces, even on a soundstage mock-up.
But the director failed to keep his word. Days before the film’s premiere, the park service issued a terse statement calling the movie “a crass violation of its permit” and wanting to “make the record clear on what the agreement provided and who failed to live up to it.” Still, the editor of the local Sioux Falls newspaper recognized the movie’s legacy. “Obviously,” he wrote, “this picture is worth its weight in gold to Rushmore from a publicity viewpoint.”

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Alcatraz Island, known colloquially as “The Rock,” was once the most notorious prison in the United States. Located 1.25 miles offshore from San Francisco, the island saw Civil War prisoners in the 1860s, mob bosses in the 1930s, and much more. Today, it’s one of the Bay Area’s most popular tourist attractions, and an on-island museum tells the story of the prison’s past. These seven facts span the many ages of Alcatraz and reveal how it became one of the most infamous sites in American history.

The Word “Alcatraz” Means “Pelican” in Archaic Spanish

In 1775, Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala became the first European to sail into San Francisco Bay. He named the bay and its islands, including one he called “Alcatraces.” Although the island’s name was anglicized over the decades, its origin is widely believed to mean “pelican” or “strange bird.” The island was once a particular hot spot for California brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis californicus), which were so plentiful in the 19th century that one French observer noted that when a group of pelicans took off in flight, it created winds like a hurricane. Although the birds’ numbers dwindled sharply due to hunting and the use of DDT over the decades, the pelican rebounded in the latter part of the 20th century, and was removed from the Endangered Species List in 2009.

Before Becoming a Prison, Alcatraz Was a Military Outpost

Although Alcatraz is known as one of America’s most infamous prisons, its first official U.S. role was as a military outpost. With California joining the U.S. in 1850 after being ceded from Mexico two years prior, and with hundreds of thousands of people flooding the state as part of the California Gold Rush, the U.S. military needed to protect San Francisco Bay. Alcatraz, along with Fort Point and Lime Point, formed a “triangle of defense” that guarded the bay’s entrance. At one point, the U.S. even installed 100 cannons on the 22-acre island, making it the most heavily armed military outpost in the Western U.S. But by the decade’s end, the first prisoners had been brought to the island, and Alcatraz played host to both Confederate prisoners and Union deserters during the Civil War.

Alcatraz Was Home to the First Lighthouse on the U.S. West Coast

During the island’s days as a military outpost, the U.S. constructed a lighthouse to serve vessels crisscrossing the busy shipping lanes of San Francisco Bay. Although the lighthouse tower was built by 1852, the Fresnel lens — a compact lens designed to make lighthouses brighter — didn’t arrive until 1854. Luckily, the delay didn’t cost the lighthouse the impressive accolade of being the first lighthouse constructed on the West Coast of the United States. Sadly, the structure was damaged beyond repair following the catastrophic 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It was rebuilt, however, and still operates to this day.

Prison Life at Alcatraz Wasn’t Always Bad

Alcatraz became a federal prison in 1934, after being transferred to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. It was designed as a maximum security penitentiary meant for the most difficult inmates in the federal system, and was partly an attempt to show the public that the government was being tough on the widespread crime of the 1920s and ’30s.

Although Alcatraz cut an intimidating figure, some prisoners reported that the experience wasn’t so bad. The first warden of Alcatraz made sure the food was good to dissuade rioting, and a menu in the 1940s even included “bacon jambalaya, pork roast with all the trimmings, or beef pot pie Anglaise.” Prisoners lived one man to a cell, which wasn’t a certainty in other federal prisons, and had basic rights to food, shelter, clothing, and medical care. Through good behavior, prisoners could earn privileges that included work on the island and even playing music. In fact, Alcatraz’s reputation far surpassed those of some other federal prisons, and occasionally inmates around the country even requested transfers to “The Rock.”

Al Capone Wrote Love Songs While an Inmate at Alcatraz

Arguably the prison’s most famous inmate was Al Capone, who was known at Alcatraz as Prisoner 85. Although a ruthless mob leader who ran the Italian American organized crime syndicate known as the Chicago Outfit, Scarface was finally put behind bars for tax evasion in 1931. In a few instances, he resorted to violence when provoked, but he mostly spent time playing banjo in the prison band the Rock Islanders, and writing love songs. In 2017, Capone’s handwritten lyrics to one song, titled “Humoresque,” sold at auction for $18,750. The lyrics included such memorable lines as “You thrill and fill this heart of mine, with gladness like a soothing symphony, over the air, you gently float, and in my soul, you strike a note.” Capone was eventually released from prison in November 1939, after more than seven years behind bars, by which time he was in ill health due to an untreated case of syphilis.

No One Has Ever Escaped From Alcatraz (Probably)

Of the 14 escape attempts at Alcatraz, all failed — except one daring attempt (forever immortalized in the 1979 film Escape From Alcatraz). On June 12, 1962, an early morning bed check at the prison revealed that three inmates were missing from their beds — and in a made-for-Hollywood twist, they’d been replaced by papier-mâché heads constructed in secret to fool the night guards.

While hacking together homemade life vests (an idea they got from the DIY magazine Popular Mechanics), the escapees tried their luck across the bay toward San Francisco. The FBI discovered the vests on Cronkhite Beach and found other bits of evidence (including letters sealed in rubber) scattered throughout the bay — but the authorities never found any evidence of the men living in the U.S. or abroad, and believed they actually drowned in the bay’s frigid waters. The FBI closed the case on December 31, 1979, but the U.S. Marshals Service has continued to investigate.

Native Americans Occupied Alcatraz

One problem with running a prison on an island is that it can be pretty expensive to maintain, and so in March 1963, the century-old military outpost-turned-penitentiary closed its doors — but that wasn’t the end of its story.

In November 1969, a group of Native Americans led by activist Richard Oakes traveled to Alcatraz and began an occupation of the island that lasted 19 months. The group referenced the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which allowed Native people to repossess retired or abandoned federal land, as the basis for their seizure. They issued a proclamation that included a letter to the “Great White Father and All His People,” which highlighted the hypocrisy of the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans both past and present. Over the following months, the occupation grew in size to as many as 600 people, before numbers began to dwindle in January 1970. The government cut off electrical and water supplies to the island, food became scarce, and in June 1971 U.S. marshals forcibly removed the final 15 occupiers from the island.

A highly publicized moment of Indigenous activism, the protest brought considerable attention to the plight of America’s Native peoples. In 1970, President Richard Nixon even ended the U.S.’s decades-long termination policy — an effort to forcibly eliminate tribes and assimilate Native Indians into American society. The occupation of Alcatraz was the first intertribal protest, and part of a rich history of modern Native American activism.