For several years, online memes have claimed a racist and dark history attached to one of the most iconic U.S. monuments, Mount Rushmore. Its past came under scrutiny amid nationwide protests against the May 2020 killing of a Black man, George Floyd, while in the custody of a white police officer in Minneapolis. Protesters subsequently took down several Confederate monuments, with many looking closely at the mountain that was considered a symbol of American patriotism.
Since then, Snopes has investigated the histories of a range of monuments across the country, including our previous coverage around Mount Rushmore. In 2025, claims about Mount Rushmore resurfaced on Facebook and Instagram, including one that said the Native American Lakota tribe called it the “Six Grandfathers” mountain, and “every person now carved in it perpetuated violence against Native Americans.”
(Facebook user “Give A Shift About Nature”)
As we previously reported, the monument had ties to the KKK, was the site of an illegal war, as well as the violent suppression of the Native American Lakota (also known as Sioux) people. We looked at the history of the region before Mount Rushmore was built, followed by an investigation into its creation and alleged KKK funding.
How the mountain is connected to Native Americans
American Indian Studies Associate Professor David Martinez of Arizona State University told Snopes that the mountain on which Mount Rushmore was carved is “indisputably sacred to the Lakota and a number of other indigenous nations.”
Before the faces of American presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt were carved into the mountain, it was called Six Grandfathers by Native Americans. Mount Rushmore is part of the Black Hills mountain range in South Dakota. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum started work on the monument in 1927 and completed it in 1941.
A 2016 study conducted by experts contracted by the National Park Service in conjunction with Lakota scholars referenced the original name. Victor Douville, history and culture coordinator in the Lakota Studies Department in Sinte Gleska University, told us the story of the mountain’s naming by Hehaka Sapa, or Black Elk, a medicine man:
Before it was called Six Grandfathers Mountain, it was called Cougar Mountain (Igmu Tanka Paha) because of many cougars or mountain lions living in the vicinity. Then around the early part of 1870, an experience by a Lakota medicine man changed the name to Six Grandfathers because of the six outcrops of the mountain and a dream or a vision.
Per Douville, the Six Grandfathers was considered the heart of what Lakota called the Black Hills, or Paha Sapa. The Black Hills played a central role in Black Elk’s vision, and he was believed to have gained entrance to the spirit world, and granted powers by six grandfathers who prepared him to help his people due to the trials brought by white colonizers.
The Lakota’s association with the region was older than most people realized, Douville added. “Our people sat in the Black Hills 3,600 years ago,” he said. While many eventually emigrated, some remained and others returned in 1776 and “re-discovered” the hills.
The Lakota also viewed a section of the Black Hill as a “center” of their world, according to Douville. They conduct their worship in that area, particularly during the summer solstice where they “welcome back all life.” The area was also a game reserve that they relied on for sustenance.
The Lakota consider the four presidents’ face carvings on Six Grandfathers a defacement of their sacred site. “Those four people had a lot to do with destroying our people’s land base,” Douville said.
As the above meme pointed out, each president also played a role in removing Native Americans from lands across the region. Washington waged war against many Native American tribes, Jefferson was considered the architect of policies that would result in the removal of Native Americans from their lands, Lincoln ordered the execution of 38 Dakota Native American rebels, the largest mass execution in American history, and Roosevelt systematically removed Native Americans from their lands.
How the US government seized lands
As we reported before, in 1868, the U.S. government and Sioux people signed a treaty, setting aside lands west of the Missouri River for the Lakota and Arapaho tribes. The U.S. guaranteed exclusive tribal occupation of reservation lands, including the Black Hills. The treaty also reserved most of present-day northeast Wyoming and southeast Montana as “unceded Indian territory,” off limits to white people without the Lakotas’ consent. But within nine years of the treaty’s ratification, Congress seized the Black Hills.
The conflict began over gold. While some Lakota settled on reservation lands, several thousands rejected the 1868 treaty and moved to unceded territory. As long as white people stayed out of their territory, the Lakota people said they would remain peaceful. In 1874, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his troops found gold in the Black Hills. Custer’s official mission was a treaty-compliant effort to find a site for an army post, while in reality he was illegally scouting for land resources.
President Ulysses S. Grant faced pressure to annex the hills. He convened a secret White House group to plan war against the Lakota tribe. Library of Congress documents and experts including History Professor Philip Deloria at Harvard University stated the administration launched an illegal war. Grant began with rough diplomacy. As Lakota chiefs came to the White House in 1875 to protest shortages of government rations for their people, miners poured into the hills at the same time.
Some online rumors claimed Grant “secretly ordered the Army not to protect local tribes.” While the Army initially tried to enforce the 1868 treaty, soldiers eventually “[threw] up their hands” according to John Taliaferro, author of “Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore.”
Deloria told Snopes: “The conflict that followed came about because the government proved unable or unwilling to keep American miners and settlers out of the [Black] Hills.” While Grant wasn’t “secretly” ordering the Army to allow miners in, military personnel appeared to have “a tacit understanding” to no longer interfere, Deloria said.
Lt. Gen. Philip Sheridan, one of Grant’s co-conspirators, wrote a confidential order to the commander in Dakota in 1875:
… the President decided that while the orders heretofore issued forbidding the occupation of the Black Hills country by miners should not be rescinded, still no fixed resistance by the military should be made to the miners going in ….
In December 1875, non-treaty Native Americans were given an ultimatum to move to reservations or be forced there by the military, resulting in the Great Sioux War of 1876.
By September 1876, Lakota elders reluctantly signed the first land-grab agreement to give up all lands outside their reservation, as well as the Black Hills. According to Taliaferro, this agreement was illegitimate. The treaty of 1868 said that ceding any portion of reservation land would be invalid unless “executed and signed by at least three fourths of all the adult male Indians,” per “Great White Fathers.” The number of signatories of this latest agreement fell far short of that requirement. By 1877 most Native Americans had surrendered or fled to Canada.
In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court, concluding a long-running case brought by the Sioux Nation, confirmed the government’s actions were illegal and ruled that Native Americans were entitled to damages for the land theft. But Native Americans refused to collect the sum (accruing interest, it now exceeds a billion dollars), saying their land was not for sale. The court remarked on Grant’s “duplicity”:
A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history …
In sum, the U.S. government did seize the land illegally from the Lakota people after discovering gold. Grant’s orders to the Army formed an understanding that their soldiers were no longer supposed to enforce rules preventing miners and settlers from entering Lakota territory. While it was not necessarily a “secret,” it did involve duplicitous means that were only acknowledged almost a century later.
Older memes alleged that Grant ordered the army to not protect Native Americans from bounty hunters, who collected money for each Native American they killed. In our past coverage, we found instances of bounty hunters paid by settlers to hunt Native Americans in the earlier part of the decade, before military campaigns began and after they concluded. We found less evidence to support the claim that such bounty hunters were supported by the government or army during tensions in 1874 to 1877.
The KKK’s role in the creation of Mount Rushmore
Borglum, the man behind the mount, had ties to the KKK before his time as the designer and sculptor of Mount Rushmore. In 1914, the United Daughters of the Confederacy — a still active women’s group known for stopping the removal of Confederate monuments — approached him to create a “shrine to the South” on Georgia’s Stone Mountain, about a thousand miles south from where Mount Rushmore would be. In 1915, the KKK was reborn (it stopped functioning during the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War) in a ceremony on Stone Mountain.
In “Great White Fathers” Taliaferro described Borglum as an “avid and influential supporter” of the KKK, even though there was no evidence that he was a card-carrying member of the white supremacist organization. He attended rallies, served on committees, and asked them for funding for his work on Stone Mountain. He said, “I would not trust an Indian, off-hand, 9 out of 10,” and wrote, “All immigrants are undesirable,” even though his father was a Danish immigrant. He took great pride in his Norse heritage, according to his writings.
Borglum tried to obscure the KKK’s involvement in the Stone Mountain project, despite their financial backing. By the mid-1920s, infighting within the Klan, as well as stalled fundraising for the monument, led to his exiting the project. A historian approached him to take on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, enraging his backers on Stone Mountain. By 1927, Borglum began carving Mount Rushmore, devoting the last 14 years of his life to the effort that was finished by his son.
We learned that the KKK did not appear to have funded the Mount Rushmore project. According to Deloria, Borglum received mostly federal funding and had left too much bad blood behind in Georgia to receive further support from the KKK. Taliaferro said Borglum and the Mount Rushmore committee struggled to fund Rushmore for a few years until they scraped together finances from magnates and a senator. By 1929 they received federal funding. Out of the total expenditure of $989,000, the government had contributed $836,000, according to “Great White Fathers.”
In sum, while the man behind Mount Rushmore was closely aligned with the KKK, evidence suggests the organization did not fund the monument’s creation. But the monument remained tied to a bloody and brutal history, built on stolen Native American land and highlighting figureheads who were slave owners who also displaced Native Americans from their land.
Snopes’ archives contributed to this report.
