But Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum had big dreams, and they included a mountainside series of granite tableaus that would retell significant events in American history.
Think of the Statue of Liberty, a French centenary gift to the young United States in 1886, or of the huge presidential heads carved by Gutzon Borglum on Mount Rushmore.
Back in the 1940s, the Indian chiefs in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where Gutzon Borglum was fashioning the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln into stone, were upset.