** Frank Haas, Kieron Vandenburg, Ray and Virgil Sanders, Frank Snijder
IT IS perhaps America’s most famous monument, Mount Rushmore. Named after a New Yorker who came to South Dakota looking for business opportunities and asked what the area was called. “Has no name,” said a local, “what’s your name?” Charlie Rushmore, was the answer. “Okay, then that’s the name of this place from now on.” That was fine with Charlie. In his family history, there was nothing unusual about name issues. The early Dutch forefather who had sailed to America from Haarlem was called The Turk, because the man’s dad was white, but mom was a dark Moroccan, and in Manhattan they assumed that because of his skin color he would probably be Turkish. The ancestor married a Dutch prostitute. People called her Madam. So what’s in a name?
Well, the land that got Charlie’s name actually did have an earlier name. It was set against a ridge, there was tin in the ground, and Mr. Rushmore purchased the tin mine. Because of six rocky peaks, locals always described the ridge as Six Grandfathers. Charlie turned this into Mount Rushmore. And by the time Americans started buying cars, and South Dakota became a 1920s tourist destination, the governor figured the mountain could be turned into a monument.
That’s when they started hiring Dutchmen to carve four heads out of the mountain.
** Fred Pulver, Bert Ham, Karel and Ernst Linde, Eddie Anton, Elmer Beuck, R. Coen
NAMES nobody remembers anymore. Men who had to be able to climb and clamber without fear. Pictures of Rushmore are almost always deceptive. It appears smaller and lower than it really is. It is high, tall, steep, imposing. Up a ladder of 700 steps every day, and down again, too. Hours spent in a climbing harness on a cable less than half an inch thick, a bosun’s chair. Chipping. Fourteen years of cutting and sanding, between 1927 and 1941.
Anonymous folks with a Dutch background who brought four presidents to life on a mountainside. Why presidents? Rumors abounded that Confederacy lovers in Georgia were about to do something similar with their own heroes. Folks in the North couldn’t stomach that thought. After all, President Lincoln had pummeled those Confederates and thus saved the nation. He, along with some illustrious colleagues, deserved such immortalization, and not those slavery enthusiasts.
** Dutch Coon, pronounced the Dutch way: Koen, Alex Denke, Hugo Hein, John Hendricks, Albert Holland, Karel Kersten
PRESIDENT Calvin Coolidge came to vacation in South Dakota in 1927, and they offered to sculpt his head as well. No, Coolidge said, he didn’t think himself important enough, include Theodore Roosevelt instead. And so Mount Rushmore came to have two presidents of Dutch descent. Roosevelt from Tholen, and Abraham Lincoln, descendant of the Haring family from Hoorn. The illustrious other two are Washington and Jefferson.
** Dickie Meiners, formally Richard
Dick also chiseled and carved. De Daily Dutchman’s editor Willem Meiners knows nothing about him. Eight dollars a day, that’s what he and his other Dutch buddies were paid. That was eighty cents an hour, value today seventeen dollars.
In return, they built something everlasting.
* Hacking an eye out of the mountain, hanging in a bosun’s chair.
