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60 free Mount Rushmore trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Mount Rushmore is one of those places everyone can picture and almost nobody can explain. Why those four presidents? Why is Jefferson on the wrong side? What is the room hidden behind Lincoln's head, and why did the Lakota refuse a $100 million settlement for the land it sits on? This Mt Rushmore trivia quiz covers all of it in 60 questions: the 1885 naming after a New York lawyer, Doane Robinson's tourism scheme, Gutzon Borglum's dynamite-and-honeycomb carving method, the 400 workers who climbed 700 stairs a day, the dedication dates of each face, the unfinished Hall of Records, the mountain goats that are not supposed to be there, and the sculpture's Hollywood cameo in North by Northwest. It starts easy and ends with questions only a park ranger would get. Every answer is checked against the National Park Service's own pages or the memorial's Wikipedia article, and the sentence that proves it is quoted under each question.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Mount Rushmore is located in which US state?
South Dakota
It sits in Pennington County in the southwest corner of the state, about 25 miles from Rapid City.
Q 02The sculpture is about two miles southwest of which small town?
Keystone
Keystone began as an 1880s gold-mining camp and now lives almost entirely on memorial visitors.
Q 03How high above sea level is the top of Mount Rushmore?
5,725 feet
The highest point in the Black Hills, 3.7 miles away, tops out over 7,200 feet.
Q 04After the 1870s the Lakota knew the peak by a name that translates as what?
Six Grandfathers Mountain
Before that it was Igmu Tanka Pahá, Cougar Mountain; the name change is tied to a vision of the Lakota holy man Black Elk.
Q 05In Lakota belief, who or what are the 'Six Grandfathers' the peak was named for?
The spirits of the six directions
North, south, east and west plus sky and earth: the same six directions honored in the Lakota pipe ceremony.
Q 06What was Charles E. Rushmore, for whom the mountain was named in 1885, doing in the Black Hills?
Checking a mining company's land claims as a New York attorney
He made three or four trips in 1884 and 1885; decades later he donated $5,000 toward the carving that bears his name.
Q 07According to the story, who told Rushmore the peak had no name and would from then on be named after him?
His guide, Bill Challis
The joke stuck locally for 45 years before it became official.
Q 08In which year did the US Board of Geographic Names officially recognize the name 'Mount Rushmore'?
1930
By then Washington's face had already been under the drills for nearly three years.
Q 09Whose idea was it, in 1923, to carve a giant monument in the Black Hills to boost tourism?
State historian Doane Robinson
Robinson was secretary of the South Dakota State Historical Society and wanted something to pull motorists off the new highways.
Q 10Which sculptor did Robinson approach first, before Borglum, only to find him ill and uninterested?
Lorado Taft
Taft was the Chicago sculptor behind the Fountain of Time; his refusal sent Robinson to Senator Peter Norbeck and then to Borglum.
Q 11Robinson's original plan called for carving which kind of figures?
Old West heroes like Lewis and Clark
Borglum rejected regional figures outright, arguing that only a national subject would justify the scale.
Q 12Where in the Black Hills did Borglum first intend to carve, before opposition stopped him?
The Needles granite spires
The spires were also too thin and eroded to hold detailed faces; they have since become a rock-climbing destination along the Needles Highway.
Q 13Before Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum had been the original sculptor of which other giant rock carving?
Q 21About what percentage of the mountain was carved using dynamite?
90%
Skilled blasters could remove rock to within a few inches of the finished surface before the drills took over.
Q 22Which technique used closely drilled holes to weaken granite for removal by hand?
Honeycombing
After that, workers smoothed the faces with a hand facer, or bumper tool, leaving a surface as smooth as a sidewalk.
Q 23Workers were lowered over the 500-foot face on steel cables in a seat known as what?
A bosun chair
Winch operators at the top could not see the men below, so 'call boys' relayed hand signals from the edge.
The Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain
That project was backed and partly funded by the Ku Klux Klan; Borglum quit it in a dispute and his work there was blasted away.
Q 14On first seeing the mountain, Borglum is reported to have said what?
'America will march along that skyline'
He later gave the finished work its own grand nickname, the Shrine of Democracy.
Q 15Why did Borglum favor this particular peak, apart from its size?
It faced south and got maximum sunlight
The southern exposure means the faces are lit for most of the day, which is why morning is the classic photo time.
Q 16Carving officially began on October 4 of which year?
1927
The dedication had been held that August, with the President on hand to make the first funding pledge.
Q 17How many years did the carving take, from 1927 to its end in 1941?
14
Only about six and a half of those years involved actual carving; the rest were lost to weather and money running out.
Q 18Which sitting president attended the August 1927 dedication ceremony?
Calvin Coolidge
Coolidge was spending the summer at a 'summer White House' in the Black Hills and rode up on horseback in cowboy boots.
Q 19Roughly how many workers helped carve the memorial?
400
Many were unemployed local miners, and Depression wages made the dangerous work attractive.
Q 20How many workers died during the fourteen years of construction?
None
Given men hanging from cables beside dynamite blasts, the record is remarkable; some later suffered from silicosis caused by granite dust.
Q 24How many stairs did the workers climb each morning to reach the mountaintop time clock?
700
A cable-car tram carried tools and later some workers, but the stairs remained the daily commute.
Q 25According to one worker quoted by the National Park Service, what was his daily wage on the mountain?
$8.00 a day
Skilled drillers earned about a dollar an hour, roughly double what the local mines paid in the 1930s.
Q 26Borglum's models were built at what scale to the finished mountain?
1:12, one inch on the model to one foot on the rock
Measurements were transferred with a 'pointing system': a boom and plumb line on the model, then a twelve-times-larger rig on the mountain.
Q 27How tall is each of the four carved heads?
60 feet
That is roughly the height of a six-story building; a man of that proportion would stand about 465 feet tall.
Q 28How tall is the nose on the Washington head?
21 feet
Roosevelt's head is slightly smaller than Washington's and Lincoln's slightly taller.
Q 29How wide is each eye on the sculpture?
About 11 feet
Borglum carved a shaft of granite in each pupil so it catches the light and gives the eyes a lifelike glint.
Q 30About how much rock was blasted off the mountainside in total?
450,000 short tons
Most of it still lies in a talus heap at the base of the carving, which the Park Service has deliberately left in place.