South Dakota's Mount Rushmore has a strange history. Built on sacred Native American land and sculpted by a man with ties to the Ku Klux Klan, the Mount Rushmore National Memorial was fraught with controversy even before it was completed 79 years ago on October 31, 1941. Mount Rushmore was carved on the granite face of a mountain in the Black Hills between 1927 and 1941. Funding problems made the project take longer than was originally expected. Seeking to attract tourism to the Black Hills in the early 1920s, South Dakota's state historian Doane Robinson came up with the idea to sculpt “the Needles” (several giant natural granite pillars) into the shape of historic heroes of the West.