In February 1925 the sculptor had a bitter disagreement with some of the executive committee of the Confederate Memorial. He thought these men careless in handling public funds. They made complaints and fired him. He broke up his models and went away from Georgia. Without him the mountain stayed uncarved. That same year a group of Black Hills patriots guaranteed a fund of $25,000 for a patriotic mountain carving. Gifts of $5,000 each were received from Senator Coleman DuPont, Charles E. Rushmore--who gave his name to the peak later selected for the memorial in the Black Hills--The Chicago and North Western Railway, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway and the Homestake Mine. Herbert Myrick contributed a donation of $1,500. The Northwestern Public Service Company of Huron, South Dakota, had offered a power plant. Doane Robinson sent out another call to Borglum, and Borglum made a second trip to the Black Hills. In the summer of 1927 Calvin Coolidge, President of the United States, dedicated the Rushmore Mountain project. And before the ending of the Second World War the carving of this peak was finished--the only thing of its kind on the face of the earth. * * * * * From the top of Mount Rushmore four Presidents of the United States--Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt--gaze out from an unbelievable block of hard rock into glowing sunlight, placid but remarkably alive. Hundreds of thousands of persons have come from the far corners of the world to look at them, and are still coming in expanding companies. The money spent by the Treasury of the United States for the carving of this peak has long since been returned to its source through the gasoline tax of the tourists. The faces of four men important in the history of the country will be preserved to us, barring some unpredictable catastrophe, until the mountains are worn as flat as the surrounding prairies. And an interesting feature of all this is that there were only a handful of people in the world who believed it possible until it was done. It is safe to say that the carving of Mount Rushmore would never have been attempted and could never have been carried out save for the early experiment on Stone Mountain. Borglum had to learn how to remove large masses of rock--more than 50,000 tons in his first twenty months in Georgia. So he had learned how to carve with dynamite and had trained stone workers so well that they could blast down to within three inches of the surface to be chiseled. He learned about drills and their sharpening. He learned how to suspend his workmen on slings that were easily maneuvered and entirely safe. He found out how to project patterns from a distance onto the rock to be carved. And he knew how to do all these things quickly when, eventually, he moved on to Rushmore.