The mountain that four presidents look out from was never supposed to hold their faces. That is one of the first surprises in Matthew Davis's "A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore," the 2026 selection for One Book South Dakota, which Davis will discuss at the Edith B. Siegrist Vermillion Public Library on the evening of October 20, 2026, from 6 to 7 p.m.
The program is free and open to the public, part of a statewide tour organized by the South Dakota Humanities Council, which has run One Book South Dakota since 2003 to promote the reading of a single book across the state each year. The 2026 theme is "One Book, Many Stories," a phrase that fits a book built around competing accounts of the same granite outcrop.
The origin story Davis tells begins not with Gutzon Borglum's chisels but with a state historian worried about the state's economy. In the years after World War I, South Dakota's agricultural commodity markets crashed, and Doane Robinson, the state historian, cast about for a way to diversify the state's economy. He landed on tourism, on luring the motorists then crisscrossing the Midwest into the Black Hills. What he wanted carved there was not a shrine to the presidency. Robinson's vision was a gallery of figures from the American West, among them the Lakota leader Red Cloud, Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark, and Custer, sculpted into the granite pinnacles of the Hills.
Davis's book sets that familiar story inside a much older and harder one. The Black Hills, the Paha Sapa or He Sapa in Lakota, are sacred ground, a site of mythology and communal identity for Native nations. The book traces the Native American story alongside the narrative of the growing territory and state of South Dakota, from the tragic history of Wounded Knee and the horrors of Indian boarding schools to the Land Back movement of today. The land question has never been settled, and the Land Back movement keeps it alive today.
Davis also takes the measure of Borglum himself, the larger-than-life sculptor whose controversial politics shaped what went onto the mountain, and traces the present-day conflict over the site's composition, meaning, and future. The book moves between history and reportage, following contemporary characters whose families have been shaped by these events. Among those Davis quotes is Gerard Baker, the first Native American superintendent of Mount Rushmore, who told Davis that most visitors want to come to a national park and leave with "that warm, fuzzy feeling with an ice cream cone." Rushmore, Baker said, cannot do that if you do it the right way. "If you do it the right way people are going to be leaving pissed."
The timing of the book, and of the Vermillion talk, is deliberate. The book is timed to the centennial of Mount Rushmore's initial dedication, and the anniversary has prompted a fresh round of reckoning with what the memorial commemorates and what it cost. Davis has said the project grew out of a speech President Trump delivered at Mount Rushmore, which left him curious not only about the memorial's history but about "the broader historical debates our country's having as we move toward celebrating our 250th birthday." The book took roughly five years from idea to publication, and Davis has said the hardest part was not recounting the monument's past but finding people in the present willing to talk about what it means to them.
Davis brings an unusual resume to a South Dakota library stage. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and a master's degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, has been a Fulbright Fellow in Syria and Jordan and a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and founded the Cheuse Center for International Writers at George Mason University. His first book, "When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter's Tale," chronicled a remote Mongolian town in transition and his own unraveling there. He now lives in London with his wife and children.
That a writer based in London ended up as the state's One Book author is one of the quieter ironies of the 2026 program, which has unfolded in a leaner season for the humanities in South Dakota. Federal budget cuts have pressed on the state's humanities council, and the South Dakota Festival of Books, now in its 24th year, shrank from a weekend to a single day in Sioux Falls this October, with about 30 authors instead of the 60 to 70 of past years. The One Book tour, by contrast, remains free and open to the public, carrying the conversation to libraries around the state, including the Vermillion library on Church Street.
For an hour on a Tuesday evening, then, a mountain will get the biographical treatment usually reserved for a person: its birth as sacred ground, its reinvention as a tourist attraction, the outsized artist who remade it, and the people still arguing over what it should mean. Davis's subtitle promises both making and meaning, and the discussion is likely to dwell on the second. As Baker's remark suggests, the book does not aim to send anyone home with an ice cream cone and a warm feeling. It aims to send them home thinking about how Americans choose what to memorialize, and who gets to decide.