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Issue 7 Summer 2002 Failure The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year 502,002 C.E. Matthew Buckingham The image above shows what geologists believe the Six Grandfathers will look like in the year 502,002 C.E. Located just south of the geographic center of the continental United States in the Paha Sapa, or Black Hills, this mountain has also been called Slaughterhouse Peak, Cougar Mountain, and is now referred to as Mount Rushmore. Much older than the Alps, Himalayas, and Pyrenees, the Paha Sapa and Six Grandfathers were formed when subterranean pressure raised the earth's crust into a huge elliptical dome 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period. Today the 6,000-sq mile granite outcropping is visited by two million tourists each year, who go there to gaze up at the massive portraits of four American presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln—carved into the Six Grandfathers between 1926 and 1941 by the sculptor Gutzon Borglum. The first descendants of Europe to enter the Paha Sapa were ponies—progeny of the sixteen horses Hernán Cortéz brought with him from Spain to the "New World." The Taos Indians introduced them to the Kiowa in the 1600s. In the 18th century, European westward expansion displaced the Sioux from their native woodlands, who then, in turn, displaced the Kiowa, acquiring their horses as well as the Paha Sapa. Napoleon Bonaparte never saw the Louisiana Territory that France had claimed under the "doctrine of discovery." In 1803 US President Thomas Jefferson was prepared to pay the French $10 million for New Orleans and the Florida peninsula, but sensed that financially troubled France might be willing to bargain.
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