The snopes article I linked in another post has some stuff on that part as well:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/07/29/kkk-mount-rushmore/

Here the history got murky. The meme claims that Grant ordered the Army to not protect Native Americans as bounty hunters collected money for each Native American killed. As mentioned above, documentation exists of the Army standing back and letting miners and settlers move into the territory. Whether the Army actively allowed independent bounty hunters to operate was another story.

While there were indeed accounts of bounties being offered for Native Americans killed, who was paying these bounties and their timing raised questions from historians. We first encountered this claim in a 2002 issue of Cabinet Magazine, a New York-based publication that stated after Grant ordered the Army to not stop prospectors from entering Black Hills, “Bounty hunters began collecting as much as $300 per Native American killed.”

Deloria argued it was likely that neither the federal government nor the territorial government based in Yankton, South Dakota, was paying bounties. George Harwood Phillips, a retired professor of history at the University of Colorado, wrote in a paper for the South Dakota Historical Society:

… by 1870 the rush was on in earnest. The first settlers went to Dakota hoping to make their fortunes. They wanted to plat town sites, to organize governments, to build railroads, and to promote immigration. They felt that the presence of the Indians halted progress — and they hated and feared them. To many, the solution was to kill the Indians and dissolve the Indian Bureau. Settlers paid bounties for Indian scalps, fed them poisoned bread, and organized Indian hunting parties.

Settlers were indeed behind payments to bounty hunters for Native American deaths. But Deloria argued that timing was important to the context. At the beginning of the Dakota rush, when settlers tried to make their fortunes, he said, “You could perhaps make the claim … that the Army stood by and watched, or approved, as bounty hunters chased down Indians.” But after the military campaigns of 1877, when the western Lakotas were in bad shape, would have been an easier time for most bounty hunters, Deloria argued: “You’d have to be a pretty brave bounty hunter to head into the Black Hills region looking to kill Indians in the years between 1874 and 1877.”

This is supported by Taliaferro in “Great White Fathers,” who documented an instance after the battles of 1877 of a county placing bounties on Native Americans, as miners began staking claims to search for gold across the Black Hills and remnants of the Lakota resisted them:

The commissioners of newly formed Lawrence County put a bounty of $250 ‘for the body of each and every Indian, killed or captured, dead or alive.’ Setting its own bounty of $50, Deadwood [a town in the county] rationalized that ‘killing Indians was conducive to the health of the community.’

Martinez, who was not aware of cases of civilians being paid bounties by the federal government to kill Native Americans, said, “At the federal level, there really was no reason to pay soldiers bounties for killing Indians. That was their job.” And during the 1870s the Lakota were considered “hostile” if they didn’t comply with the Army, and in those cases soldiers were ordered to treat them as enemies in the field.

In summary, we learned that bounty hunters were paid by settlers to kill Native Americans in the earlier part of the decade before military campaigns began, as well as after they concluded. We found little evidence to back the claim implied in the meme that they were paid or actively supported by the government or the Army at the height of tensions from 1874 to 1877, a period when the Army was tacitly allowing miners to come into the territory.

Like with the other claim, it seems the spirit of it is more or less correct, but the details are wrong.

Edit: So I guess a more accurate way to put that particular aspect of Rushmore’s history would be, instead of “it was funded in part by the KKK,” one could say “the project was spearheaded by an avid supporter of the KKK.” Or even just “a white supremacist.”

I did some searching, here’s what I can find on it from a snopes writeup:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/07/29/kkk-mount-rushmore/

The man behind the mount, Borglum, had an old relationship with the KKK, preceding his time as the designer and sculptor of Mount Rushmore. In 1914, the United Daughters of the Confederacy — an organization known today for stopping the removal of Confederate monuments — approached him to create a “shrine to the South” on Georgia’s Stone Mountain, about a thousand miles south from where Mount Rushmore would be. In 1915, the KKK would be reborn (it had faded during the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War) in a ceremony on Stone Mountain.

Borglum was an “avid and influential supporter” of the KKK, Taliaferro wrote in “Great White Fathers,” even though there was no proof that he was a card-carrying member of the organization. He was involved in their politics, attended rallies, served on committees, and saw them as a source of funds for his work on Stone Mountain. He was a white supremacist who said, “I would not trust an Indian, off-hand, 9 out of 10,” and wrote, “All immigrants are undesirable,” even though his father was a Danish immigrant. He also took great pride in his Norse heritage, according to his writings.

The KKK did financially back the Stone Mountain project, even though Borglum tried to obscure its involvement. But infighting within the Klan by the mid-1920s, as well as stalled fundraising for the monument, led to Borglum leaving the project. He was approached by a historian to take on the Mount Rushmore project in South Dakota, enraging his backers on Stone Mountain. By 1927, he began carving Mount Rushmore, devoting the last 14 years of his life to the project that was finished by his son.

The KKK does not appear to have been behind any funding for Mount Rushmore. According to Deloria, Borglum received mostly federal funding for Rushmore, and he had left too much bad blood behind in Georgia to receive further funding. Taliaferro described how Borglum and the Mount Rushmore committee struggled to find funds for Rushmore for a few years. They scraped together finances from magnates and a senator, and by 1929 received federal funding. Out of the total expenditure of $989,000, the government had contributed $836,000, according to “Great White Fathers.”

Even though this meme highlighted key elements of Mount Rushmore’s darkest history, some of its facts were incorrect or pulled out of necessary context. While the man behind Mount Rushmore was very closely aligned with the KKK, evidence suggested that the organization itself did not fund the monument’s creation. But the monument remained tied to a racist past, highlighting figureheads who were slave owners and despised by Native Americans, and built on land that was indeed stolen by the U.S. government.

Hmm. Would be nice to have a source to go on in either direction, some kind of details on its funding.

funded in part by the Ku Klux Klan

I gotta remember this part to say to unsuspecting liberals who think US patriotism is some kind of internal struggle and triumph over racism, rather than the creation of it.

Edit: Corrected on the details. It would seem a more accurate way to say it is that Rushmore project was spearheaded by an avid KKK supporter / white supremacist. See: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7163539/6035893

Well, partly I’m thinking of like people who lost jobs or journalists who got temporarily locked up over speaking out for Palestine. But those two are maybe a bit different, one is the corporate wing punishing people and the other is the state wing punishing people, and you’re probably right that for the most part, the state wing only goes after regular non-specialist roles like a journalist if they’re taking action. Or I guess we could say it’s like, the amount of perceived threat (to the empire) of what you do is directly correlated to how quickly they sweep aside their “free speech” spiel.

Yes, there is that too. You can still get in trouble for saying stuff that opposes imperialism, but you can purchase any one of fifty-seven brands of frozen peaches. :P