For 50 years the giant faces of Washington, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Jefferson have stared out over South Dakota's Black Hills, watching for a committee of VIPs which would formally dedicate Mount Rushmore to the American people.

The committee never came. One might have, soon after sculptor Gutzon Borglum's masterwork was completed in 1941 -- but Pearl Harbor was bombed less than two months later, and any dedication plans were bombed with it.

What with one thing or another, a formal dedication of the Mount Rushmore Memorial has been on hold ever since. But at long last, on this Fourth of July in its golden anniversary year, the Mount Rushmore Memorial will be officially ushered into our national park system.

It's being billed as "a media event," and I suppose I'll go even though I once had trouble with the idea of sacrificing a perfectly good mountain to commemorate four politicians. But I've mellowed a lot. For one thing, as politicians go, there couldn't have been better choices. For another, the project seemed a good idea at the time and we should try to judge events in the context of their times.

There's no denying that Borglum did a whale of a job. His clay models at the Sculptor's Studio near the visitors' center may seem crude, but the main work is highly refined. If the thing had to be done, it couldn't have been done better -- although it's difficult to understand how the money to build it could be found during the Great Depression, while the money to repair cracks in the carving is so hard to find today.

Mount Rushmore is the great public magnet of the Black Hills -- no doubt about it. Millions of visitors go into the heart of the Black Hills just to see those four faces, but then, after a sandwich and a trip to the restroom, they're back on the interstate. Too bad, for Mount Rushmore is just an added attraction; the main show is the Black Hills region itself.

Nowhere else did so many parts of the legendary West actually exist: forested mountains and deep canyons, treeless plains, desert, gunmen, cowboys, Indians, gold, prospectors, Custer's

cavalry, hell-roaring mining towns, buffalo herds. If there's anything on the sundown side of the 100th meridian that qualifies as classic West, this is it.

I was an expert in such stuff by my 14th summer, thanks to Zane Grey and the lurid yarns in Street & Smith's Western Magazine. That was the year I saw the Black Hills for the first time, and I wasn't disappointed. It was my first look at real buffalo, real mountains and Sioux Indians. The only let down was in Deadwood when I stood at the graves of Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok and thought of having been born 80 years too late and missing all the real fun.

Then I turned and saw a character right out of Western fiction: The last of the old Black Hills prospectors, Potato Creek Johnny, in the flesh -- a gnarled, bearded, ragged gnome of a man, no taller than I was, complete with burro and gold pans and happy to tell a 14-year-old kid about the half-pound nugget he found back in the glory days.

Potato Creek Johnny joined Wild Bill and Calamity years ago in the Mount Moriah Cemetery. They have passed on with Custer and Crazy Horse, but the setting they all knew is still there, as good as ever, a rich and genuine enclave of the real West that's within a two-day drive of Chicago.

Maybe Deadwood isn't the hell-roaring gold camp it was when Wild Bill came to town, but he still could find a little action. There's open gambling with slots, blackjack and poker -- and there are signs on the doors of many Rapid City businesses advising that knives and pistols aren't welcome on the premises.

South Dakota really consists of two parts:"East River" and "West River." It's a valid distinction, for the West really begins at the Missouri River. As you come out of the east on Interstate 90 and cross the Big Muddy, you'll be near the south edge of the Fort Pierre National Grassland, a vast reach of grass and sky of the kind in which the motion picture "Dances With Wolves" was made. This place -- where you still can see the wind dancing, if not the wolves -- is worth a short side trip.

A hundred miles farther west, you'll be skirting the north walls of Badlands National Park -- a moonscape still being carved from the volcanic ashes and clays of the Oligocene Epoch. Badger Clark, poet laureate of South Dakota, called it a place where "millenniums winked like campfire sparks/Down the winds of unguessed time."

At the Badlands I usually put on a certain hat. It once was South Dakota Wildlife Department issue, a dressy Stetson now stained with sweat and bacon grease. My good-time hat generally is reserved for special occasions and such good-time places as the Badlands and Black Hills. Just a little farther down the road, on a clear day, I know I'll see what looks like a distant storm front. A long, low cloud along the western skyline that is dark even in summer sunshine -- the Black Hills of South Dakota, with the mantle of pine forests that named them. Those hills, like the old hat, mean adventure past, adventure at hand and adventure yet to come.

The Black Hills are "hills" in name only. They easily qualify as mountains. Harney Peak is an impressive 7,242 feet high -- the tallest point east of the Rockies and the highest part of what's known to geologists as "the Black Hills Dome."

Back in the days of two-lane main highways and 20-cents-a-gallon gasoline, the Black Hills were as far as many of us could afford to go, or needed to. The region had about 'D everything a camper, fisherman, hiker or sightseer could want, and if that wasn't enough, it was loaded with fine tourist traps -- and still is.

I have a feeling, though, that the Black Hills have fallen a bit out of fashion as a prime destination, and I can't understand why. In this age of interstate freeways, the Black Hills seem more of a wayside stop en route to Glacier, Yellowstone and Jackson Hole.

There are three basic components in a successful vacation: enough time, enough money and something for everyone to enjoy. The Black Hills rate high on all counts. Coming from the East, you'll never get into the West any faster or with less gasoline. Coming from the West,the Black Hills region and the West River grasslands are a grand conclusion to eastward travel.

In either case, there's a special added attraction just before you get to the Hills. A few miles to the east is Badlands National Park; over on the west side, in Wyoming, is Devil's Tower National Monument. If you come in from the south, there are Wind Cave National Park and Jewel Cave National Monument.

In the hills themselves, one of my favorite places is Custer State Park -- a fine 73,000-acre mix of short-grass prairie and ponderosa pine forest, with free-ranging buffalo, elk, coyotes, prairie dogs, mule deer, antelope, prairie falcons, golden eagles, wild turkeys, and even bighorn sheep and Rocky Mountain goats in the rough breaks of French Creek.

At the rugged heart of the Black Hills are igneous intrusions that pierce the vast dome of sedimentary rocks to form the granite spires of the Needles, and the massifs of Harney Peak and Mount Rushmore. That molten rock brought gold -- and the gold would bring miners, cavalry and an Indian war.

Gold still is big business in the hills. The Homestake Mine at Lead is the largest underground gold mine in the world. In operation since 1876, it also is the oldest continuous producer. In August 1990 its total production passed 36 million ounces. The diggings are now down to 8,000 feet, with indications of ore reserves nearly a half-mile deeper than that. There are public tours of the upper workings and refinery, but none underground, and this may be a chance to see some 24-carat ingots. Sorry, no free samples.

I've never done the Homestake tour, seen the shows at the Reptile Gardens or Bear Country, or visited the Green Door Brothel -- Deadwood's historic, but inactive, sportin' house (no free samples there, either). I keep meaning to see such places, but always seem to get hung up somewhere in the Badlands or the breaks of French Creek, or in the 1.2 million acres of the Black Hills National Forest. I keep going back to the Needles area and the trails on and around Harney Peak and Sylvan Lake, where hot sun on ponderosa pine needles smells just the same as it did in my 14th summer.

The things that draw me to the Black Hills and stay in my mind have little to do with Mount Rushmore and the main tourist centers.

For further information about the Black Hills Region and South Dakota in general, contact the South Dakota Department of Tourism, Capitol Lake Plaza, Pierre, S.D. 57501; (800) 843-1930; or (800) 952-2217 in South Dakota. Another source is the Black Hills, Badlands and Lakes Association, 900 Jackson Blvd., Rapid City, S.D. 57702; (605) 341-1462.