The Crazy Horse Memorial: Carving a Mountain Since 1948
A few miles from the carved presidents of Mount Rushmore, another mountain has been slowly taking the shape of a man on horseback for more than seventy years. The Crazy Horse Memorial is the larger undertaking by far, and the slower one, and it remains unfinished. Its story is one of stubborn private effort across generations, and of a question that has never quite settled about what such a monument should be.
The project began with a request. The Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear wanted a monument to show that Native peoples had heroes of their own, and he chose the Oglala war leader Crazy Horse as its subject. The sculptor he persuaded to take it on was Korczak Ziolkowski, who set off the first blast on the granite of Thunderhead Mountain in 1948 and gave the rest of his life to it.
The plan and its scale
The design calls for Crazy Horse mounted on a horse, his left arm extended over the land in answer to a question he is said to have been asked about where his lands were now, his reply being that his lands were where his dead lay buried. The intended dimensions are difficult to grasp. When complete, the carving would be far larger than the presidential faces nearby, the head alone dwarfing any one of them, and the horse’s head and the rider together spanning a portion of mountain that makes Rushmore look modest. The whole figure, if finished, would be among the largest sculptures on earth.
Ziolkowski made the choice early to refuse federal funding, turning down substantial government grants more than once. He wanted the memorial built by private means so that it would remain independent, and that decision shaped its pace. With no public appropriation behind it, the work has lived on admission fees, donations, and the labor the family could muster, and progress has come in slow stages rather than steady seasons. He also planned for the mountain to anchor more than a carving, envisioning a museum of Native culture and a center for Native education and health at its base.
A work passed down
Ziolkowski died in 1982 with the figure still roughly shaped at best. His widow, Ruth Ziolkowski, then led the foundation for decades and made a decisive change of priority, concentrating the work on completing the face rather than spreading effort across the whole figure at once. The face was dedicated in the late 1990s, and for the first time visitors could see a finished feature and grasp what the entire carving might one day become. Ruth led the project until her own death, and members of the family and the foundation have carried it on since, turning in recent years toward the horse’s head and the rider’s hand and arm.
Around the mountain, the broader vision has grown into a substantial complex. There is a large visitor center and the Indian Museum of North America, programs and scholarships for Native students, and a cultural center, drawing many thousands of visitors a year. For the foundation, the carving and these institutions are meant to be inseparable, the mountain giving the rest its reason and its draw.
The memorial has never been free of debate, including among the Lakota. Some welcome it in the spirit Standing Bear intended, a grand and lasting honor to a Native hero on sacred ground. Others question whether blasting a sacred mountain honors anything, or whether a man famous for shunning display and for never allowing his picture to be taken would have wanted a likeness carved into stone at a colossal scale. There is also unease that the project lies on land taken from the Lakota under the Act of 1877, the same dispossession that troubles every monument in the Hills.
No one alive is likely to see it finished. The carving moves at its own pace, dependent on weather, money, and the will of the family that has tended it for three generations. What stands now is a face emerged from the rock, an arm and a horse beginning to take form behind it, and a promise made decades ago that has outlived everyone who first made it.