Henry Standing Bear's Vision for the Crazy Horse Memorial
The mountain carving southwest of Rapid City is usually associated with the sculptor who blasted it, Korczak Ziolkowski. But the idea behind it came from a Lakota elder, and the monument exists because he persisted in asking for it. His name was Henry Standing Bear, and the vision was his before it was anyone’s chisel.
Standing Bear was an Oglala Lakota of a generation that had lived through wrenching change. Born in the latter part of the nineteenth century, he came of age as the old life on the plains was being closed off, the Black Hills taken against the terms of treaty, the buffalo gone, and his people pressed onto reservations. He was educated in the boarding school system that the federal government used to assimilate Native children, and he moved between the white world and the Lakota world with a foot in each. That dual experience shaped his sense of what a monument might do.
A reply to Mount Rushmore
By the 1930s the faces of four American presidents were emerging from a Black Hills cliff at Mount Rushmore, drawing national attention to granite the Lakota still regarded as stolen and sacred. Standing Bear watched this with a complicated eye. The carving celebrated the men who led the nation that had dispossessed his people, on land that was the heart of Lakota country. He came to believe that the Lakota should have their own answer in stone, a monument to show, in words attributed to him, that the red man had great heroes too.
He fixed on Crazy Horse as the subject. The Oglala war leader had fought to defend the old life and had never surrendered to reservation confinement before his death in custody in 1877. He was revered among the Lakota as a man of integrity who shunned display, which made him both a fitting and a difficult choice for an enormous public image. Standing Bear judged that his stature outweighed the discomfort, and he set about finding someone to carve him.
Persistence and an invitation
Standing Bear did not simply wish for a monument. He worked to bring it about. He corresponded with officials and artists, sought support, and at one point offered some of his own land toward the effort, though the mountain eventually chosen lay elsewhere in the Hills. He approached more than one sculptor before his invitation reached Ziolkowski, who had assisted briefly at Rushmore and had won notice for his own work. In the late 1930s Standing Bear wrote to him, and after the interruption of the Second World War, Ziolkowski came west to take up the task.
The famous letter in which Standing Bear framed the purpose has been quoted often, and the heart of it is the wish to honor Native heroes in a form the wider world could not ignore. He wanted the monument to stand for more than one man. It was to represent the dignity and the leadership of Native peoples at a time when both were widely dismissed. That framing carried into the larger plans Ziolkowski adopted, including a center for Native education and culture at the base of the mountain.
Standing Bear lived to see the first blasting begin in 1948 and the early, slow years of the carving, but he died in the early 1950s, long before the work took recognizable shape. He did not see the face dedicated decades later, nor the steady labor of the family that has continued the project, described in the account of the memorial.
The monument has drawn debate among the Lakota themselves, some embracing it as Standing Bear intended and others uneasy at carving a sacred mountain or fixing the image of a man who avoided being pictured. That debate is real and ongoing. But the origin of the project is not in doubt. It began as a Lakota elder’s deliberate answer to the faces on the neighboring cliff, a claim that the heroes of his own people deserved to be remembered on the same grand scale, in the same enduring stone.