Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear surveyed the
faces of the four American great leaders carved into the sheer mountainside.
For ten years, Standing Bear had pondered the white men hanging by scaffolds from
the face of Mt. Rushmore, which happened to lie on his native homeland, the
Black Hills of South Dakota. The irony stirred him deeply, and an idea came to
him. Finally, in the fall of 1939, he wrote a letter to one of Mt. Rushmore’s
sculptors, which read,
''My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know
that the red man has great heroes, too.''
The sculptor was Korczak Ziolkowski and he became
so intrigued with Standing Bear’s idea of creating a stone memorial honoring
Native Americans that he eventually moved west to begin work. Standing Bear and
the other Lakota leaders chose the warrior Crazy Horse’s likeness to represent them
in stone.
It was
Crazy Horse’s band of Lakota warriors who defeated Custer’s Seventh U.S.
Cavalry battalion in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, known as "Custer’s Last
Stand.” The warrior Crazy Horse was killed in 1877 at
Ft. Robinson, where he rode in under a flag of truce. A misunderstanding,
possible the fault of a poor translator, led to a scuffle and Crazy Horse was
mortally wounded with a bayonet.
In 1948,
Korczak Ziolkowski’s hammer struck a chisel into the granite of Thunderhead
Mountain, only 17 miles from Mt. Rushmore. Being a self-taught sculptor, he
made many early miscalculations, some resulting in bodily injuries. He fell in
love with Ruth, a young volunteer on the project, and eventually married her. The
Ziolkowskis welcomed a total of 10 children. Ruth worked alongside him until his
death in 1982, then took over supervision of the carving, taking to heart his
instructions to “go slowly so you do it right.” At this point, not even the face
of Crazy Horse was finished.
 |
| Korczak and Ruth Ziolkowski |
The privately funded transformation from
mountain to statue has been a long one, and it is still not complete. Today,
four of the Ziolkowski children and several grandchildren carry on the work. After
69 years of construction, the sons and daughters of Korczak Ziolkowski say they
will not see completion of the statue in their lifetimes. (In comparison, the
Great Pyramid of Egypt is thought to have been built in about 20 years.)
Eventually, the image of Crazy Horse will be wider than two football fields and
taller than the Washington Monument.
Crazy Horse’s pose was inspired by the story
that, after the defeat of the Lakota, a derisive Cavalryman asked him the
question, “Where are your lands now?” With his left hand pointing over his
horse’s head, Crazy Horse answered, “My lands are where my dead lie buried.”
Strangely, a few
years after the warrior’s death, a medicine man, Black Elk, told an interviewer
that Crazy Horse had predicted to him: ''I will return to you in stone.'' The prophecy is coming true, one chip of granite at a time.
For more information about the Crazy Horse Memorial, visit crazyhorsememorial.org.
 |
| Rendering of the future Crazy Horse Memorial Visitor Complex |
All the best,
Vonn
2015 WWA Spur Finalist (Short Fiction)
2015 Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Finalist (Short Fiction)
2015 Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Finalist (Short Fiction)
