Earlier this month my family visited the Black Hills of South Dakota, a fantastic destination one long day’s drive from Chicago. The highlight of the trip was hiking to the top of Harney Peak, but close behind were visits to two mountain monuments just a few miles apart: Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse.
Everyone knows Mount Rushmore—those four stoic faces staring out from the granite are one of the most familiar sights on the planet. Travelers from all over the world fly into Seattle and Minneapolis and Denver, then ride buses for a day or more just to marvel for a couple of hours.
[ibimage==27754==Small==Large==self==ibimage_align-left]And Crazy Horse? It might be just as famous someday. Check back in 2213.[ibimage==27755==Small==Large==self==ibimage_align-right]
They Ought to Call it “Crazy Sculptor”
In 1948, responding to the completion and instant popularity of Mount Rushmore, Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear appealed to Boston-based sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to create a monument that would honor Native American heritage. They conceived a symbolic likeness of never-photographed Chief Crazy Horse, pointing from atop his horse to the lands his people once roamed freely, that would dwarf Rushmore.
They sought no Federal funds, which made perfect sense, considering the atrocities The United States government perpetrated against the Lakota and other nations. Problem was, for the first 50 years or so, they barely had any funds at all.
In the welcome center video, Ziolkowski recounts climbing hundreds of stairs daily, in all weather, starting and restarting a balky compressor just to drill holes for the dynamite. It takes some kind of crazy artist gene to commit so fully to a project so colossal with such meager resources, but Ziolkowski took crazy to new heights, so to speak. In 36 years of carving, he never took a salary.
When Ziolkowski died in 1982, all he had accomplished was to blast away a chunk of mountaintop the size of a small office building. Crazy Horse didn’t even have a face.
Hard to Put a Good Face on the Progress
[ibimage==27756==Medium==Large==self==ibimage_align-left]The face was unveiled in 1999, and since then Ziolkowski’s family has bored a tunnel through the rock—which will become the space between Crazy Horse’s arm and the horse’s mane—and completed some preliminary work on the pointing finger and the horse’s head.
That’s it.
Now, I admire the sheer bigness of this undertaking—my family and I were especially wowed seeing the face lit by night—and I realize that even the tiniest detail requires blasting away tons of granite with razor precision. It’s not like building a bridge or laying a highway.
But how many more generations of Lakota will die before Crazy Horse is complete?
Is Crazy Horse Just a Scam?
The non-profit Crazy Horse Memorial no longer lacks for funds, charging visitors $27 per car (more than twice Rushmore’s fees) and collecting millions in donations and corporate sponsorships. The family claims to have repeatedly turned down government assistance, insisting that taking the Feds’ money would give them too much power to hurry the project along.
Ya think?
Some people claim the whole thing’s a scam, with the Ziolkowski family gouging tourists for millions with no intention of making any more progress carving the mountain.
I hope not. But I do get the feeling their aversion to Federal involvement now has less to do with dishonoring the Lakota, and more to do with honoring some right-wing, we-don’t-need-no-government-telling-us-what-to-do agenda. Why else end the incredibly cheesy laser show with Lee Greenwood’s cornball flag-waver, “God Bless the USA”?
Hey, I’m usually all for private enterprise and a hands-off government. But the Feds finished Mount Rushmore in 14 years with pre-WWII equipment. At the current rate, even with state-of-the-art engineering and blasting gear, Crazy Horse won’t be done for another 200.
Sometimes, government just does it better.
