Crazy Horse Monument Still Being Sculpted

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The fingers have been carved on the Crazy Horse Monument outside of Custer, South Dakota.

“My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes also.” Chief Henry Standing Bear

The giant sculpture in a mountain that began in 1948 and is ongoing started with Chief Henry Standing Bear, a Brule Lakota. Born in 1874, he was one of the first natives to attend Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania where he took the  name “Henry.”

He realized that he would have to learn the non-Native ways to preserve his culture. After Carlisle, he attended night school in Chicago, while working for the Sears Roebuck Company to pay for his schooling.

Eventually he would work with the South Dakota State Senator Francis Case and was a member of the South Dakota Indian Affairs Commission.

He led the initiative to honor President Calvin Coolidge with a traditional name, “Leading Eagle.” At that naming ceremony he challenged President Coolidge to take up the leadership role that had been previously filled by highly-respected leaders such as Sitting Bull and Red Cloud.

As Mount Rushmore was being built from 1927 through 1941, Standing Bear wanted a memorial for his relative Crazy Horse. He wanted it carved in the scared Paha Sapa (Black Hills). At one point, the chief even approached Guzon Borglum, who carved Mt. Rushmore to advocate for a Native American addition to the faces.

He finally found an advocate with prize-winning sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski.

As a young man, Ziolkowski lived in several foster homes, before he became an apprentice patternmaker in the Boston shipyards.

In 1932, he used a coal chisel to carve his first portrait, a marble tribute to Judge Frederick Pickering Cabot, a famous Boston juvenile judge who had befriended and encouraged Ziolkowski.

Moving to West Hartford, Conn., Ziolkowski launched a successful studio career doing commissioned sculpture throughout New England, Boston, and New York. At age 34, he volunteered for service in World War II. He landed on Omaha Beach and was later wounded.

He accepted the invitation from Standing Bear to carve the monument in the granite of Thunderhead Mountain. On June 3, 1948, the project began with a dedication ceremony with the understanding that the memorial would serve to create cross-cultural understanding and to mend relations between Natives and non-Natives. Five survivors of the Battle of the Little Bighorn attended that ceremony.

This is a 1/ 34 scale model of  how the sculpture in the mountain will look when completed.
This editor’s mother and sister accompanied her on the trip.

Ziolkowski worked on the project until his death on October 20, 1982, at age 74. During his nearly 36 years of working on the Mountain, he refused to take any salary at Crazy Horse Memorial®. He is laid to rest in the tomb that he and his sons blasted from a rock outcropping at the base of the mountain. He wrote his own epitaph for the tomb door and cut the letters from steel plate.

KORCZAK Storyteller in Stone
May His Remains Be Left Unknown

Those growing up in South Dakota have watched the mountain, located outside of Custer, South Dakota, gradually being carved. This editor’s father in the 1970s said it would never be completed in his lifetime, and now this editor feels similarly, although the arm on the structure is now taking shape, a portion of the hand was carved.

The memorial, which had become a family project, is privately funded and takes no government dollars, state or federal. There is an entrance fee to go to the large cultural center that includes a museum, Native American artifacts, gift shop, the Laughing Water Restaurant and a visitor’s center.

The woman in green won the hoop dancing contest one year, which has only recently allowed women to compete in what used to be strictly a man’s dance. “I won it and I was wearing a dress,” she said.

The Memorial is located at 12151 Avenue of the Chiefs Crazy Horse, SD 57730-8900. (605) 673-4681.

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