Crazy Horse Memorial
Crazy Horse, S.D., 1948-present
Korczak Ziolkowski, creator
The white man may have won the west but the red man, in the form of Crazy Horse, has won the postwar monument race. The Crazy Horse Statue, a tableau in stone now in its ninth decade is already the world’s largest mountain carving.
How big? Upon completion the carving will measure 641 feet long and 563 feet high, dimensions which work out to some 360,000 square feet. By contrast the four Presidents depicted on Mount Rushmore, just 17 miles to the northeast, are only sixty feet high, though they do tower several thousand feet above the canyon below.
Conceived and begun by Korczak Ziolkowski and Henry Standing Bear in 1948, the land was chosen by the sculptor and Standing Bear, a Lakota Indian chief. Crazy Horse was never photographed so the carving is said to represent the spirit of Crazy Horse and, through him, all Indians. Crazy Horse’s head was unveiled in a 50thanniversary ceremony in 1998; it measures 87’7” high, almost 50% more than the nearby Presidents. The Indian hero will be astride a 221 foot tall horse.
Ziolkowski died in 1982, passing the torch to his wife, Ruth, who guided the project until her death in 2014, assisted by seven of the couple’s ten children and a board of directors charged with maintaining “the beauty and justice of the Crazy Horse dream”, The project is set amid a campus in Crazy Horse, South Dakota, in the Black Hills.
A very comprehensive website gives the lowdown on the project and the “explosive engineering” techniques used to carve the mountain. The pace might seem slow but mountain carving is not done at a breakneck speed, mistakes cut in rock are forever. The work is also 100% privately funded, as opposed to Mount Rushmore, which was taken over by the Government during the construction phase and operates it today.
Ziolkowki was a dreamer of the first order. He left over two hundred pages of plans for the memorial and the development of the area, including schools, a museum, medical center, training site, recreational facilities and hotels, an entire planned community would surround the massive memorial.
Maybe all this will come to pass but for now we must content ourselves with a partly done masterwork presaging a planned finished carving larger than many bridges.
Good post, I've been there with my son and it's pretty cool/impressive!
I wanna see a Neil Young & Crazy Horse mountain sculpture. ;-)