Chief’s long, hard stare
QUESTION Why is the Crazy Horse monument unfinished after 70 years?
TourisTs flock to the Black Hills region of south Dakota to see Mount rushmore, a stone monument to the four u.s. Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. These can be seen up close, for no cost, from the roadside.
There is a lesser known monument, 17 miles away, of Crazy Horse, the Native American chief who led the charge against General Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn.
Visiting this attraction is expensive. You have to pay extra for a bus ride to see the monument and a lot more to get really close to an imaginary likeness of Crazy Horse, who refused to be painted or photographed in his lifetime.
Lakota elder Henry standing Bear wanted this memorial to recognise that Native Americans had great leaders. He contacted sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who had worked on Mount rushmore.
Ziolkowski’s vision was a huge statue of Crazy Horse on his horse, pointing at his tribal lands. Work started in 1948, but had not got very far by the time of Ziolkowski’s death in 1982.
His wife and family continued the work, turning down offers of government or state financial help to get it completed. They concentrated on the face, 87 ft high, which was finished in 1998. There has been little progress since then.
The delays are due to the sheer scale of the undertaking. The proposed sculpture is 641 ft long and 563 ft high — more than three times the height of Niagara Falls.
relatively few people are working on it compared with the hundreds who carved Mount rushmore, which was completed in just 14 years.
Dynamiting the granite has to be done at night, while most of the work is undertaken outside the tourist season, when storms and snow can halt progress.
However, not everyone supports working on what is seen by many to be sacred land. speaking to The New Yorker in 2019, Charmaine White Face, a spokesperson for the sioux Nation Treaty Council, described the memorial as a disgrace: ‘Many, many of us, especially those of us who are more traditional, totally abhor it. it’s a sacrilege. it’s wrong.’
There have also been claims not all of the entrance fees paid by visitors are being used to complete the project speedily. The Ziolkowskis have repeated Korczak’s advice to ‘Go slowly so you do it right’. But at the present rate of progress, the monument will take decades to finish.
QUESTION Is there a brewery in Austria with a swimming pool of beer?
AT THe brewery in starkenberg Castle in Tarrenz, you can take a dip in one of seven 13 ft pools of warm beer.
The castle was built between 1309 and 1339 by the Knights of starkenberg, and beer has been brewed there since 1516.
The starkenberger Biermythos, or beer myth, includes a tour of the castle, ice cellar and chapel, and a chance to bathe in 42,000 pints of beer.
According to the owners, the beer is rich in vitamins and calcium, and is good for the skin, helping to heal wounds and treat psoriasis. You are encouraged to order a cold stein as you relax in the warm beer. Drinking from the pool is not advised!
Paul Williams, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion.
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