‘The red man has great heroes too’

In Crazy Horse country, Michael Kerr gets a very different take on America

The morning I went to see them, South Dakota’s most famous man-made tourist attractions had vanished. That can happen in spring. Two days earlier I’d experienced dazzling sun followed by horizontal rain; now fog had seeped in through the ponderosa pines of the Black Hills and swallowed the peaks.

Over my “Monumental Breakfast” in Carver’s Café, I peered across at Mount Rushmore (named in 1885 after a New York lawyer who was checking mining claims). There, between 1927 and 1941, Gutzon Borglum, the son of Danish Mormon immigrants, dynamited and hammered into existence the images of four presidents – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln – that he declared would “endure until the wind and the rain alone shall wear them away”. Occasionally the fog would briefly drift or lift to reveal a presidential brow or nose, but never the whole panorama. Endurance wasn’t foremost in my mind; more the vanity of sculptors, and the transience of politicians.

Sixteen miles away, at the Crazy Horse Memorial, the fog was thicker still. Here, 70 years ago tomorrow, the Boston-born Korczak Ziolkowski began blasting granite to carve an answer to Mount Rushmore; an image commissioned by the Oglala Lakota chief Henry Standing Bear, who told him: “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes also.” The hero he had in mind was Crazy Horse, who with Sitting Bull engineered General George Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn, their people’s greatest triumph in the American Indian Wars. In scale and ambition, Ziolkowski’s plan – to depict a mounted Crazy Horse, left arm and pointing finger stretched over his horse’s mane – dwarfs Rushmore. It is designed to be 641ft long and 563ft high. All four presidential heads, each 60ft tall, would fit inside Crazy