You’ll never forget this face
A colossal monument to Sioux leader Crazy Horse continues to take shape in the Black Hills. Will the work ever be complete?
CRAZY HORSE, S.D. — It had been nearly 40 years since I’d visited the Black Hills of South Dakota, a 5,000-square-mile mountain range rising in the middle of the Great Plains.
I had grown up on the opposite, mostly flat, side of the state, so I thought the Black Hills exotic. From family vacations, I remembered cool pine forests, pristine granite-ringed lakes and clear, fast-running mountain streams so unlike the brown, muddy rivers snaking through my part of the state.
Last summer, I decided to return to the place that had evoked fond memories of those family trips. I was curious to see how much — or how little — the area had changed in the decades since I had been there.
One evening I struck up a conversation in Rapid City with a woman who had brought her mother from Santa Monica to fulfill a bucket-list wish to see Mt. Rushmore, in the southwestern part of the state.
I asked her whether she was also planning to visit the nearby Crazy Horse Memorial.
Never heard of it, came the reply.
I, of course, had heard of it, but it wasn’t until earlier that day that I had finally visited the colossal monument, decades old but still a work in progress.
Crazy Horse doesn’t attract the same attention as Mt. Rushmore National Memorial, just 17 miles away, but the two are inextricably linked.
Had it not been for Gutzon Borglum’s enormous sculpture of four exalted white leaders, Crazy Horse never would have happened.
In 1939, determined to make a statement of their own, Lakota elders approached Polish American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski with a request to carve a mountain for them.
“My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know the red man has great heroes too,” Chief Henry Standing Bear wrote to Ziolkowski. The hero they chose was Crazy Horse, the Oglala Sioux leader who helped lead his people to victory over Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s forces at Little Bighorn in 1876, only to be stabbed to death the next year by a guard after surrendering to the U.S. Army.
If and when it’s completed, the memorial will lay claim to being the largest sculpture in the world: 641 feet wide and 563 feet high.
I pulled into a half-full parking lot on a weekday morning.
Before heading out to get a better look at the sculpture, I wandered through the large museum at the visitors center, full of artifacts and Native American artwork, as well as Edward Curtis’ haunting prints of Plains Indians and Ziolkowski’s 1:34 plaster scale of the memorial, in front of expansive windows that look out onto the real thing for comparison.
Outside, I caught the shuttle that would take us to the foot of the mountain so we could hop off for a better view.
As I looked up, I was struck by the enormity of the sculpture, and even more so that after 68 years of blasting and carving, there was so much more left to finish.