Almost everyone has heard of Mount Rushmore. But far fewer know that just 8 miles away, work is now taking place on the world’s largest sculpture—orders of magnitude larger than that homage to American presidents. The carving is called Crazy Horse, and its roots are a world apart from modern-day politics. It’s so enormous that if you were to pile the four presidential heads of Mount Rushmore on top of one another, they wouldn’t even reach halfway up the colossal work in progress.
This memorial is truly epic. Its carving began 75 years ago and was sparked by an unlikely friendship. Chief Henry Standing Bear, a local Native American, was a legendary character in Native culture; this visionary Lakota Indian, a great public speaker and thinker, was passionate about finding new ways of preserving his people’s history and tradition. But it was his cousin, a war hero by the name of Crazy Horse, who was revered by the Lakota as a truly iconic warrior.
When Standing Bear caught wind of plans to build a memorial in honor of Crazy Horse in Nebraska, he appealed to the one spearheading the project. The rightful place for such a carving, he said, was the Black Hills in western South Dakota, which are considered sacred by the Lakota. This small, isolated mountain range covered in pine forest is the oldest in the United States, and Native Americans have inhabited the region for almost 10,000 years.
Crazy Horse Monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota. (Glenn Perreira/Shutterstock)
Standing Bear and fellow Lakota leaders were determined to contribute their own appropriate dedication to Crazy Horse, fueled by a desire not only to pay homage to their hero, but also to promote cross-cultural understanding and heal past wounds. It was an ambitious dream—and Standing Bear needed an exceptional artist to help him realize it.
“My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know the red man has great heroes, too,” wrote Standing Bear in a 1939 letter to sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski. Mr. Ziolkowski himself had led an extraordinary life. Born in Boston of Polish descent, he was raised in foster homes and had a difficult childhood. Helping one foster parent do construction, however, he learned he had a natural aptitude for working with his hands. With grit and talent, he managed to put himself through technical school, earn an apprenticeship in Boston’s shipyards, and later become a successful sculptor.
When Standing Bear learned of Mr. Ziolkowski’s contribution to the famed Mt. Rushmore monument, he reached out. The two struck up a friendship and set about looking for a suitable carving site, but their mutual wish to achieve a giant Crazy Horse sculpture in the Black Hills was interrupted by the Second World War.
Detail of the finished face of Crazy Horse Memorial. (Glenn Perreira/Shutterstock)
Mr. Ziolkowski volunteered for service, participating in the Omaha Beach landing and suffering injury in a later conflict. Only when the war was over could this courageous soldier and artist finally devote his time and effort to the Crazy Horse Memorial.
“By carving Crazy Horse, if I can give back to the Indian some of his pride and create a means to keep alive his culture and heritage, my life will have been worthwhile,” he said.
Mr. Ziolkowski arrived in the Black Hills on May 3, 1947, and stayed until his death in 1982. He was 74 years old and had spent almost 36 years working on the carving. His widow, Ruth Ziolkowski, took over overseeing all operations and running the family’s dairy farm and timber mill. Mrs. Ziolkowski passed away in 2014 and was laid to rest by her husband’s tomb, located at the base of the giant sculpture.
Today, the couple’s daughter, Monique—one of their ten children—continues her parents’ legacy, managing the day-to-day work, which receives no government funding and relies upon revenue generated through visitor admissions and charitable giving.
A to-scale maquette of Crazy Horse Memorial at the site of the carving. (Conner Baker/Unsplash)
The face of the sculpture, a staggering 87 feet tall, is complete and efforts have now turned to Crazy Horse’s left hand, arm, and mane. Workers hope that by 2035, the arm, hand, hairline, shoulder, and upper part of the horse’s head will be complete; but with only a small team, sometimes less than 10, work is slow and laborious.
It’s hard to know just when—or whether at all—the Crazy Horse Memorial will be finished. If it eventually is, it would measure 641 feet (195 meters) long and 563 feet (171 meters) high; and the dream started by Standing Bear and Mr. Ziolkowski 76 years ago, will at long last be realized.
Complex feeling surrounds the mountain carving that, if completed, will be by far the largest sculpture in the world; not all those of Native American descent back the monument’s creation, believing it to be a form of desecration. These include Lakota Indian White Face, who, in a 2013 interview, stated:
“It won’t be finished. It will never … That’s a sacred place.”
With just the face of the famed Lakota warrior, the Crazy Horse Memorial still has much work to go. (James Dalrymple/Shutterstock)
Barbara Murray-Charging Crow, whose husband’s fifth-generation grandfather rode with Crazy Horse, says that the monument is at odds with the spirit of the Lakota:
“There are no pictures of these men for a reason. They were a different kind of man. They suffered emotionally and mentally because their people suffered. He never wanted to be a chief ... He became a warrior, and a very spiritual man.”
One factor that isn’t up for debate is the sheer ambition behind the project. If finished, it will be four times bigger than the Statue of Liberty. To put it into scale, each president’s head at Mt. Rushmore measures 60 feet (18 meters) by 40 feet (12 meters), while Crazy Horse’s head towers almost 1.5 times larger than this. To get an idea of what the final sculpture would look like, the foundation puts on light shows nightly throughout summer, transforming the granite mountainside into a 500-foot (152-meter) “movie screen” for telling stories rich in Native American heritage.
Anna Mason is a writer based in England. She majored in literature and specializes in human interest, travel, lifestyle and content marketing. Anna enjoys storytelling, adventures, the Balearic sunshine and the Yorkshire rain.
