HISTORY5 - Crazy Horse Forever

That Western National Parks tour, which I mentioned in my last article on the history of Mount Rushmore, also stops at the Crazy Horse Memorial, another place I have never been, so I wanted to learn about it too, before our visit in September.

The Crazy Horse Memorial is a mountain monument, started in 1948 and still under construction on private land in the Black Hills of South Dakota, just over 16 driving miles from the Mount Rushmore Memorial.  The Oglala Lakota warrior, Crazy Horse, is being depicted riding a horse and pointing into the distance, in a gigantic 641 feet long x 563 feet high sculpture.  The memorial was commission by Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota elder, and designed and initially sculpted by Korczak Ziolkowski.  The project is operated today by the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation.

The incomplete Crazy Horse Memorial sculpture as it appears today.  Note the 1/34th scale model in the left foreground.

Crazy Horse (1840-1877)

Crazy Horse was an Indian leader of the Oglala Lakota tribe of Sioux who fought against the encroachment of American settlers on Indian Territory.  He participated in several battles against U.S. troops on the northern Great Plains, including the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1877 (aka Custer’s Last Stand), leading a war party to victory, earning great respect from both his enemies and his own people.  In September 1877, four months after surrendering to General George Crook, he was fatally wounded by a bayonet-wielding guard, while allegedly resisting imprisonment.  He ranks among the most notable and iconic of Native American warriors and was honored by the U.S. Postal Service in 1982 with a 13-cent Great Americans series postage stamp.

A 1934 sketch of Crazy Horse made by a Mormon missionary after interviewing Crazy Horse's sister, who claimed that the dipiction was accurate.

The Beginning

In the early 1930s, Oglala Lakota brothers, Luther and Henry Standing Bear tried to interest sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who was then working on the Mount Rushmore Monument, in carving an image of Crazy Horse on Mount Rushmore along with the four U.S. presidents, suggesting that “Crazy Horse is the real patriot of the Sioux tribe and the only one worthy to place by the side of Washington and Lincoln.”  Borglum ignored the brothers and subsequent campaigning to push this idea failed.

So in 1939, Henry Standing Bear wrote to Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski about doing a separate sculpture, informing Ziolkowski that “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too.”  Standing Bear also wrote to the U.S. Department of the Interior, offering his own fertile 900 acres in exchange for the barren 6,532-foot Thunderhead Mountain, near the town of Custer in their sacred Black Hills, for the purpose of paying honor to Crazy Horse.  The government responded positively, and the National Forest Service, responsible for the land, agreed to grant a permit for use of the land and an okay to oversee the project. Standing Bear chose not to seek government funds, with the idea of relying instead upon influential Americans interested in the welfare of the American Indian to privately fund the project.

The Black Hills region of South Dakota.  The Crazy Horse Memorial is 16 road miles southwest of Mount Rushmore.

Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski

Korczak Ziolkowski was born in Boston in 1908 to Polish parents, was orphaned at the age of one, and grew up in series of foster homes.  Without any formal art training, his gifts as a sculptor began to show at an early age.  He first became a wood carver and accomplished furniture maker.  After completing his first marble sculpture in 1932, he moved to New Britain, Connecticut to begin life as a professional artist.  His sculpture of Ignacy Jan Paderewski won first prize at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.  Also, in 1939 he was hired as a sculptor’s assistant by Gutzon Borglum on his Mount Rushmore Project.  However, he was soon fired from that job after getting into an argument about responsibilities with Gutzon’s son Lincoln.

In the spring of 1940, Ziolkowski met with Henry Standing Bear and other Lakota representatives and agreed to go ahead with the Crazy Horse project.  For the next few years, Ziolkowski conducted research and began planning the sculpture.  But World War II intervened and he had to put the project on hold when he volunteered for service in the U.S. Army.

In 1947 Ziolkowski moved back to the Black Hills and turned his full attention to the sculpture by inspecting the granite mountain and building a 1/34^th scale model for the enormous undertaking.  The monument was expected to be the largest in the world - 64 stories tall and longer than two football fields.  Consider these mind-boggling numbers:  Crazy Horse’s head will be large enough to contain all the 60-foot heads of the presidents at Mount Rushmore.  All four of the Mount Rushmore presidents will fit under the Indian leader’s outstretched arm.  The hand will be about 25 feet tall; the extended left index finger will be nearly 29 ½-feet long.  The horse’s head will be 219 feet tall with each horse’s eye 20 feet wide and 15 feet high.

Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski and Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear stand in front of the Crazy Horse monument model with the as yet untouched Thunderhead Mountain in the background.  Circe June 3 1948.

Construction

On June 3, 1948 the first dynamite blast was made and the memorial was dedicated to the Native American people.

Progress on this ambitious privately-financed project has been very slow.  For 34 years, until his death in 1972 at age 74 of acute pancreatitis, Korczak Ziolkowski removed tons of granite off the mountain without shaping any of the monuments key elements, e.g., the horse or Crazy Horse’s head, extended arm, or hand.  After his death, Korczak’s wife Ruth took over the project and decided to focus on the completion of Crazy Horse’s head first, instead of the horse as her husband had originally planned.  She believed that Crazy Horse’s face, once completed, would increase the sculpture’s draw as a tourist attraction, which would provide additional funding.  Sixteen years later, in 1998 the face of Crazy Horse was completed and dedicated.  Work continued at a steady, if slow, pace for another 16 years on the horse and Crazy Horse’s extended arm and hand, until Ruth Ziolkowski’s death in 2014 at age 87 -without completing any of these other key elements of the sculpture.  Since Ruth’s death, the project has continued under a multiple-person Ziolkowski family group, keeping up the family tradition and dream, recently concentrating on crafting Crazy Horse’s outstretched arm and hand, and the horse’s mane.

Carving Crazy Horses face - 1994.

The complete Crazy Horse face - 1998.

Aerial view of the Crazy Horse Sculpture today.

Measuring and carving systems have evolved steadily since the carving of Mount Rushmore (completed in 1941) and during the construction of the Crazy Horse memorial.  Korczak used a combination of his artistic eye, tape measures, and an old theodolite (surveying instrument) to determine the basic location of his planned sculpture within the mountain and to begin the process of removing excess rock.  In 1987, a 60-foot long measuring boom was fixed to the top of Crazy Horse’s head.  A plumb bob suspended from that measuring boom was used to transfer numbers from the pointing system on the 1/34^th scale model of Crazy Horse’s face.  (Much like the method used on Mount Rushmore.)

When work moved beyond the face in 1998, a survey control system was developed, measuring very precise angles and distances from known control points to calculate three-dimensional coordinates for any point on the mountain.  It used an infrared beam reflected from a hand-held prism to measure distances up to several thousand feet with accuracy to the nearest 1/1000^th of a foot.

Since 2000 laser scanning equipment has been used to measure the entire mountain on several occasions, allowing for measuring huge numbers of points very quickly and accurately to build digital models in computers.  These digital models permit measurements and coordinates to be provided to the carvers.

Drilling equipment has evolved from Korczak’s use of single-jack (sledge hammer and steel) to drill holes for dynamiting to hydraulic drills mounted on tracks or rubber tires.  Dynamite blasts use detonating cord to control the explosive energy and do less damage to the rock that is not removed by the blast.  Blast timing is now controlled electronically with programmable detonators. Removing blasted rock from the site is accomplished with dump trucks.  Finishing is accomplished by drilling to isolate small blocks of rock; a jet torch, running on diesel and compressed air, removes drill marks and smooths the final surface.  The last step is to seal the natural seams in the granite so that water cannot infiltrate and cause damage during freeze/thaw cycles.

Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation

Even though the Crazy Horse Memorial is unfinished, the enterprise has grown into a multi-million dollar per year tourist operation, with more than a million visitors per year.  Early fund-raising efforts included charging fees for visitors who wanted to view the sculpting progress and encouraging donations to the project.

Today, the slowly progressing sculpting project is supported by the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation, a non-profit organization whose mission is to protect and preserve the culture, tradition and living heritage of the North American Indians.  The Foundation started national fund-raising efforts in 2006 and has raised millions of dollars to continue the progress on the sculpture, provide educational and cultural opportunities for Indians, and act as repository for Native American arts and crafts.  The Crazy Horse Memorial visitor complex now boasts a cultural center, museum, restaurant, conference center, and gift shop.  Millions of dollars have been contributed to Indian education scholarships to South Dakota schools, and future plans include an on-site Indian University of North America.

The extensive visitor center is about three quarters of a mile from the Crazy Horse sculpture.