South Dakota: Crazy Horse Memorial

🏔️ Crazy Horse: The Mountain That’s Been Under Construction Since Before I Was Born

We pulled into the Crazy Horse Memorial on a bright South Dakota morning, slightly bewildered — as we often are — and immediately confronted by something so vast and so audaciously ambitious that it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Which, given I’m at an age where most things just make me want a sit-down and a cup of tea, was quite the achievement.

To understand what we were looking at, you need to go back a fair way. Back to a man named Henry Standing Bear, a Brulé Lakota chief born around 1874 near Pierre, South Dakota, on the banks of the great Missouri River. The Brulé — whose name in Lakota is Sičhánǧu, meaning “Burnt Thighs,” the origin of which is a story for another day — were one of the seven council fires of the Lakota Sioux Nation, a people with deep roots across the Northern Great Plains stretching back centuries before anyone with a European accent turned up and started causing trouble.

Standing Bear was a man of considerable dignity and considerable determination. He was also, it turned out, a man with a very long memory and an even longer sense of purpose.

In 1933, word reached him that there were plans afoot to erect some sort of monument to his cousin, the legendary war leader Crazy Horse, at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. Now, Fort Robinson is a name that sits heavily in Lakota history. It was there, on the 5th of September 1877, that Crazy Horse — whose Lakota name was Tȟašúŋke Witkó, meaning “His Horse Is Crazy” — was killed. He had surrendered peacefully to the U.S. Army only months earlier, and was bayoneted by a soldier during what his people regarded as a betrayal. He was somewhere between 31 and 35 years old. So Fort Robinson, you might say, was not exactly a location dripping with fond memories for the Lakota.

Standing Bear was having none of it. As far as he and the Lakota Sioux were concerned, if there was going to be a monument to Crazy Horse, it was going to be in the Black Hills of South Dakota — the Pahá Sápa — land considered sacred by the Lakota for generations beyond counting. The Black Hills had been guaranteed to the Lakota by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which the United States government then cheerfully tore up six years later when gold was discovered there in 1874. Business as usual, one might say. The Hills had cultural and spiritual significance that went well beyond mere geography; they were the heart of the Lakota world, and Standing Bear was not about to let the story of one of their greatest heroes be told somewhere else, by someone else, on someone else’s terms.

So he set about finding someone with the skill, the vision, and frankly the sheer bloody-mindedness to carve a sculpture out of an actual mountain. Most people, sensibly, would have given up at this point. Standing Bear, fortunately, was not most people.

He found his man in the form of Korczak Ziółkowski — a self-taught sculptor of Polish-American heritage, born in Boston in 1908, who had already won first prize at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 for his marble portrait of the composer Ignacy Paderewski. Ziółkowski had also, somewhat randomly, assisted on the carving of Mount Rushmore briefly in the late 1930s, which at least meant he knew roughly what he was getting himself into. Or possibly hadn’t fully thought through what he was getting himself into. Hard to say.

Standing Bear wrote to Ziółkowski in 1939, and the two men began a correspondence that led, eventually, to a handshake agreement and the beginning of one of the most staggering construction projects in human history. On the 3rd of June 1948, work officially began on Thunderhead Mountain — a modest name for something that was about to become anything but modest.

The mountain itself sits on land considered sacred by some of the Oglala Lakota, roughly 17 miles — about 27 kilometres — southwest of Mount Rushmore. The choice of location was deliberate and pointed. Mount Rushmore, completed in 1941, features four American presidents carved into the granite: Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln. It is, depending on your point of view, either a magnificent feat of engineering or a rather bold piece of artwork on land that the United States had promised to leave alone. The Lakota had views on this. Strong ones.

What Ziółkowski and Standing Bear envisioned would make Rushmore look, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit timid. The planned final dimensions of the Crazy Horse Memorial are 641 feet long and 563 feet high — that’s 195 metres by 172 metres for those of us who still find feet slightly baffling despite having lived through decimalisation. The outstretched arm of Crazy Horse will be 263 feet long — 80 metres — and the head alone will stand 87 feet, or 27 metres, high. For comparison, the presidential heads at Mount Rushmore are each a mere 60 feet high. Crazy Horse’s head, once complete, will be nearly half as tall again. It’s the sort of statistic that makes you blink.

Ziółkowski worked largely alone in the early years, hauling equipment up the mountain by hand, living in a wooden cabin at the base with his wife Ruth, who proved to be every bit as formidable as her husband. He died in 1982, having spent 34 years on the project, with instructions to his family not to let the work stop. His wife Ruth, and eventually their ten children, carried on. Ruth herself continued directing the project until her death in 2014. This is a family that takes commitment seriously.

Today, the Crazy Horse Memorial has grown into something far beyond a single statue. It is a campus — a whole complex built around the mission that Henry Standing Bear championed, a man who believed passionately in the power of education to change things. And given what had happened to his people over the preceding century or so, you could hardly blame him for wanting to get the story straight.

The face of Crazy Horse has now been completed — a powerful, wind-weathered profile gazing out across the Plains — and work continues on the outstretched arm and hand. The figure depicts Crazy Horse as described by his people: on horseback, arm extended, pointing forward. According to Lakota oral tradition, when a Crow chief once asked him mockingly, “Where are your lands now?” Crazy Horse swept his arm out and replied, “My lands are where my dead lie buried.” That gesture — that defiant, sorrowful, magnificent gesture — is what is being carved into the mountain. We found that rather moving, if we’re honest.

One of the things that struck us — and this is important — is that the memorial receives absolutely no funding from either State or Federal government. Not a penny. It is supported entirely by donations and by the proceeds from visitors coming through the gates. Given that the project has now been running for over 75 years and is perhaps, charitably, about a quarter of the way through, this is either a heroic act of independence or a financial strategy that would give most accountants a nervous breakdown. Possibly both.

Visitors can take bus tours up to the base of the mountain itself, getting genuinely, impressively close to the carving in progress — close enough to grasp the sheer scale of it in a way that the viewing deck simply cannot convey. In the summer months, there are laser shows in the evenings, projecting light across the mountain face in ways that are, we are told, rather spectacular.

And then, if you have a little more planning in you than we did — which, admittedly, is not difficult — you could time your visit for one of the bi-annual ceremonial blasts. These are not, we should clarify, your standard fireworks display. These are full-scale detonations on the mountain itself, sending spectacular fireballs rolling down the rock face, accompanied by specially designed pyrotechnical effects that apparently have to be seen to be believed. We did not see them, because we are the sort of people who find out about these things slightly too late. Next time.

The complex also houses the Indian Museum of North America, which is an institution that absolutely deserves more than a quick shuffle-through on the way to the gift shop. The museum holds a substantial collection of art and artefacts — we were informed it represents the histories and cultures of more than 300 Native Nations, which is a number that rather puts into perspective how much has been simplified, generalised, and frankly got wrong in most of the popular history we grew up with. The museum was designed explicitly to complement the story being told in stone up on the mountain: to present the lives of American Indians as living, complex, diverse peoples rather than a single monolithic footnote in someone else’s national story, and to preserve Native culture for the generations coming up behind.

Standing Bear, who died in 1953, did not live to see the face of Crazy Horse completed. He died five years into the project, at roughly 79 years old — though exact birth records for the era were not always what you might call meticulous. But he had set something in motion that, three-quarters of a century later, shows absolutely no sign of stopping.

We drove away from Thunderhead Mountain in the early afternoon, squinting back at the mountain in the rear-view mirror, Crazy Horse’s face just visible against the sky. It is a strange and powerful thing, this monument. Unfinished, ongoing, stubborn, and — in a way that the more polished and completed monuments nearby somehow are not — completely alive.

It’s also, if we’re being entirely honest, the sort of place that makes you feel a little bit ashamed for moaning about the queue at passport control.