Crazy Horse Memorial: Seventy-Eight Years and One Face

In nineteen thirty-nine, a Lakota chief named Henry Standing Bear wrote a letter to a sculptor named Korczak Ziolkowski. The message was direct. The white man, he wrote, has his presidents carved in the mountain. The Lakota should have their hero.

Ziolkowski had won first prize in a national sculpture competition. He was a self-taught artist with no formal training and an outsized opinion of his own abilities. He accepted the commission.

He began blasting at a mountain called Thunderhead in the Black Hills in June of nineteen forty-eight. He built his house at the base and raised his family there. He had ten children. He refused all federal funding, because accepting it would have transferred control of the project away from the Lakota cultural vision it was meant to serve.

Ziolkowski died in nineteen eighty-two with the mountain still largely uncarved. His wife Ruth continued the work. The Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation, led by the family, has continued ever since.

The face was dedicated in nineteen ninety-eight: fifty years after the first blast. The arm pointing toward the horizon, which the completed sculpture requires, was completed in twenty twenty-three, seventy-five years in. The completed sculpture, when finished, will be the largest in the world. It will depict Crazy Horse on horseback, arm extended, pointing toward the land he died protecting.

At current pace, no one alive today will see it finished. Ziolkowski knew that when he started. The Lakota knew it too. Some commitments are generational.