Crazy Horse Memorial: The Counter-Monument in Progress

Seventeen miles from Mount Rushmore, a different mountain is being carved, one that has been in progress since June third, nineteen forty-eight, and is not finished yet. The Crazy Horse Memorial, if completed as designed, will be the largest sculpture in the world: a five-hundred-sixty-three-foot-tall, six-hundred-forty-one-foot-long likeness of the Oglala Lakota war leader, arm extended and pointing east, the direction of his homeland.

The project began with a letter. Standing Bear, a Lakota chief, wrote to sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski after seeing Rushmore and asking whether a great hero of the Indigenous people could also be remembered in the Hills. Ziolkowski, a self-taught sculptor from Connecticut who had worked briefly under Borglum, accepted without pay. He moved to the Black Hills and began dynamiting a different granite peak, Thunderhead Mountain, by hand. He worked for decades, largely alone. He died in nineteen eighty-two with the mountain still far from complete.

His wife Ruth and several of their ten children continued the work. The Ziolkowski family has refused all federal funding, operating the memorial entirely through admission fees and donations. Ruth died in two thousand fourteen. The Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation still runs the site.

Progress has been slow, and critics have noted that after more than seventy-five years, primarily the face and the pointing arm are recognizable. Defenders of the pace point out that the monument is privately funded and carved from a more geologically complex formation than Rushmore. Some Lakota people support the project as a counterweight to Rushmore. Others object, noting that no photograph of Crazy Horse is known to exist, that he resisted being photographed as a matter of principle, and that carving his likeness into a mountain might be the opposite of what he would have wanted. The memorial exists in that tension, still becoming.