Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, Contested Stone

Gutzon Borglum arrived in the Black Hills in the nineteen twenties with a vision and a federal commission: carve four American presidents into the granite face of a mountain the Lakota called Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, the Six Grandfathers. The mountain was considered sacred. The faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln were completed between nineteen twenty-seven and nineteen forty-one, blasted and chiseled by four hundred workers into a scale of sixty feet. Borglum chose his subjects for what he called the founding, expansion, preservation, and unification of the United States. The Lakota noted, with some precision, that three of those four men had presided over policies that reduced or eliminated their land base.

Seventeen miles away, a different carving has been under way since nineteen forty-eight. Korczak Ziolkowski, a Boston sculptor who had worked briefly for Borglum, began blasting the face of Crazy Horse into Thunderhead Mountain at the invitation of Lakota chiefs who wanted to answer Rushmore with a monument of their own. Crazy Horse, the Oglala war leader who is believed never to have been photographed, is being rendered at a scale that would make Rushmore look like a thumbnail. His outstretched arm points toward the northeast. When asked by a soldier where his lands were, Crazy Horse is popularly quoted as having replied: my lands are where my dead lie buried.

Neither carving is without critics. Some Lakota object to both, to Rushmore for what it represents, and to the Crazy Horse Memorial for commercializing a man who resisted all forms of documentation. Others see the memorial as a necessary assertion of presence. The stone carving, after more than seventy-five years of work, continues.