THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 27
is a beloved symbol for the Lakota today
because “he never conceded to the white
man,” Tatewin Means, who runs a com-
munity-development corporation on the
Pine Ridge Reservation, about a hun-
dred miles from the monument, explained
to me. “He lived a life that was devoted
to protecting our people.” (“Sioux” orig-
inated from a word that was applied by
outsiders—it might have meant “snake”—
and many people prefer the names of
the more specific nations: Lakota, Na-
kota, and Dakota, each of which is fur-
ther divided into bands, such as the Oglala
Lakota and the Mnicoujou Lakota.)
There are many other famous Lakota
leaders from Crazy Horse’s era, includ-
ing Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, Spotted Elk,
Touch the Clouds, and Old Chief Smoke.
But when, in 1939, a Lakota elder named
Henry Standing Bear wrote to Korczak
Ziolkowski, a Polish-American sculptor
who had worked briefly on Mt. Rush-
more, to say that there ought to be a me-
morial in response to Rushmore—some-
thing that would show the white world
“that the red man had great heroes, too”—
Crazy Horse was the obvious subject.
Ziolkowski, a self-taught artist who
was raised by an Irish boxer in Boston
after both his parents died in a boating
accident, came to Standing Bear’s atten-
tion after winning a sculpting prize at
the World’s Fair in New York. He moved
to South Dakota in 1947, and began ac-
quiring land through purchases and
swaps. A year later, he dedicated the me-
morial with an inaugural explosion. “I
want to right a little bit of the wrong
that they did to these people,” he said.
In the early days, Ziolkowski had
little money, a faulty old compressor,
and a rickety, seven-hundred-and-forty-
one-step wooden staircase built to ac-
cess the mountainside. His first mar-
riage dissolved, apparently because his
wife didn’t appreciate his single-minded
focus on the mountain, and in 1950 he
married Ruth Ross, a volunteer at the
site who was eighteen years his junior,
on Thanksgiving Day—supposedly
so that the wedding wouldn’t require a
day off work. Ruth told the press that
Korczak had informed her that the
mountain would come first, she second,
and their children third. “You can see
why we had ten children,” Ziolkowski
once said. “The boys were necessary for
working on the mountain, and the girls
were needed to help with the visitors.”
Ziolkowski, who liked to call himself
“a storyteller in stone,” sometimes seemed
to be crafting his own legend, too, posing
in a prospector’s hat and giving dramatic
statements to the media. He made models
for a university campus and an expansive
medical-training center that he planned
to build, to benefit Native Americans.
“Of course I’m egotistical!” he told “60
Minutes,” a few decades into the venture.
“All my life I’ve wanted to do something
so much greater than I could ever possi-
bly be.” In 1951, he estimated that the
project would take thirty years to com-
plete. By the time of his death, in 1982,
there was no sign of the university or the
medical center, and the sculpture was still
just scarred, amorphous rock. Ziolkow-
ski had, however, built his own impres-
sive tomb, at the base of the mountain.
On a huge steel plate, he cut the wordsKORCZAK
STORYTELLER IN STONE
MAY HIS REMAINS
BE LEFT UNKNOWN.After Korczak’s death, Ruth Ziol-
kowski decided to focus on finishing the
sculpture’s face, which was completed in
1998; it is still the only finished part of
the monument. The unveiling ceremony
prompted a wave of media attention, a
visit from President Bill Clinton, and a
fund-raising drive. Most of the Ziol-
kowski children, when they became
adults, left to pursue other interests, but
eventually returned to draw salaries at
the mountain. Some have worked on
the carving and others have concentrated
on the tourism infrastructure that has
developed around it—both of which,
over the decades, have grown increas-
ingly sophisticated.E
very year, well over a million people
visit the Crazy Horse Memorial, a
name almost always followed, on bro-
chures and signage, by the symbol ®.
They pay an entrance fee (currently thirty
dollars per car), plus a little extra for a
short bus ride to the base of the moun-
tain, where the photo opportunities are
better, and a lot extra (a mandatory do-
nation of a hundred and twenty-five dol-
lars) to visit the top. They buy fry bread
and buffalo meat in the restaurant, and
T-shirts and rabbit furs and tepee-build-
ing kits and commemorative hard hatsin the gift shop, and watch a twenty-
two-minute orientation film in which
members of the Lakota community praise
the memorial and the Ziolkowski fam-
ily. On special occasions—such as a com-
bined commemoration of the Battle of
the Little Bighorn and Ruth Ziolkow-
ski’s birthday, in June—they can watch
what are referred to as Night Blasts: long
series of celebratory explosions on the
mountain. They are handed brochures
explaining that the money they spend at
the memorial benefits Native American
causes. “The purpose here—it’s a great
purpose, it’s a noble purpose,” Jadwiga
Ziolkowski, the fourth Ziolkowski child,
now sixty-seven and one of the memo-
rial’s C.E.O.s, told me. “It’s just a hu-
manitarian project all the way around.”
There are many Lakota who praise
the memorial. Charles (Bamm) Brewer,
who organizes an annual tribute to Crazy
Horse on the Pine Ridge Reservation,
joked that his only problem with the
carving is that “they didn’t make it big
enough—he was a bigger man than that
to our people!” I spoke with one Oglala
who had named her son for Korczak,
and others who had scattered family
members’ ashes atop the carving. Some
are grateful that the face offers an un-
missable reminder of the frequently ig-
nored Native history of the hills, and a
counterpoint to the four white faces on
Mt. Rushmore. “It’s the one large carv-
ing that they can’t tear down,” Amber
Two Bulls, a twenty-six-year-old La-
kota woman, told me.
But others argue that a mountain-size
sculpture is a singularly ill-chosen trib-
ute. When Crazy Horse was alive, he was
known for his humility, which is consid-
ered a key virtue in Lakota culture. He
never dressed elaborately or allowed his
picture to be taken. (He is said to have
responded, “Would you steal my shadow,
too?”) Before he died, he asked his fam-
ily to bury him in an unmarked grave.
There’s also the problem of the loca-
tion. The Black Hills are known, in the
Lakota language, as He Sapa or Paha
Sapa—names that are sometimes trans-
lated as “the heart of everything that is.”
A ninety-nine-year-old elder in the Si-
congu Rosebud Sioux Tribe named Marie
Brush Breaker-Randall told me that the
mountains are “the foundation of the
Lakota Nation.” In Lakota stories, peo-
ple lived beneath them while the world