28 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
was created. Nick Tilsen, an Oglala who
runs an activism collective in Rapid City,
told me that Crazy Horse was “a man
who fought his entire life” to protect
the Black Hills. “To literally blow up a
mountain on these sacred lands feels like
a massive insult to what he actually stood
for,” he said. In 2001, the Lakota activ-
ist Russell Means likened the project to
“carving up the mountain
of Zion.” Charmaine White
Face, a spokesperson for the
Sioux Nation Treaty Coun-
cil, called the memorial a
disgrace. “Many, many of us,
especially those of us who
are more traditional, to-
tally abhor it,” she told me.
“It’s a sacrilege. It’s wrong.”
S
ometime around 1840, a
boy known as Curly, or Light Hair,
was born to an Oglala shaman and a
Mnicoujou woman named Rattling Blan-
ket Woman. He learned to ride his horse
great distances, hunting herds of buffalo
across vast plains. As a young man, Curly
had a vision enjoining him to be hum-
ble: to dress simply, to keep nothing for
himself, and to put the needs of the tribe,
especially of its most vulnerable mem-
bers, before his own. He was known for
wearing only a feather, never a full bon-
net; for not keeping scalps as tokens of
victory in battles; and for being honored
by the elders as a shirt-wearer, a desig-
nated role model who followed a strict
code of conduct. (He later lost the honor,
after a dispute involving a woman who
left her husband to be with him.) His
father passed on his own name: Tasunke
Witko, or His Horse Is Wild.
White settlers were already moving
through the area, and their government
was building forts and sending soldiers,
prompting skirmishes over land and
sovereignty that would eventually erupt
into open war. In 1854, when Curly was
around fourteen, he witnessed the kill-
ing of a diplomatic leader named Con-
quering Bear, in a disagreement about
a cow. The following year, he may also
have witnessed the capture and killing
of dozens of women and children by U.S.
Army soldiers, in what is euphemisti-
cally known as the Battle of Ash Hol-
low. (Much of what we know about Crazy
Horse’s life comes from oral histories
and winter counts, pictorial narratives
recorded on hides.) In 1866, when Cap-
tain William Fetterman, who was said
to have boasted, “Give me eighty men
and I can ride through the whole Sioux
nation,” attempted to do just that, Crazy
Horse served as a decoy, allowing a con-
federation of Lakota, Arapaho, and Chey-
enne warriors to kill all eighty-one men
under Fetterman’s command. He con-
tinued to build a reputation
for bravery and leadership;
it was sometimes said that
bullets did not touch him.
The U.S. government,
knowing that it couldn’t
vanquish the powerful tribes
of the northern plains, in-
stead signed treaties with
them. But it was also play-
ing a waiting game. Buffalo,
once plentiful, were being
overhunted by white settlers, and their
numbers were declining. Major General
Philip Sheridan, a Civil War veteran
tasked with driving Plains tribes onto
reservations, cheered their extermination,
writing that the best strategy for deal-
ing with the tribes was to “make them
poor by the destruction of their stock,
and then settle them on the lands allotted
to them.” (An Army colonel was more
succinct: “Kill every buffalo you can!
Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”)
In 1868, the United States promised
that the Black Hills, as well as other re-
gions of what are now North Dakota,
South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Ne-
braska, and Colorado, would be “set apart
for the absolute and undisturbed use
and occupation” of the Sioux Nation.
But, just six years later, the government
sent Custer and the Seventh Cavalry
into the Black Hills in search of gold,
setting off a summer of battles, in 1876,
in which Crazy Horse and his warriors
helped win dramatic victories at both
Rosebud and the Little Bighorn.
But the larger war was already lost.
To survive, Red Cloud and Spotted Elk
moved their people onto government
reservations; Sitting Bull fled to Can-
ada. In 1877, after a hard, hungry win-
ter, Crazy Horse led nine hundred of
his followers to a reservation near Fort
Robinson, in Nebraska, and surrendered
his weapons. Five months later, he was
arrested, possibly misunderstood to have
said something threatening, and fatally
stabbed in the back by a military po-
liceman. He was only about thirty-seven
years old, yet he had seen the world of
his childhood—a powerful and inde-
pendent people living amid teeming
herds of buffalo—all but disappear.
That same year, the United States re-
neged on the 1868 treaty for the second
time, officially and unilaterally claiming
the Black Hills. More and more Native
Americans, struggling to survive on the
denuded plains, moved to reservations.
In 1890, hundreds of Lakota, mostly
women and children, were killed by
the Army near a creek called Wounded
Knee—where Crazy Horse’s parents
were said to have buried his body—as
they travelled to the town of Pine Ridge.
Twenty of the soldiers involved received
the Medal of Honor for their actions.
Years later, the holy man Black Elk said,
“I can still see the butchered women and
children lying heaped and scattered all
along the crooked gulch as plain as when
I saw them with eyes young. And I can
see that something else died there in the
bloody mud, and was buried in the bliz-
zard. A people’s dream died there.”
In 1975, the U.S. Court of Federal
Claims wrote, of the theft of the Black
Hills, “A more ripe and rank case of dis-
honorable dealings will never, in all prob-
ability, be found in our history.” In 1980,
the Supreme Court agreed, ruling that
the Sioux should receive compensation
for their lost land. The tribes replied
that what they wanted was the hills
themselves; taking money for some-
thing sacred was unimaginable. The
funds ordered by the Supreme Court
went into a trust, whose value today,
with accrued interest, exceeds $1.3 bil-
lion. It remains untouched.
O
n a bright June day, the parking lot
of the Crazy Horse Memorial was
packed with cars and R.V.s, their license
plates—California, Missouri, Florida,
Vermont—advertising the great Amer-
ican road trip. The front door of the vis-
itors’ center, like the brochures handed
out at the gate, was emblazoned with the
memorial’s slogan: “Never Forget Your
Dreams® —Korczak Ziolkowski.” On
an outdoor patio, beside a scale model of
Ziolkowski’s planned sculpture, tourists
took their own version of a popular photo:
the idealized image in front, and the un-
finished reality in the distance behind it.
The memorial boasts that it holds,
