The Crazy Horse Monument in South

Dakota: Started in 1948, may take another

century to complete
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Oct 24, 2016 Goran Blazeski

Located in South Dakota’s Black Hills, not far away from Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse
Monument is a work in progress, started back in 1948.

Lakota warrior Crazy Horse has long been a controversial figure. He fought against George
Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn and also he led his tribe against settlers and
miners in the Dakotas, Montana. and Wyoming. He died on September 5, 1877.

Korczak Ziolkowski began work on Crazy Horse Memorial in 1948. Once complete, this tribute
to the Lakota leader will be the largest mountain carving in South Dakota, and the world.
Alleged photo of Crazy Horse in 1877

Lakota Chief Standing Bear and sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski started the project in 1946 by
identifying Thunderhead Mountain as the place to create the Crazy Horse Monument. In 1948
the project officially began when the first explosives were detonated to start sculpting the rock
face. It’s likely to take more than a century to be completed.

When completed, the sculpture will stand 641 feet long and 563 feet tall making it the world’s
largest sculpture by far. The head of Crazy Horse alone is 27 feet taller than the six-story heads
of Mount Rushmore. It’s taller than the Washington Monument and well over two football fields
wide.
The Crazy Horse Memorial in 2010. Photo Credit

Chief Henry Standing Bear, who was the leader of the Lakota tribe, didn’t like the Mount
Rushmore National Memoriam which was completed seven years ago, and he decided to ask
Ziolkowski if he could carve a monument in honor of a Native American legend.

Ziolkowski accepted his offer and worked on the carving until his death in 1982 at age 74,
sixteen years before the face of the carving was completed.
His wife Ruth Ziolkowski continued with the project from the 1980s to the 2010s. She was
president and CEO of the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation. She focused on Crazy Horse’s face
and not on the horse as her husband planned.

Ruth Ziolkowski died 21 May 2014, at the age of 87. Seven of her ten children work on the
project even today.

The Crazy Horse

Memorial. Photo Credit

Many descendants of Crazy Horse think that the monument is in a way offensive to their culture.
For example, Elaine Quiver, a descendant of Crazy Horse, in an interview with Voice of
America, said that Standing Bear had no right to order the monument.

“They don’t respect our culture because we didn’t give permission for someone to carve the
sacred Black Hills where our burial grounds are,” Quiver said. “They were there for us to enjoy
and they were there for us to pray. But it wasn’t meant to be carved into images, which is very
wrong for all of us. The more I think about it, the more it’s a desecration of our Indian culture.
Not just Crazy Horse, but all of us.”
 The Crazy Horse
Memorial. Photo Credit

After 50 years of work, Crazy Horse’s 87-foot head was completed in 1998, but no one knows
exactly when the entire monument will be completed.

It is now nearly seven decades in the making. In comparison, most historians say Egypt’s Great
Pyramid took about 20 years to finish.