The Making—and Controversy—of the Crazy Horse Memorial

 

By Jennifer Uhlarik

 

Last month, I shared about the creation of Mount Rushmore. This month, I wanted to share another Western monument that sits only seventeen miles southwest of Mount Rushmore. Do you know the one I mean? It’s the Crazy Horse memorial.

 

WHO WAS CRAZY HORSE?

 

Crazy Horse was a Lakota Sioux leader who was born somewhere between 1840 and 1845, though common thought is it was around 1840 or ’41. He was the son of a Lakota medicine man and a Miniconjou woman. His mother passed away when he was a small child. In 1854, during his early teens, Crazy Horse witnessed the Grattan Massacre, where an Indian stole and ate a cow from one of the Oregon Trail wagon trains, and when thirty soldiers, led by Lt. John Grattan, marched in to retrieve the animal, gunfire broke out and all but one of the soldiers was killed. This sparked quite a war on the Plains and set Crazy Horse on a path to become a great warrior. 

 

After the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, where the U.S. Army slaughtered a sleeping camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children, the Lakota and other tribes aligned with the Cheyenne to make war on the white man. Crazy Horse distinguished himself in battle over and over and participated in many of the biggest conflicts in the Plains Indian wars, including the Battle of the Little Big Horn (aka Custer’s Last Stand). But eventually, the tide turned against the Lakota and other Plains Indians, and Crazy Horse ended up surrendering in September of 1877. When an interpreter wrongly interpreted something Crazy Horse said, the general he was supposed to meet with was told he intended to kill the general during the proceedings. Crazy Horse was arrested, and as he struggled to free himself and flee, he was stabbed with a bayonet and died soon after.

 

Crazy Horse was known to be very caring toward his people, always helping the poor or elderly. He poured his life out to benefit his people, and he is remembered in history because of it.

 

THE MONUMENT

Crazy Horse Monument
(c) RJA1988
https://pixabay.com/users/rja1988-5385704/

 

Like Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse memorial is a statue carved into the side of a mountain in South Dakota’s Black Hills. The sculpting of Thunderbird Mountain (now known as Crazy Horse Mountain) began in 1948 when Oglala Lakota chief Henry Standing Bear unsuccessfully requested a Native American face be included in Mount Rushmore. Since his request was never answered, he took it upon himself to hire Polish sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to begin work on a mountainside statue dedicated solely to a Native American hero. In his letter to the sculptor, Chief Standing Bear wrote, “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too.” Ziolkowski agreed to the project, and the Department of the Interior gave the necessary permitting to begin work.

 

Unlike Mount Rushmore, the sculpture is still in progress and probably will be for many years to come. Chief Standing Bear chose not to receive any money from the government for the project, so it is completely funded by private donations from wealthy citizens and from the visitor’s center. Work began on Crazy Horse’s face in 1948, but it took until June 3^rdof 1998—a whopping fifty years—to complete that portion. 

 

1/34 Scale Model of the Crazy Horse Memorial.
(c) Mark Bellingham on Flickr
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/legalcode.en

When completed, the entire sculpture will show Crazy Horse seated on his horse, pointing toward his people’s sacred lands. It is a monumental undertaking, and if it is ever completed according to its current plan, it will be the second tallest sculpture in the world, following India’s Statue of Unity. The entire carving, as proposed, will be 641 feet long by 563 feet high. Crazy Horse’s face is 87 feet, 6 inches tall. Other dimensions of the proposed statue are as follows:

 

Outstretched arm—263 feet long

Pointing finger—29 feet, 6 inches long.

Horse’s head—219 feet (or 22 stories) high

Horse’s mane—62 feet high

Horse’s ears—54 feet long

Horse’s eyes—20 feet wide by 15 feet high

Horse’s feet—26 feet in diameter

 

Also included at the Crazy Horse monument are the Indian Museum of North America, the Native American Educational and Cultural Center, the Mountain Carving Gallery, and the Sculptor Home and Studio.

 

THE CONTROVERSY

 

While many see this great monument as a positive step in telling the history and culture of the Native American people, there are many who aren’t as impressed. Many, particularly among the very Native American culture this statue tries to uplift, have taken issue with dynamiting the natural rock face to create a manmade image of Crazy Horse. They would far prefer nature be left alone. It is beautiful as is.

Commemorative postage stamp
released on January 15, 1982

 

Crazy Horse Commemorative Postcard from
the stamp's release day--January 15, 1982

To make matters worse, some have pointed out that during his lifetime, Crazy Horse took great pains to avoid being photographed, as he believed that to capture his image with a camera was to trap a piece of his soul with it. So these naysayers feel that it goes against the very spirit of Crazy Horse to create such a mammoth image of him. 

 

Others have taken issue with the fact that the Crazy Horse monument and park seems to be more about the sculptor, Karczak Ziolkowski, rather than Crazy Horse himself. And still more complaints have been raised by some of Crazy Horse’s family’s descendants that the money raised by the visitor’s center and shops isn’t going into completing the sculpture, but instead, to lining individuals’ pockets. 

 

It's Your Turn: How do you feel about Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial? Are they positive additions to the fabric of American culture, or do they detract? If the latter, why do you feel that way?

 

Award-winning, best-selling novelist Jennifer Uhlarik has loved the western genre since she read her first Louis L’Amour novel. She penned her first western while earning a writing degree from University of Tampa. Jennifer lives near Tampa with her husband, son, and furbabies. www.jenniferuhlarik.com

 

 

AVAILABLE NOW

 

Love’s Fortress by Jennifer Uhlarik

 

A Friendship From the Past Brings Closure to Dani’s Fractured Family

 

When Dani Sango’s art forger father passes away, Dani inherits his home. There, she finds a book of Native American drawings, which leads her to seek museum curator Brad Osgood’s help to decipher the ledger art. Why would her father have this book? Is it another forgery?

 

Brad Osgood longs to provide his four-year-old niece, Brynn, the safe home she desperately deserves. The last thing he needs is more drama, especially from a forger’s daughter. But when the two meet “accidentally” at St. Augustine’s 350-year-old Spanish fort, he can’t refuse the intriguing woman.

 

Broken Bow is among seventy-three Plains Indians transported to Florida in 1875 for incarceration at ancient Fort Marion. Sally Jo Harris and Luke Worthing dream of serving on a foreign mission field, but when the Indians reach St. Augustine, God changes their plans. However, when Sally Jo’s friendship with Broken Bow leads to false accusations, it could cost them their lives.

 

Can Dani discover how Broken Bow and Sally Jo’s story ends and how it impacted her father’s life?

 

The Making—and Controversy—of Mt. Rushmore

By Jennifer Uhlarik

 

Most everyone is aware of Mt. Rushmore, the South Dakota monument memorializing four American presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt—on the face of a granite mountainside. But do you know the history—and controversy—of this monument?

 

Doane Robinson

It was in August of 1924 when a historian from South Dakota, Doane Robinson, came up with the concept of a large stone monument to bring attention of tourists to his state. His initial concept was to memorialize western heroes such as Red Cloud, Lewis & Clark, and Buffalo Bill Cody. To accomplish this monumental goal, he contacted Gutzon Borglum, who had been working on carving the face of Robert E. Lee at Stone Mountain, Georgia, at the time. Borglum came to South Dakota twice to discuss the project, first in 1924, when he initially agreed to the project, and again in 1925, when he searched out which mountain he would carve. Upon finding Mt. Rushmore, he convinced Robinson that the faces of western heroes were too limiting—if he hoped to draw national attention, he needed to memorialize national figures. American Presidents.

The son of Danish immigrants, Borglum had little formal training in his early life, but eventually was placed in a private school in Kansas where he received some initial exposure to art. As an adult, he went to Paris where he studied at the Julien Academy and other prestigious schools. He lived for several years in various European countries and gained small amounts of success. But it was after he returned to the United States that his career truly began to take off. His artwork appeared on the Gettysburg Battlefield, in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the Cathedral of St. John the Devine in New York among other places. But it was his large bust of President Abraham Lincoln, carved from a block of marble and put on display in a New York shop window, that ultimately led to his work on Stone Mountain, and later Mt. Rushmore.

 

Gutzon Borglum

Construction on the famed Mt. Rushmore began on October 4, 1927. The first face to be carved was George Washington’s, and Borglum roughed in a simple egg shape to begin with, eventually adding his detailed features later. Washington’s face was completed in 1934, seven years after it was begun. During that time, work was also begun on Thomas Jefferson’s face, situated to the right of Washington, but two years into the process, his visage was badly cracked, so the rock face had to be blown off with dynamite and started again to the left of Washington. His sculpture was completed in 1936. One year later in 1937, Lincoln’s portion was completed, and the final face—Teddy Roosevelt’s—was finished in 1939. Borglum had intended to add a carving of the early history of the United States to the monument, but he died on March 6, 1941, leaving his son Lincoln to assume the remainder of the project. But as World War 2 was ramping up, the United States decided the money allotted for Mt. Rushmore’s completion was better spent elsewhere, so the project was deemed complete on October 31, 1941.

 

During all the years of carving, nearly four hundred men and women worked on the Mt. Rushmore project in capacities from the blacksmiths who created the tools used in the process, to winch operators who lowered workers down the rock face, to the skilled men who blasted the rock face with dynamite. Nearly ninety percent of the project was completed by blasting with explosives, which got the rough features of each president within three to five inches of the finished carving. The rest was done with small jackhammers in “honeycomb fashion”—where small holes were drilled into the rock, often close enough together that the pieces of rock would just fall away, and the faces could be buffed smooth. All told, over 800 million pounds of rock were removed to create the faces of the memorial, and according to the National Park Service website and the Smithsonian, there were no known fatalities of any work crew members during the monument’s fourteen-year creation.

The final work crew to work on Mt. Rushmore in 1941, with the monument in the background.

 

THE CONTROVERSY

 

Of course, in any venture, you can’t please all the people all the time, and Mt. Rushmore is no different. From the start, environmentalists opposed the idea of blasting away the natural beauty of a mountain to memorialize men. Ultimately, Robinson and Borglum won out, and the project went forward, despite this criticism.

 

Worse, the Native Americans took great issue with the project. The United States government had given The Black Hills to the Lakota Sioux as part of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, but in the 1870s, gold was found in this area, and settlers flooded the area in search of wealth. War ensued, and by the later 1870s, the government took back what had been willingly given only a decade before. So to not only lose their ancestral land, but then to have four white men’s faces blasted into the rock face was a great afront. In the 1930s, during the carving of the monument, Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear contacted Borglum by letter, requesting that the face of Crazy Horse be added among the American Presidents, but Borglum never responded. Chief Standing Bear later contacted another artist to create a separate monument, which I’ll discuss next month.

 

To counter the largely white perspective of Mt. Rushmore, the first Native American superintendent, Gerard Baker, who served between 2004 and 2010, encouraged park rangers to include the Lakota point of view in their tours, presentations, and in answering visitor’s questions. 

 

It’s Your Turn: Have you ever visited Mt. Rushmore? If yes, tell us what you enjoyed (or didn’t enjoy) about the memorial. If no, would you like to—why or why not? 

 

Award-winning, best-selling novelist Jennifer Uhlarik has loved the western genre since she read her first Louis L’Amour novel. She penned her first western while earning a writing degree from University of Tampa. Jennifer lives near Tampa with her husband, son, and furbabies. www.jenniferuhlarik.com

 

Love’s Fortress by Jennifer Uhlarik

 

A Friendship From the Past Brings Closure to Dani’s Fractured Family

 

When Dani Sango’s art forger father passes away, Dani inherits his home. There, she finds a book of Native American drawings, which leads her to seek museum curator Brad Osgood’s help to decipher the ledger art. Why would her father have this book? Is it another forgery?

 

Brad Osgood longs to provide his four-year-old niece, Brynn, the safe home she desperately deserves. The last thing he needs is more drama, especially from a forger’s daughter. But when the two meet “accidentally” at St. Augustine’s 350-year-old Spanish fort, he can’t refuse the intriguing woman.

 

Broken Bow is among seventy-three Plains Indians transported to Florida in 1875 for incarceration at ancient Fort Marion. Sally Jo Harris and Luke Worthing dream of serving on a foreign mission field, but when the Indians reach St. Augustine, God changes their plans. However, when Sally Jo’s friendship with Broken Bow leads to false accusations, it could cost them their lives.

 

Can Dani discover how Broken Bow and Sally Jo’s story ends and how it impacted her father’s life?