For once there is no hyperbole. It really is huge, and not just in size, but in vision, scale, and timeframe! The face alone is almost 30m high. The whole sculpture when finished will be over 170m high and 200m long. Almost unbelievably Crazy Horse was started in 1948! They have been carving it for almost 75 years! And they have only completed the face! But what a face. What a project!
The history of this place leaves you awestruck. Commissioned by Chief Henry Standing Bear, it is an attempt to represent and celebrate the history and culture of the Indian tribes (all the references locally are to Indians, rather than Native Americans or First Nations) , and in particular the spirit represented by the warrior Crazy Horse who refused to submit to American rule after Custer was defeated at the Battle of Little Big Horn. He never did die in battle, but was stabbed by an infantry man with a bayonet while negotiating a truce.
Chief Standing Bear persuaded a Polish American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to undertake the mammoth task, and he started, alone, in 1948, carting his own dynamite and drills etc up the mountain. I cannot describe how difficult it must have been to envisage what the final product would look like but he had a vision throughout and it is, slowly, coming to fruition. To even get started Korczak (nobody seems to call him by his surname) had to build his own cabin to just live in and appropriate ancient machinery that broke down on regular occasions. He built his own 700 step ladder from the bottom of the mountain to the top and on some days (when his compressor kept packing up) climbed it more than ten times! To call him a determined man would be an understatement bigger than the sculpture.
By the time Korczak died in 1982, after 34 years on the job, not even the face was completed! He refused state aid on the grounds that he didn't want government interference or be reliant on state funds, and his wife and many of his ten children, and now some of his grandchildren, have continued his work to the point that the fully completed face was finally revealed in 1998, fully 50 years after it was started!
Work is now progressing on the arm, hand and fingers, but the horse remains a distant dream. Nobody will tell you when they expect this to be finished, mainly because they have no idea. As it happens we were here in 2017, five years ago, and I traveled up to the face for the selfie below.
And this is what it looked like in 2017. By my reckoning another 100 years could pass before this is finished.
So on with the journey … to Mount Rushmore, which on our second visit somehow seemed even more impressive than the last time. It too is a massive sculpture in the very same rocks as Crazy Horse, only about 20 minutes drive away. These South Dakotans are greedy when it comes to monolithic sculptures! Built between 1927 and 1941, but with government money and about 400 people. Crazy Horse only has a team of eleven, and is funded entirely by visitor fees (which are very modest) and private endowments. You cannot but admire them. But Mount Rushmore is pretty damn good too. We walked the "Presidents' Trail" which almost gets you up close and personal. Impressive.
And what would it be without the rubbish selfie?
Then we took the short, one hour trip north to Deadwood, scene of the shooting of Wild Bill Hickok in 1876, and generally an iconic setting of the old wild west. It is now a gambling destination - as far as we could tell virtually every bar and hotel has a casino. Maybe it was always thus. Another very interesting place but we suspect one night will be enough for us. We are too nervous to try our hand at the tables.
Last few pics, I've said enough today!
Where Wild Bill was shot
Korczak's bronze model of what Crazy Horse will eventually look like. I wish I could be alive to see it, but unless I live to 160 odd, it seems unlikely!
The Deadwood Stage, which somewhat idiosyncratically was in Korczak's home! Whipcrack away!
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