August 30, 2012

ON OUR LAST FULL DAY in the Black Hills, we decided to go to Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Monument. Frankly, I wasn’t too keen about going to the Crazy Horse Monument. From what I had read, the project there seemed to be very similar to the cathedral built in the novel Pillars of the Earth, a project that took a couple of hundred years to complete. An e-mail from an amazing woman, and one of Carole’s friends, changed my mind. In addition to founding and running the largest Wizard of OZ festival in the world, Carole’s friend also found time to engage in parachute jumping and participating in the annual roundups of the Bison at the Custer State Park. She has also been a long time supporter of the Crazy Horse Monument project. I was glad that I took her advice and spent some time at the monument.

We stopped first at Mount Rushmore. Like most people, we had seen the monument in movies, books and magazines countless times. Seeing it in its natural state was a very different experience. Stately and solemnly, the four presidents stare out over the Black Hills. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt were good choices, but I wished that the sculptor would have added Millard Fillmore.

Surprisingly, there was some opposition to construction of the monument. Placing a huge carving of dead white presidents in the middle of the Black Hills, an area deemed sacred to the Indians, seemed to many to smack of arrogance. President Coolidge’s vocal support ended most of the dissent. People were probably surprised to hear him say anything about anything. Carving in granite is not a quick process. Even with the ample use of dynamite, it took 14 years to complete.

I annoyed Carole as she worked through another workbook to acquire her third Jr. Ranger badge. Completing the workbook normally requires running all over the park and reading plaques and posters to find answers to the questions posed in the workbook. Because I was hungry and wanted to speed up the process, I started answering the questions without “looking up” the answers. Carole, however, wanted to “do her own work.”

Near the end of our stay at Mount Rushmore, I was forced to save a woman’s life. Some ditzy blonde had started to crawl down the monument from the top and lost her nerve part of the way down. Her shrieking would have done justice to a heroine in a B-level science fiction film. After listening to her for a few minutes, I knew that I had to do something. I ended up racing up the monument, passing her as I sped my way to the top.  Once I reached the top, it was a simple matter of pulling her up. A ranger, who had been watching the situation develop, met us as we were walking down and gave us a ride in his jeep. Before we got in the jeep, the ranger scratched his head and said:”Stranger, I have never seen anything like what you just did. How did in world did you do it?” I replied simply: “A life time of clean living and right thinking son.” Thankfully, another ranger took a picture of the rescue; otherwise, some of my skeptical friends would not have believed me when I told them about my actions today.

It is only a short, scenic drive from Rushmore to the Crazy Horse Monument. When the Lakota Sioux, the Indians who live in the Black Hills, saw the construction of Mount Rushmore, they told everyone who would listen that “we have heroes too.” Eventually, Standing Bear one of the Lakota elders, approached a man who had worked on Mount Rushmore and convinced him to build a monument of Crazy Horse. The sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, with a name that would not sound unusual on North Milwaukee in Chicago, would end up devoting the rest of his life to the sculpture.

His devotion to the project staggers the mind. For the first several years, he worked alone. The 700 or so steps he had to climb simply to get to the worksite would have been enough for me to conclude that discretion is the better part of valor and find another job. One day, he made 9 trips up and down the ladder schlepping tools to where he was carving. Over the years, he would obtain some help through donations and from volunteers; but, the bulk of the work would be done by Korczak. During his life, Korczak refused offers of financial support from the government, and his family has continued to reject money from the government.

He ended up marrying one of the volunteers and fathering ten children. Working on the monument from 1948 until his death in 1982, he was only able to complete the massive head. 

Korczak would have agreed with Daniel Burnham’s famous statement: “Make no small plans.’ When completed, the monument will dwarf Mount Rushmore and exceed the height of Khufu, the great pyramid, by over 100 feet. Even now, the carved heads at Mount Rushmore could be placed inside of the completed head of Crazy Horse. A three dimensional scale model of the proposed structure gives one some idea of how it will look. There is no way, however, that the scale model can convey the proposed size of the monument.