Making Crazy Horse: The Role of a Lifetime

Majestic art in the Badlands, a compelling vision, what a subject, what an artist

W hen I visited Mount Rushmore a few days ago, I saw signs for Crazy Horse and, Vermont provincial that I am, believed that it was a town, though I gauzily remembered it was a monument, too. There is indeed one there, massive and majestic, unfinished but well advanced and moving forward and fast, about 15 miles southwest from Rushmore.

Usually less is more, but sometimes more is stupendous, unreal, and wild. That’s the Crazy Horse sculpture. If completed as planned, the monument will be 563 feet tall and 641 feet long, the biggest mountain sculpture in human history and dwarfing Rushmore, whose presidential heads are a mere 60 feet tall, with the suite of four stretching a bit over 200 feet. The Crazy Horse monument has been percolating since 1939 and more or less actively in the works since 1948. The thing’s astonishing. Nature is American art’s default theme. In Europe, we see religion, history, and myth, and the doings of aristocrats. Like Rushmore, Crazy Horse springs from nature and is part of it.

Who was Crazy Horse? Born around 1840, he was the central Lakota warrior leading the charge in the Great Sioux War in 1876 and 1877 and, most famously, at the Battle of Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876. “Everybody’s got a plan until he’s punched in the face.” That’s Mike Tyson Prize Fight 101, which Custer, last in his class at West Point, might have flunked. Crazy Horse wasn’t as dumb. He was cunning and stealthy and not dumb at all. Custer and nearly all his troops were demolished.

Crazy Horse was both a fighter and a symbol of last-gasp Native resistance to the “reservation movement” of the late 19th century. He surrendered his forces in 1877 and was bayoneted a few months later by an Army private. His final defeat was partly the result of an on-the-spot misunderstanding, partly a setup engineered by his Lakota enemies, and partly the Army’s ultimate goal in obliterating Native elites. Noble in bearing, a man of principle, ascetic but dashing, committed to Lakota ways, he has always appealed to romantics.

And who is Korczak Ziolkowski (1908–1982), the artist? Crazy Horse was his life’s work and the mother of all one-hit wonders. His mantra was “always follow your dreams,” and the epitaph on his tomb at the base of the mountain is Storyteller in Stone. He was cussed, relentless, and flagrant. Seeking after something eternal, he landed, circuitously, on Crazy Horse. Born in Boston, he was orphaned as a baby. He worked in Boston shipyards as a pattern maker but sculpted and made furniture as an amateur artist. He said that Frederick Pickering Cabot, the empath and renowned Boston juvenile-court judge, called the Children’s Judge, guided him toward art. Cabot was a Boston Brahmin, the best of that cohort. Ziolkowski built a small sculpting business in tony West Hartford in Connecticut. Then came three pivotal, barrier-busting moments and Crazy Horse redux.

In 1939, Gutzon Borglum hired Ziolkowski as his chief sculpture assistant in what Borglum believed would be the final, well-funded push to complete Mount Rushmore. Things were going well, and Ziolkowski was absorbing Borglum’s technique and style. Ziolkowski and Borglum’s son, Lincoln, who was the Rushmore superintendent, disagreed on a small carving issue. A fistfight ensued. Ziolkowski, enormous, all muscle, and raised not in twee West Hartford but among Boston dockworkers, sent Lincoln to the hospital.

Borglum reluctantly fired Ziolkowski in a letter so regretful that Ziolkowski framed it. Over his time with Borglum and onsite, Ziolkowski got an up-close and personal masterclass in design and massive-scale sculpting in Black Hills granite. And the project got him halfway across the country into a radically new space, physical and spiritual. He filed the Black Hills under “unfinished business.”

Ziolkowski’s other 1939 moment was his Carrara-marble sculpture of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Polish pianist, philanthropist, statesman, and pioneer of California zinfandel. It’s a stern, formidable, hideous thing, a mammoth head carved in marble and very much a Rodin retread. It won first prize in a popular vote as the best sculpture displayed at the New York World’s Fair.

It was news of Ziolkowski’s first prize and his familiarly with Rushmore that led Henry Standing Bear, the Oglala Lakota chief, to write him asking whether he’d be interested in sculpting a Crazy Horse memorial on the scale of Rushmore. “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too,” Standing Bear wrote in his letter.

Ziolkowski took the road not followed and then some. In the early 1940s, he worked on the planning and design of the Crazy Horse monument, but in 1943 he joined the Army. He was wounded at Omaha Beach on D-Day. After the war ended in 1945, he was discharged as a sergeant and returned to South Dakota.

Supersized sculpture seems to be a Buddhist proposition, which holds that Buddha’s reach is universal and the source of all enlightenment, whether intellectual or emotional. His command is beyond human imagination. He sees everything and commands infinite respect and contemplation. Hence, his size. You can’t absorb his teachings in one gulp. The Egyptians and Romans went imperial-big, but, for them, labor was free. The Great Pyramid in Giza is about as big as Crazy Horse and has an epic look.

Ziolkowski may or may not have borrowed this thinking, but, let’s face it, in America, the bigger, the better. Outdoing Rushmore was a goal. The Crazy Horse project is certainly Rushmore’s counterpart and boisterous retort. It’s not only radical in scale. Many of the mega-monuments are tributes to power, but Crazy Horse died vanquished, with time marching on — no new, world-changing faith was inspired by him. In the 1930s, the Lakota were on the margins, as were all the Native tribes. The Feds weren’t helpful at first, since Rushmore had been such a headache. Most of the Black Hills were federally owned.

Standing Bear eventually swapped 900 acres in tribal land for Thunderhead Mountain, 6,532 feet above sea level, composed of coarse-grained pegmatite granite, the color of dull silver with a spoonful of pink. The mountain would provide in abundance the smooth, hard surfaces that Rushmore, layered with decayed, invasive rock, gave like Scrooge before his visions. Crazy Horse, a Wonder of the World, left the realm of mere vision. The first blast on the mountain was on June 3, 1948.

Crazy Horse was a Lakota, but his monument, as conceived by Ziolkowski and Standing Bear, salutes all American Indians. He was an action hero, so he couldn’t be shown just standing around. He’s astride his speeding horse, his long hair flowing; his outstretched arm points to the mountains and the land of his tribe. He looks intense and fierce, the keeper of the flame. That’s good. I don’t want monuments to Pajama Boy, the Herr Oyster SS Waffens of the world, or a trans Miss America.

Crazy Horse was the strong, silent type and refused to be photographed. There’s one purported photograph from 1877 after the Lakota surrender, but the man depicted had long, luminous jet-black hair. Crazy Horse’s was closer to chestnut, and he felt, adamantly, that photography was theft of the soul. Did Ziolkowski use a model? He’s said to have imagined a generic Indian. Who cares? For all we know, he used the Crazy Horse played by the young Anthony Quinn in They Died with Their Boots On.

The monument is the product of geology, of course, but also engineering and design. Ziolkowski’s design and his scale model had to consider the hundreds of thousands of tons of rock that would have to be removed by dynamite. He used his own near-infallible sense of scale, a tape measure, and a theodolite, an optical instrument that measures angles in vertical and horizontal planes. Later, using a measuring boom, his 1:34 scale model of Crazy Horse’s head was transferred by numbers to the mountain. Now, laser scanners, digital models, and infrared beams from hand-held prisms do the measuring.

Rushmore’s carved surface is about 10,000 square feet, done over 14 years. Extrapolating these numbers, about 700 feet a year, to the Crazy Horse design, we get an estimate of 700 years. That’s longer than it took to build an English Gothic cathedral, longer than Europeans have been in America. Time for radical thinking and robotics. The new tech used now has to be customized to mountain-carving, so portability is an issue, and to the carving of pegmatite granite specifically. Crazy Horse has a new tower crane to move its programmed carving machine and also to move equipment to spots that are inaccessible by road. Dynamiting is no more. Rock is removed in bulky blocks cut by machine-mounted or hand-operated cable saws and rock drills. The process makes for a crypto-Cubist look. Then rough-shaping, contouring, and plenty of old-fashioned chisel work to carve, say, the wrinkles on Crazy Horse’s thumb.

Will it ever get done? People understandably ask this question, but it’s a miracle it’s gotten this far. Think of Ziolkowski, having left a good business in a fancy New England suburb, at Crazy Horse for nearly 40 years, climbing up and down 741 rickety steps, two, three, or four times a day — as low-tech as it comes — money trickling in. The thing’s only a vision for years, then barely visible for years more. There was lots of planning, blasting, and hewing, but nothing had been finished.

“Persistence,” thy name is Korczak. “Resolute,” thy name is Ruth. That’s Ruth Ziolkowski, his wife, who made a new home at age 24 at the Crazy Horse site, had ten kids, and kept the project’s books, but she never carved a piece of stone in her life. Ziolkowski told her before he died to carry on the best she could and, first things first, to see to it that the horse’s head was finished. She decided otherwise and chose to focus on Crazy Horse’s face first. His 87-foot head was finished in 1998. Smart move. The face put the project on the map. Hundreds of feet in the air, the face projects will, urgency, and hope.

Ruth died in 2014. The family is still involved. Caleb Ziolkowski, the grandson of Ruth and Korczak, is the chief mountain officer. He runs the sculpture operation. The project is a nonprofit. It has never taken government money, in part because Ziolkowski saw how intrusive government meddling could be at Rushmore. The NEH is in the business of $10 million grants now and ought to send them a big check if they’ll take it. Crazy Horse is certainly worthy and needy. The donor base is small. In ambition, quality, majesty, and with its movie-worthy narrative, the Crazy Horse memorial is hard to beat. Ziolkowski is the Hollywood role of a lifetime, evolving as he did from orphan to dockside delinquent, suave suburban artist, Army sergeant, and mountain man on a one-goal mission.

Here and there locally and in the bitchy woke press are bleats and yammers about carving — desecrating — a sacred mountain. “How dare Bad White Man carve Lakota chief?” Why is it taking so long, and where’s the money going.

I’ll clear the thicket of flimsy grievances, all intellectual weeds. Mount Rushmore took 14 years and was never finished because Borglum died and the project ran out of money, praise the Lord. His final design was too fussy and cluttered. At some point, sooner as opposed to later, the Crazy Horse foundation will declare it done, from sheer exhaustion. The Crazy Horse design, like Mount Rushmore’s, includes a wordy, carved entablature that ought to be ditched now. Let the image do all the lifting. And how much torso, man and horse, do we really need? “Less is more” will rear its head and toss its curls. At some point, no one in the family will want to be involved.

Standing Bear and his fellow chiefs weren’t much into sacred mountains, assimilated as are most Natives today. There was a time — in the 1970s and ’80s — when the history of the sad, inevitable conquest of Indian tribes needed to be set straight, but we’re 50 years beyond that. Today, clingers, fundamentalists, and racketeers abound. Sasheen Little Feather was the icon, a fraud and crazy, too. Elizabeth Warren isn’t crazy, but she’s a fake Indian and a race pimp. Ignore them. They’re a version of the grudge fest that gave us the Indian boarding-school grave scandal in Canada in 2021 and 2022. But there were no mass graves. It was a hoax and a case of bourgeois mass hysteria. A lot of phonies glue themselves to Native causes. “Who Speaks for Crazy Horse?” a New Yorker story is titled. It’s sure as hell not The New Yorker. It’s a weepy set piece about the monument, rote and dull.

Young people with Native ancestry ought to be proud of it, not burdened by axe-grinding. They should live in today’s world, the only world they’ve got. In that spirit, the Crazy Horse memorial is a national treasure and an essential visit. It’s an authentic American miracle.