http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23518404-5002031,00.html

Crazy Horse's revenge

The world's largest sculpture is slowly rising in the hills of South
Dakota, reports Tony Perrottet | April 12, 2008

"FIRE in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!" As the voice rings
out from a loudspeaker, we visitors to a cultural centre in the idyllic
Black Hills of South Dakota fall silent and focus our eyes on a granite
mountainside.
Crazy Horse

The model of the Crazy Horse monument and the full-scale version slowly
taking shape behind it. Picture: Tony Perrottet

Against the piercingly blue western sky, I can clearly make out the
enormous head and torso of a Lakota warrior on horseback, his right hand
pointing forcefully towards the horizon.

Then a dynamite blast shatters the silence, sending a shower of granite
boulders thundering to earth. The charge, one of two or three every week in
summer, barely makes a dent in the neck of the warrior's horse. But another
blow has been struck in the creation of the world's largest, and strangest,
sculpture.

"It's been a work in progress for about 60 years," a tourist from San
Francisco mutters, unsure whether to be amazed or bemused. "Only another 60
to go."

When it is finished, this corner of the American Old West will be graced
with a 171m-high sculpture of the most successful Native American leader in
history: Crazy Horse, the man who defeated George Armstrong Custer at the
Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. It will depict the moment after Crazy
Horse had surrendered to US troops in 1877 and was asked mockingly by a
soldier what had become of his homelands.

"My lands are where my dead lie buried," he reportedly replied. (He was
bayoneted in a scuffle at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, soon after; most Native
Americans believe it was a planned murder.)

It is no accident that Crazy Horse is rising only 25km from white America's
most famous patriotic sculpture, Mt Rushmore, depicting the faces of four
US presidents, or that Crazy Horse is going to be way, way bigger. From the
start, this image was planned to be a political counterpart to Rushmore and
to overshadow it.

The scale of this western colossus is mind-boggling. On completion, it will
be the world's largest sculpture, dwarfing the Great Pyramid of Giza and
the Statue of Liberty. Rushmore's presidents will fit inside Crazy Horse's
26.6m-high head. The image will include a giant tablet bearing a poem about
Native American history carved in 1m-high letters. The site already has a
sprawling cultural centre at its base, attracting one million visitors a
year. (Rushmore scores three million.) And there are plans for a university
and medical training centre for Native Americans to be built as part of the
complex.

As they say out west: If you're going to dream, you may as well dream big.

Suitably, the story of the Crazy Horse memorial is a true western epic. It
was conceived in the late 1930s by Chief Henry Standing Bear of the Brule
band of Lakota who, like all Native Americans, regarded the creation of Mt
Rushmore in the sacred Black Hills as a pointed insult. The gorgeous
mountain region was guaranteed to the Lakota by an 1859 treaty that
Congress broke once gold was discovered in the area; Custer led the first
expedition into the region in 1874, a year before he and his men were
cornered by the Lakota at Little Bighorn, Montana. Gold rush towns quickly
followed, the most famous of which was Deadwood.

As Rushmore neared completion, Standing Bear decided he wanted to show the
world that "the red man has great heroes, too". So the chief invited a
Boston sculptor who had once worked in the area, a young Polish-American
named Korczak Ziolkowski, to undertake a sculpture of Crazy Horse.
Ziolkowski was an idealistic war veteran with movie-star looks. Fresh from
fighting in Europe, he was casting around for a project that evoked the
history of the American west and was undaunted by any plan, no matter how
insanely ambitious. In 1948, Ziolkowski leased a vast chunk of the Black
Hills and started work on the monolith, declaring: "Every man has his
mountain. I'm carving mine."

By the late 1970s, Ziolkowski was still slaving away; he had become a local
fixture in the Black Hills, wandering the landscape with a huge white beard
and broad-rimmed hat, like a latter-day Walt Whitman. By then he was
assisted in his labours by his wife, Ruth, and brood of 10 children. The
artist knew that Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mt Rushmore, had wasted
years wrangling with bureaucrats to arrange funding. So Ziolkowski refused
to let any officials become involved in the project, twice rejecting $US10
million grants of federal aid. Instead, he funded the project with private
donations and the contributions of visitors.

Of course, this independent stance meant that progress was slow. When
Ziolkowski died in 1982, the sculpture was only a vague outline; many
locals assumed it would be abandoned. But Ziolkowski's family rallied to
continue work on the mountain. In 1998, Crazy Horse's completed face was
unveiled. Overnight, a chimerical project was given a distinct reality for
the public, bringing streams of enthusiastic tourists, all evidently eager
to learn more about Native American history.

The momentum led to the opening of a cathedral-like visitors centre in
2000, with a museum, Native American cultural centre (where local artists
come to work), bustling restaurant and state-of-the-art cinema. Crazy Horse
is squarely on the western sightseeing circuit, although it still maintains
its down-home, family feel, perhaps because seven of Ziolkowski's children
still work full time on the site and 28 of his grandchildren are seasonal
waiters in the restaurant.

Although carving is proceeding on the 22-storey-high horse's head, nobody
in the family will discuss when the monolith may be finished.

"There's no way to estimate," says Ruth, Ziolkowski's widow, in her
mid-70s, when we meet for a lunch of tacos. "It would be nothing but a wild
guess anyway. We're not trying to be difficult. We just don't know.

"Korczak always said it wasn't important when it was finished."

Later, wearing a hard hat, I visit the worksite, strolling along Crazy
Horse's outstretched arm and drinking in a view that seems to stretch to
New York City. The work is overseen by the Ziolkowskis' eldest son,
Casimir, who talks about his father with wry affection. "He was one of a
kind, that's for sure," he says with a laugh. "We had our fights, like
every father and son."

Workers are diligently laying dynamite, although they are also using tools
that would have been science fiction to Ziolkowski when he was alive:
ground-penetrating radar, electronic detonators, precision explosives and
3300C torches to polish the granite. Daughter Monique prefers to plot the
carving using a scale model, as her father did in the '50s. She uses
plumblines to measure distances, like the ancient Greeks; relying on a
computer, she says, "feels like cheating".

"Only in America could a man carve a mountain," Ziolkowski once declared, a
sentiment that, perhaps unsurprisingly, has not won over all Native
Americans. In recent years a group called the Defenders of the Black Hills
has argued that the region, which is sacred to the Lakota, should be left
alone.

Spokeswoman Charmaine Whiteface says the fact that this new sculpture
involves an image of a revered Lakota leader does not make it less of a
violation than Mt Rushmore. Work should simply stop on Crazy Horse, she
says. "Let nature reclaim the mountain."

But this is the US and nobody leaves a project half-finished. Today, Crazy
Horse is going from strength to strength; there are even two annual
festivals that encourage visitors from across the nation to enjoy the Black
Hills' crisp summer nights. The first is on June 26, the anniversary of the
battle of Little Bighorn as well as Ruth Ziolkowski's birthday; the second,
on September 6, is Korczak Ziolkowski's birthday and, according to Lakota
sources, the anniversary of Crazy Horse's early death at Fort Robinson.

On my last night in South Dakota, I visit the September extravaganza,
joining a stream of about 3000 picnickers sitting on hillsides beneath the
stars. A Technicolor laser show turns the half-carved mountainside into an
enormous cinema screen on which Native American petroglyphs and historic
photographs are projected to the sound of music and narration.

Finally, in the darkness, roars go up as 20 consecutive dynamite blasts
shoot out along Crazy Horse's arm, giving a spectacular breath of life to
thesculpture.

Driving back to my hotel that night, I see the name of the Lakota's white
enemy, Custer, marked everywhere on the Black Hills. Today he is
commemorated in the Custer State Forest, where buffalo have been
reintroduced after coming close to extermination. (The US Army funded
buffalo hunting to wipe out Native American food supplies.) The largest
town in the Black Hills is called Custer. And, bizarrely, white townsfolk
have even put the Custer name on a mountainside in large white capital
letters, like the famous Hollywood sign. But after the night of
celebrations at Crazy Horse, it feels as if the historic balance is at
least starting to be redressed.

Checklist
The easiest way to visit the Crazy Horse Memorial is to fly to Sioux City,
South Dakota, and rent a car. There are plenty of moderately priced hotels
in the town of Custer. It's worth spending several days exploring the Black
Hills, which have a haunting beauty (they are the oldest mountains in North
America).

www.crazyhorse.org
www.southdakotahotels.org