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The Violinist and the Sculptor

By Paul Higbee

Ruth Ann Karlen has traveled across the country to research and preserve the nearly-forgotten history of a woman who contributed greatly to the Crazy Horse carving.

Rapid City’s Ruth Ann Karlen believes Dorothy Comstock Ziolkowski Moreton fell through the cracks of Black Hills history.

The two women never met, but Karlen sometimes feels as though Dorothy is sitting in the room with her as she reads decades-old letters. She routinely calls her research subject by her first name. She describes a woman who was an accomplished violinist, writer, world traveler, and force behind the establishment of Crazy Horse Memorial.

“Dorothy was the first wife of Crazy Horse mountain sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski,” says Karlen, who believes the world’s biggest carving might not exist without Dorothy’s early efforts. Karlen can paint a detailed life story, in part because Dorothy’s cousin turned over to her photographs, writings and other documents.

“I would have been happy with a shoebox of materials,” Karlen laughs.”Instead, I got the jackpot.”

And eventually more. Karlen’s investigation has taken her coast to coast, spurred by a graduate history course that she took in 2005 while working as a Rapid City public school librarian. The class stressed how educators can uncover significant history by seeking out primary sources. Karlen’s travels included Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where Dorothy graduated in 1919, and the campus chapel where Dorothy and Korczak exchanged wedding vows in 1934.

Like most women at Vassar a century ago (the all-female school wasn’t yet coed), Dorothy came from East Coast social standing and wealth. Her father was a highly respected surgeon at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, and in 1905 he took his family on an ocean liner to the Far East — an incredibly rare travel opportunity. The trip was only part of Dorothy’s early international experiences. She lived in England for five years with her family, and after attending Vassar she moved to Paris to study violin with the renowned George Enescu.

Her trek into the interior of the American continent — specifically the Black Hills — can be traced to an encounter in Massachusetts after returning from France. She met Boston sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, several years her junior, who later told Dorothy he was sometimes his own worst enemy because of his brash, gruff manner. Dorothy experienced that immediately. Trying to make small talk by telling Korczak she admired two New York sculptors, she heard Korczak scoff, saying that most sculptors he liked were dead, artists of previous centuries who cut images from stone rather than molding clay for bronze statues, as Dorothy’s New York artists did.

Korczak revealed great admiration for one contemporary American sculptor: Gutzon Borglum, who at the time was carving presidential likenesses from hard mountain granite in South Dakota.

Despite Korczak’s antisocial ways, and possibly somewhat because of them, too, Dorothy found herself in love with the young sculptor. The attraction proved mutual, and the president of Vassar himself participated in their wedding because of his friendship with Dorothy. She was 36, Korczak 26, both driven by artistic spirits. Dorothy would play with the Boston Symphony. Korczak always called her Dorrie.

“She was very much an East Coast, proper lady,” Karlen notes.”I’m not sure she owned a pair of slacks.”

Korczak Ziolkowski and Dorothy Comstock were married in 1934. They adopted a daughter, Anne, and moved with Dorothy’s mother, Bertha Comstock, to the Black Hills in 1948 as Ziolkowski prepared to begin work on Crazy Horse Memorial. The family is pictured above in January 1944.

An East Coast lady, perhaps, only because she hadn’t yet experienced the American West. But five years after the wedding a dream position opened for Korczak: assistant sculptor under Borglum at Mount Rushmore for the 1939 carving season. Traveling to South Dakota by automobile in that year, of course, didn’t compare to steaming to Asia in 1905, but to some Easterners the adventure didn’t fall short by much. Dorothy’s writing documented the journey.

She described crossing South Dakota east to west — early summer croplands East River that looked like they could use rain, eerily fascinating Badlands and, finally, the splendor of the Black Hills, where they drove”up, up, up endlessly, into the dark pines which had been the sacred temples of the Sioux.” Dorothy called the Black Hills”mystic,” a region where,”anything might happen except the expected — and strange events lost their strangeness.”

For example, Dorothy and Korczak loved the area’s songbirds. Always attuned to classical music, Dorothy identified one”that repeated deliciously the theme of a Schubert Rondo!”

“We led the life of pioneers in Dakota,” Dorothy wrote to former Vassar classmates,”in a log cabin with porcupines, mountain lions, elk and rattlesnakes for company! Every day Korczak worked on the Mount Rushmore Memorial, as Borglum’s only sculptor assistant, and I spent all my dimes in telescopes, watching my only husband dangle on a tiny cable over the cliffs. In the studio below, I did publicity for Borglum, and I wrote a pageant, which was given there for the Golden Jubilee of the State of South Dakota.”

Dorothy’s pageant commemorating 50 years of statehood was part of the Theodore Roosevelt head dedication (each of the four Rushmore figures had its own dedication over the years).”Held on a Sunday evening, it was by far the best attended of all the Rushmore dedications,” wrote historian Rex Alan Smith in his 1984 book, The Carving of Mount Rushmore. Three thousand cars carrying 12,000 people showed up, and that number was dwarfed by a national CBS radio audience listening live.

While Smith wrote glowingly of Dorothy’s efforts at Rushmore, he did not mention her by name in the book — only as”Ziolkowski’s wife.” Researchers today won’t find Dorothy’s name in an anonymous Wikipedia article about Korczak, although the story makes clear he had two wives, the second of whom is named. Those kinds of omissions triggered Karlen’s thinking decades later about what sometimes happens to women in history, especially those from an era when no wife kept her original surname after marriage and often lost even her first name in newspaper accounts.

Before coming to South Dakota, Ziolkowski carved likenesses of great leaders in history. He and Dorothy (pictured) gifted this statue of Noah Webster to the city of West Hartford, Connecticut.

The year 1939 was significant for Dorothy and Korczak for reasons beyond Mount Rushmore. Korczak’s sculpture of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, a musician and Prime Minister of Poland, won first place in a New York World’s Fair competition. Korczak suddenly had the international arts community’s attention. But the summer didn’t end well. Lincoln Borglum, Gutzon’s son and a key part of the Rushmore project, got into a fistfight with Korczak. Lincoln and Korczak made up quickly and, Dorothy later wrote, the pair”are good friends.” But Gutzon decided the men couldn’t work together and dismissed Korczak. The Ziolkowskis left the Hills, not certain they would see them again, and certainly not guessing that the Paderewski sculpture would aid in their return.

Back East, in Connecticut, the two immersed themselves in the lifestyles of professional artists.”Korczak has had no vacation since I have known him,” Dorothy wrote to her Vassar friends.”One piece follows another without so much as a half-day’s interim. We don’t even take weekends off. While he works, I fiddle, for there seems to be a lot of programs to be given.”

Music of another style came into their lives when they formed a patriotic drum and fife corps that performed as New England soldiers and sailors deployed for World War II service. Dorothy’s widowed mother, Bertha Comstock, lived with the couple and crafted authentic-looking colonial costumes.

Korczak himself left for the Army in 1943 and hit the bloody beaches of Normandy in 1944. Dorothy noted that war changed Korczak — made the hardened man harder still. Korczak railed against”what he called the veneer of civilization,” Dorothy wrote, and”was much more intolerant of people in general.” Karlen thinks Dorothy’s ability, well-practiced, to stand as a buffer between Korczak and others was a key to his acceptance in the Black Hills in the late 1940s.

His post-war vision of himself and his family was life in South Dakota or Wyoming; he had accepted Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear’s invitation to create a mountain carving honoring American Indians. Standing Bear had been impressed by Korczak’s World’s Fair accomplishment, and his time in the Black Hills was a plus. The Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming were considered as a site, but South Dakota’s quality granite won out. Korczak selected Thunderhead Mountain near Custer and declared he would shape it into Crazy Horse astride a horse. The land and mineral rights were purchased in 1947. The same year, Korczak built an on-site house, and his family followed him West — Dorothy, Bertha and a little girl, Anne, adopted by the Ziolkowskis (Standing Bear called her Maiden of the Dawn). They were prepared to live in the Black Hills for as long as it would take to complete a mountain sculpture considerably bigger than Mount Rushmore.

Also arriving from Connecticut were half a dozen young women who would volunteer at Crazy Horse Memorial. The drums and fifes and costumes came West, too, for occasional Black Hills performances but, of course, the focus was the mountain. A dynamite blast in June 1948 was a baby step in removing rock to reach carving surfaces — a process that continues 73 years later.

But in 1949, for reasons known only to the couple, the Ziolkowski marriage ended. A year later, Korczak married Ruth Ross, one of the young volunteers from Connecticut. Certainly, there were those who guessed the recently arrived Dorothy would return to New England, but she didn’t. She, her mother and Anne set themselves up in a little house on Franklin Street in Rapid City. Dorothy went to work as a Rapid City Journal writer. She also joined other Rapid City musicians as violinist in a small orchestra and endured an unhappy second marriage.

Divorce from Korczak didn’t mean complete separation from Crazy Horse Memorial. Dorothy watched its development, believed in it fully, and sent encouraging letters to Korczak. Two years before her death she mailed a note to Korczak, saying:”I am always extremely interested and stimulated as I hear of the tremendous progress for which you alone are responsible, and which is your gift to a world in need.” Considering both the sculpture and sculptor to be of permanent historical importance, Dorothy penned a 300-page Korczak Ziolkowski biography (never published).

The Ziolkowskis created a patriotic fife and drum corps while living in New England. The group came with them to South Dakota and is pictured with Henry Standing Bear, the man who convinced Ziolkowski to create a mountain carving in the Black Hills that honored all American Indians.

When it was time for Anne to go to college, she looked west, not east, and selected the University of Arizona. Dorothy and Bertha moved to Tucson with her in 1960. Dorothy played with the Tucson Symphony and gave violin lessons. Bertha died in 1961 and Anne sadly followed in 1968 after developing leukemia. Dorothy passed away in 1978 and Korczak in 1982.

Twenty-seven years after Dorothy’s death, Karlen took that history course and was advised by her neighbor, who had known Dorothy slightly, that the sculptor’s wife for so many years might make a good subject for a paper. Karlen found Dorothy’s obituary and noticed a cousin in Tucson listed as a survivor.

“Nobody’s ever asked about her before,” said Lenci Loring of her accomplished cousin when Karlen phoned out of the blue. She invited Karlen to Thanksgiving in Tucson in 2005. The women spent the holiday going through boxes Dorothy left behind — content Loring later gifted to Karlen.

Back home, Karlen looked up people who had known Dorothy and Korczak as a couple, including journalist Bob Lee. Lee gave Karlen a 1948 Rapid City Journal feature he wrote that mentioned Dorothy’s own artistry and credited much of the Crazy Horse project’s”super-salesmanship” to Dorothy and Bertha, who”showed hospitality-wise westerners how to entertain in a grandiose style.” In 2018 Karlen flew to Vassar, where no one in the alumni office or library knew who Dorothy was.”But they were mesmerized by her story when we talked,” Karlen says. Vassar staff helped her search registrar files and the library to find transcripts and the newsy letters Dorothy wrote to her class of 1919 friends (“Dear 1919,” each begins). Karlen had enough information and perspectives to do occasional history talks in Rapid City and typically found audiences no less mesmerized than the Vassar staff. Now and then, however, she met people who told her she had to be mistaken about Dorothy’s very existence.

She fully understood the confusion. Two generations of South Dakotans knew the second Mrs. Ziolkowski — Ruth Ross Ziolkowski, mother to Korczak’s 10 children, and the iconic leader who stepped up after Korczak’s death to take Crazy Horse Memorial into the 21st century. Ruth can be credited for the decision to complete Crazy Horse’s face, handled millions of visitors from around the world, and fulfilled an educational mission.

“She did a wonderful job,” says Karlen, who met the second Mrs. Ziolkowski a few times before her 2014 death.

But Karlen is making it her task to remind South Dakotans of Dorothy, remarkable in her own right and certainly deserving of a recognized place in state history.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Spring Hike at Crazy Horse

Crazy Horse Memorial hosted its 33rd annual Spring Volksmarch June 2-3. Hikers from around the country made the 6.2-mile jaunt over dirt trails and gravel roads to experience a view of the world’s largest mountain carving that visitors don’t ordinarily enjoy. The turn-around point happens on the outstretched arm of Crazy Horse, with the sculpture’s nine-story face looming in the background. The volksmarch is among the most popular organized hikes in the country. Another trip in the fall is scheduled for September 30. Photos by John Mitchell.

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A Nature Hike Without Solitude

By Bernie Hunhoff

Korczak Ziolkowski envisioned the Crazy Horse carving as not just mountainous art, but as a living symbol. That’s never more evident than on volksmarch weekends.

Can a man have a wilderness experience with 5,000 people on the same mountain? We sought an answer to that question by joining the multitudes of hikers at the annual Crazy Horse Volksmarch.

Traffic snarls are nearly as rare as white buffalo in the southern Black Hills, so you know you’re on the right road to the Volksmarch when Highway 16 west of Custer becomes bumper-to-bumper vehicles. Follow the crowd to a flat valley in the pine-covered foothills, where volunteers on horseback provide some semblance of order since there are no yellow lines in the grass to organize the parking.

The ascent to the peak begins on logging trails in the pine forest. As you climb, the trees give way to expansive views of the forest, mountains and prairie.

A few registration preliminaries are required (entrance to Crazy Horse is free if you bring a cash donation or canned food for Feeding the Hungry, but the Black Hills Volksport Association charges a flat $3 per hiker). Within minutes you’ll be walking into the forest.

We were a three-generation group, the youngest a 5-year-old with a walking stick who kept running far ahead of us and then darting back. He was taking four steps to our one.

The beginning trails are dirt or gravel work roads and deceptively easy. The morning mountain air is cool and crisp, so you congratulate yourself for wearing a jacket and bringing warm clothes for the kid.

In the clearings, you’ll soon have a glimpse of the mountain sculpture that was begun in 1947 by Korczak Ziolkowski. Crazy Horse’s 87-foot-tall face is now complete, and on his 263-foot outstretched arm you can see that some of the hikers got a much earlier start than you. Hikers can begin as early as 6 a.m. They must have been very cold, you think. Didn’t they know better?

Though climbers share the mountain with thousands of fellow hikers, the only congestion is at the top and the bottom.

The first stretch of the 6.2-mile roundtrip is a pleasant stroll like you might take in some hills by the Missouri River. Jump over a fallen log, duck under a low branch. Uphill and downhill you go, happy for that jacket and your good sense to start in mid-morning. Local church and youth groups offer snacks and beverages at rest stops, and candy for the kid. Medical professionals are also near at hand.

After a mile or two, the pine trees become fewer so you lose their shade just as South Dakota summer sun shows its strength. That’s also about the time that the climb becomes more vertical, although the elevation only rises about 500 feet on the entire march.

Up we went. The jacket comes off. The 5-year-old, who has probably already traveled 10 miles in his circuitous style, wants a ride on someone’s back. And why did you bring the binoculars and the camera bag?

But people twice your age are climbing and talking, and passing you and the 5-year-old so you can’t slow down. Well, maybe a short rest so the kid can share his licorice from the last rest stop.

Walking sticks and canes are helpful aids to older hikers and handy toys for their youthful companions.

Your fellow travelers are mostly South Dakotans, but some have East Coast accents and a few speak a foreign tongue. The atmosphere is festive. There’s much picture-taking, of course. Some hikers find friends from home, and others stumble on long-lost acquaintances. The Ziolkowskis, who are still in charge, say a few marriage proposals have even been made in the heady air of the world’s largest mountain carving.

The last ascent is a steep grade but you can see the stone face now, and a thousand people ahead of you and behind you. One step after another. Stop to enjoy the expansive Black Hills landscape. A few more steps. A few hundred more. And you’re there, atop Crazy Horse, 6,000 feet above sea level.

The fastest and fittest hikers make the trek in less than an hour, but most people take two hours to climb and an hour or so to descend.

While walking down the mountain you realize that a wilderness experience doesn’t require solitude. Five thousand people only add variety to the Volksmarch, especially once the 5-year-old regains his stamina on the down-hill side.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2014 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117. The 31st Crazy Horse Volksmarch is June 4-5. An autumn volksmarch on the mountain is set for Oct. 2. It’s considered the most popular organized hike in America.

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The Woman Behind the Mountain

Editor’s Note: All of South Dakota was saddened to hear of the death of Ruth Ziolkowski, who passed away May 21, 2014, in Rapid City at age 87. She first arrived in South Dakota in 1948 to help sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski begin his monumental carving of Crazy Horse. The two were married in 1950. After Korczak’s death in 1982, Ruth steadily guided work on the mountain. She will be missed, but her legacy will live at the mountain forever. This story originally appeared in our May/June 1995 issue.

By Paul Higbee

Ruth Ziolkowski has emerged from the shadows of her late husband, Korczak, to become one of South Dakota’s best-known and busiest women. She supervises the world’s largest sculpture, 563 feet high and 641 feet long. Yet, she presides over the project and a large family with a gentleness that belies her toughness.

I drove to Custer recently to meet Ruth and learn about her work. Although it was a raw spring day, I first went to Thunderhead Mountain to see the carving. There were more mountain goats than carvers on the rocks. Crewmembers were warming themselves in an equipment building and passing around a new Weekly Reader that described their work.

Articles like that have become commonplace. Korczak’s sculptural design became well known to South Dakotans, and many Americans, long before any features were discernible on the granite outcrop. Crazy Horse sits astride a great horse, and he points to the southeast where his people’s dead lie. The design is increasingly recognizable worldwide as a mighty statement about the strength, pride and historical tribulations of American Indians.

Journalists from everywhere document the crew’s progress (the day before my visit, a French TV team wrapped up a shoot). For years it was standard practice to photograph the mountain with a model of the finished sculpture in the foreground. But not anymore. The mountain carving has begun speaking for itself.

The crew went back to its tasks, one of which was preparing to blast a pie-shaped section of rock from Crazy Horse’s left jaw. A few feet from there, from a point on the rock that will be cut away to shape the outstretched arm, the face’s appearance is startling. No longer is it a generic mask, but a Lakota face with cheekbones, strong nose, and furrowed brow. The head is cocked slightly to the left; Ziolkowski noted that people usually tilt their heads when they point.

Just this spring it was announced the 87-foot face will be completed by June 3, 1998. That will be the 50th anniversary of the date when Ziolkowski set the first blast on the mountain, in front of an audience that included five Battle of the Little Bighorn survivors. The completion will put the project nearly two years ahead of its goal of finishing the face by the turn of the century, attributable largely to recent mild winters. Work this past winter progressed, too, on Crazy Horse’s chest, the right side of his head, and on the horse’s mane.

I caught up with Ruth Ziolkowski a couple hours later in her home below the mountain. Between fixing lunch and taking phone calls, she recalled her husband’s first years here.

“He knew right away how big the carving would be in physical terms, but the job in human terms he didn’ t know until he had worked on the mountain for awhile,” she said. “Can you imagine starting to work on that mountain by yourself? Building steps up there, carrying up all the equipment on your back? Most anybody would have quit, but he didn’t.”

Ruth described herself as the project’s “chairman of the board, but I do the dishes, too.”

Self-effacing humor and a gentle manner mark Ruth’s interaction with the public and her workers, long-time acquaintances say. But make no mistake, they quickly add — she is in charge.

“When Korczak died in 1982, Ruth was an unknown quantity to the public,” said Robb DeWall, the project’s communications director. “Some people wondered what would happen to the sculpture, though people who knew Ruth were completely confident she’d continue her husband’s work. But the public didn’t know her then, and we didn’t know the skills of the children.”

Seven of Ruth and Korczak’s 10 grown children are part of the Crazy Horse project. On this day three — Mark, Anne, and Monique — stopped in for lunch, along with the 10-year-old granddaughter, Heidi. Around the table, with the potatoes and corned beef, was passed a Weekly Reader, and someone mentioned that the mountain came up on Carmen Sandiego, the TV geography show, the day before. Then the table talk drifted to a discussion of the type of crane needed for completing the Native American Educational and Cultural Center, under construction next to the house.

Everyone has his or her own area of responsibility. Mark oversees forest management on the 1,200 acre Crazy Horse site and builds roads. Anne is director of the acclaimed Indian Museum of North America here, and is in charge of the gift shops that feature Native American products. Monique, who is winning recognition as a sculptor in her own right, is the Crazy Horse pointer, meaning she takes precise measurements from points on her father’s model and calculates how much rock must be removed from corresponding points on the mountain. Other siblings direct services for 1.3 million visitors annually, work on the mountain, and perform daily behind-the-scenes duties.

“I’m lucky,” Ruth told me. “My children are working with me. Every one of them went off and did something else for awhile, but seven came back here. We’ve all grown in our jobs.”

Korczak was nearly 40 when he began Crazy Horse, and early on he drew up plans for continuing the work after his lifetime.

“Leave it to Korczak to look to the future,” said Ruth. “He would have been a great chess player, always planning a couple moves ahead.”

But when you’re sculpting a mountain, even detailed plans don’t mean you simply check off completed tasks and move on to the next. “There’s a lot to learn as you go, and that’s the challenge, the fun,” Ruth said. “For everything you finish, about three more jobs come along.”

There are always decisions to make about how much revenue should go into the sculpture, and how much should support visitor services. The project is also committed to a scholarship program that’s the forerunner to a university and medical center Korczak envisioned here. Since 1978, 800 Native American students have benefitted.

For the past few years Crazy Horse has worked with an annual budget of a bit more than $1 million, mostly raised by admissions to the grounds and concessions. The Grass Roots Club, with members who support Crazy Horse with $25 dues each year, contributed $133,000 in 1994.

Even occasional revenue windfalls mean hard choices, though. Additional money might allow for more mountain carvers. But more workers mean more equipment, and that equipment will need maintenance in the future; where that maintenance money will come from has to be considered now.

By far the most difficult decision Ruth has made was when she determined, in 1987, to make Crazy Horse’s head the focus of work, rather than the horse’s head. It was the right call, gaining the project greater credibility as the facial features emerged. Fewer and fewer comments are heard along the lines of one that CBS newsman Charles Kuralt heard in Rapid City several years ago. A rental car clerk told Kuralt that Korczak Ziolkowski was perpetrating a scam, living well off admissions, and blasting a little rock now and then for effect (Kuralt didn’t buy it, and ended up staying several days with the Ziolkowskis that trip and reporting on the carving’s development several times over the years).

Confront people who said Crazy Horse was a scam a few years ago, and they’ll say that thinking was understandable if you compared Mount Rushmore’s progress to Crazy Horse’s. Rushmore, even with chronic funding problems and crew layoffs, was brought to its present state in 14 years. The Crazy Horse folks, after four decades, could claim more than eight million tons had been blasted away, but could point to nothing resembling a chief on a horse. Crazy Horse supporters, in the early years, were quick to respond that work on Thunderhead Mountain was a privately funded, one-man show, while Rushmore had taken federal funding which supported over 300 carvers during its creation. And then there’s the size. The four Rushmore heads combined could fit into the area planned for Crazy Horse’s head.

“Korczak never liked those comparisons, because that’s not what this carving is about, and it’s not what Mount Rushmore is about,” Ruth said. She added Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum was among three personal heroes Korczak claimed, along with Michelangelo and da Vinci.

Her husband, Ruth said, knew it would have been easier to sculpt a mountain away from the object of comparison (Rushmore is 17 miles up the highway) but that was never a possibility because the Black Hills were Crazy Horse’s native land.

In 1939 Korczak worked part of a season as a Rushmore carver. Also that year, his marble Paderewski: Study of an Immortal won first prize for sculpture at the New York World’s Fair. That publicity, combined with the fact that Korczak knew something of mountain carving because of Rushmore, led Lakota chief Henry Standing Bear to approach him about Crazy Horse.

About the same time a teenage girl showed up at Korczak’s West Hartford, Connecticut home hoping to get an autograph from movie star Richard Bennett, who was visiting. The girl was Ruth (then Ruth Ross) and she would volunteer to help Korczak as he sculpted a Noah Webster statue in Connecticut a couple years later. As a college student she would come to South Dakota with a group to assist with the very first work at Crazy Horse in 1947.

“Back in those first years here, he never said if the sculpture is completed,” Ruth recalled. “It was when the sculpture is completed. So people around him, and visitors, talked that way, too. That was the power of his personality.”

Ruth and Korczak were married in 1950. In a way, Ruth also found herself married to the mountain and surrounding Hills. She receives many invitations, but has no desire to leave home even for brief trips. And the Black Hills are home; she hasn’t been back to her native Connecticut since 1962.

“I like being surrounded by evergreens year-round,” she said. “Besides, like Korczak always said, wait and eventually everyone you’d ever want to meet will come here.”

It proved a prophetic statement. Artists, politicians, reservation school kids, and vacationers from around the globe all make the trek to Crazy Horse. Ruth doesn’t get up on the mountain often. “I told Korczak I’d keep Crazy Horse together as an organization, but I can’t carve a mountain,” she said. “So when I go up, it’s just to see. I’m not about to tell anyone where to drill, or blast, or anything else.”

She has, she said, complete confidence in her children who work on Thunderhead Mountain and in the crew. And her thoughts when she visits?

“It’s absolutely amazing to see, but I’m like Korczak,” she said. “There’s never been a time I didn’t think it would happen.î

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Crazy Horse: Pointing to the Future

By Bill Allan

Editor’s Note: The work at Crazy Horse Memorial has progressed considerably since Bill Allan, a Plankinton native, wrote this piece. It appeared in our November 1987 issue. To subscribe to South Dakota Magazine, call us at 800-456-5117.

Chad Coppess of Dakotagraph snapped this view of Crazy Horse Memorial in 2009.

I came up to Mount Rushmore National Monument in long nourished anticipation, like others who flock to see this renowned carving, and was moved by the grand tribute to these four presidents who guided our land during troubled times. However, having seen pictures of Rushmore in magazines and papers, my emotions fell short of what I wanted and expected.

The story of Mount Rushmore is inspiring. The accomplishments of the creator, Gutzon Borglum, and those of the four faces portrayed in stone are truly a tribute to man’s determination and exemplary of man’s ability to rise to new heights.

But today, the work is finished. All that is left are the visitations and the photo taking, as viewers pay homage to artist and subjects alike. It is the same with the Washington Monument, the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower and other great masterpieces. They gleam with grandeur and artistic greatness. Our eyes feed on them and we are inspired.

And then we drive away.

But as I drove away down one of the Black Hills roads, I found new inspiration in a mountainous tribute being carved to the American Indian. It became the lifetime endeavor of a special man whose work is now being continued by his family.

“When the legends die, the dreams end; when the dreams end, there is no more greatness.”

The monument — conceived by local Native Americans, and engineered by the great sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski — is being carved out of a mountain of rock five miles north of Custer, South Dakota. It will one day be a gigantic figurine of the great Oglala Lakota leader Crazy Horse, astride a pony, pointing over the horizon to the Indian lands. “My lands are where my dead are buried,” the young warrior once told a taunting white trader.

While he lived, Korczak liked to brag that, out of the 4.5 billion people in the world, he was the only one carving a mountain. The largest sculptural undertaking of all time, it will rise to 563 feet and span 641 feet — higher than the Washington Monument, larger than the pyramid of Gizeh, and so massive all four of the heads at Rushmore could fit inside the head of Crazy Horse when it is completed. Sculpted in the round, it will picture Crazy Horse mounted bareback on a horse so large a five-story house could fit into one of the animal’s nostrils.

Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota chief, pleaded with an orphan boy from Boston who was already an established sculptor to carve a likeness of Crazy Horse, one of the greatest of Indian heroes. That was 1939. A war later Korczak accepted the challenge. He and Standing Bear searched until they found the proper mountain and, without money or income, forty-year-old Ziolkowski lived in a tent and immediately began the world’s most massive sculpture.

Not knowing this, I reflected little interest as we drove up the road leading to the project. I was let down. All I could see was a pile of stone at the base of a rock mountain that someone had painted white markings on. I expected little else to capture my attention.

I was wrong.

Photo by Chad Coppess.

There on the mountain I found an inspiration that will always be a part of my life. I found refreshing value in the determination of this man called Korczak. He could have likely written his own ticket to fame and fortune in the art centers of the world. Yet he was inspired to live the rest of his years in the shadow of a mountain, measuring, planning, carving and recording plans in the event he did not live to see the finish.

I am especially inspired by the last words the sculptor said to his wife, Ruth, just before his death in 1982 after 34 years on the mountain. “You must work on the mountain,” he told her, “but go slowly — so you do it right.”

It becomes obvious to all who view the stone carving that it is not the act of completion that carries the import of this tremendous undertaking. It is the act of doing!

I am sure the Indian people and Korczak designed it to be so. He did not plan to have a heart attack or have his back broken as he worked. And he knew bigots would oppose the idea of carving an Indian, yet he went ahead and bought the mountain with the arrangement that it would revert to the Indians at the death of the artist’s youngest child. These obstacles just happened as part of living his love of life.

The mountain could break his bones and his body, but never his spirit. Like Crazy Horse, the man he was perpetuating, Korczak had too much heart.

Today his wife and children carry on the work. Visitors pay a fee (presently $27 a carload) to see the progress. Believing in free enterprise, the sculpture proudly refuses federal financing, relying instead on the monies from private people, namely the American public. It gives every viewer the opportunity to be a part of the dream as they participate in the doing. Most visitors take a stone chip or two of the famous mountain to more graphically tell the story when they arrive home. As each small chip falls, we are reminded that the inspiration of the Crazy Horse Memorial is in the doing. When it is completed, one day in the distant future, it will tell the story of America’s first people and engrave the nobleness of the Indian Nation. From around the world, people will flock to view the masterpiece, and those whose aspirations found growth in the Crazy Horse story as told in rock may find a need for new goals that concentrate on the act of doing.

The memory of Crazy Horse is a marker, a milestone to the changing times of our nation. Perhaps we can view the Crazy Horse monument as an inspiration to rekindle our land’s greatness. This proud Indian chief, along with the leaders of other Indian nations, knew the value of this vast land. They deemed it worth fighting for. They, too, were willing to lay down their lives to preserve it.

No one said it better than Korczak Ziolkowski: “When the legends die, the dreams end; when the dreams end, there is no more greatness.”

On my next visit to the Black Hills, I will stop to look at the Rushmore faces, be uplifted, but will race on to the Crazy Horse site to see the progress that has been made in my absence. I will not look at Korczak’s grave at the base of the mountain, rather, I will spend my time appreciating his ongoing lesson in creativity.