Crazy Horse Memorial

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Almost 70 years ago, Lakota Chief Standing Bear invited sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to create a monument of Crazy Horse in the sacred Black Hill as a tribute to North American Indians. Crazy Horse Memorial is mankind's largest art project (641 feet long and 563 feet high with a 210 foot high horse's head.

Korczak first came to the Black Hills in 1939 to help Gutzon Borglum on Mt. Rushmore. After serving in World War II, he returned to start this project in 1948 which the S.D. Governor Mickelson said "will serve to remind us of the debt we owe to these first Americans". His wife Ruth also worked on the project while taking care of their ten children, a dairy and a sawmill. She is still working on it at age 83 and so are seven of the children.

Korczak worked alone at first with chisels and hammers on very high ladders. Sometimes a mountain goat would climb up the ladder. So the work was very slow. He died in 1982 and Ruth took over. The face of Crazy Horse was finished in 1998. Now they are focusing on the 219 foot high horse's head.

There was a large Indian Museum of North America and a Native American Educational and Cultural Center. There were Indian artists working there and selling their wares. I bought some jewelry from an elderly woman with very arthritic hands. While I was looking at the jewelry, a blond woman, who was working on a necklace, asked me if the horses on my t-shirt were Swedish? "I have one which I bought, when I was in Sweden. My grandmother was Swedish. I married a man from the Rosebud tribe. It was a challenge with two cultures! I am making necklaces that my husband designed."

Later I noticed that my sunglasses were missing so I ran back and asked the Swedish woman but they were not there. Then on to the Indian woman. She did not have them but she said that she remember that I had given something to my husband and he had put it in his pocket. So I ran back to Jalil who was having coffee. Yes, my glasses were in his pocket! I returned to the Indian woman and thanked her for her keen observation and I bought another bracelet made of horse hair. Her husband had made them.

The plan is to build a university and a medical training center. There is now a scholarship program for Native American students.

It is all run with private money and they have refused federal support.

Quite a place!