In 1939, Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota Sioux elder, wrote to the sculptor Korczak Ziółkowski, saying in part, "My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too." Ziółkowski, who had worked on Mt. Rushmore, met with a number of Sioux chiefs and decided to devote the rest of his life to carving an entire mountain into a statue of Chief Crazy Horse. He started blasting the mountain in 1948. Apparently, it takes a long time to change a mountain into a statue. Ziółkowski died in 1982. His wife and kids are continuing his work.
Carolyn and I viewed the mountain in 1969. You couldn't tell that it was going to be a person back then. We attempted to see the progress they'd made when we were in the black hills in 2009, forty years after our first viewing of the mountain, but the clouds were too low the day we passed through the black hills, and we couldn't see the top of the mountain.
I went back there today. You can see the face.
This is the way it's going to look when it's done. That might not be for another hundred years. This is the model they're working from as they sculpt the mountain.
