Crazy Horse Memorial

In November 1939 Henry Standing Bear, an Oglala elder who had watched the presidents go up on Mount Rushmore, wrote to Korczak Ziolkowski, a young Boston-born sculptor who had worked briefly under Gutzon Borglum there. He and the other chiefs, he wrote, wanted white people to know that the red man had great heroes too. After the war Ziolkowski came to Thunderhead Mountain, south of Hill City, and set off the first blast on June 3, 1948.

He turned down federal money, reportedly twice, fearing that the government would take the project over, and the work has run since on admissions and donations. When he died in 1982 the face was not yet finished. His widow, Ruth, decided to complete the face before the horse, betting it would bring in visitors, and it was dedicated on June 3, 1998. Seven of their children worked on the mountain, and the family's foundation runs it still. The finished carving is meant to be 641 feet long and 563 feet high, Crazy Horse on horseback with an arm pointing out over the hills, and no one gives a date for it.

Not everyone the carving honors wants it. Crazy Horse was never photographed, and many Lakota hold that carving a likeness of him into the Black Hills is the opposite of what he stood for. Elaine Quiver, one of his descendants, said in 2003 that Standing Bear should never have asked a sculptor on his own, because Lakota custom required the family's consent and no one sought it before the first dynamite. The visitor complex holds a large Native American museum alongside the studio and the scale model.