Mt. Rushmore is not the only mountain sculpture in the Black Hills; there is also the "now in progress" Crazy Horse Memorial, the work of Korczak Ziolkowski (Core-chock Jewel-kuff-ski), now deceased.
In 1939, Sioux Chief Henry Standing Bear invited Ziolkowski to carve an Indian memorial in the Black Hills. The Indians picked Crazy Horse because they felt that he was a real Indian's Indian.
One of the chiefs who defeated Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse never surrenders, never signed a treaty, and never went on a reservation. He also refused to be photographed by the White Man, so Korczak's model represents the spirit of the man, symbolic of the pride and dignity of the North American Indian. Astride a rearing horse, Crazy Horse points East, proclaiming, "My lands are where my dead lie buried."
Before beginning Crazy Horse in 1948, Korczak's only mountain experience was that spent briefly assisting Gutzon Borglum at Mt. Rushmore. At Crazy Horse he pioneered mountain carving techniques, employing heavy equipment and tons of dynamite.
He began with $174 in his pocket, living in a tent at the base of Thunderhead Mountain, the site of Crazy Horse. With Ziolkowski's death in October, 1982, his family carries on the project using the scale models and detailed plans he left for that purpose.
During the three and a half decades he was at Crazy Horse, Korczak Ziolkowski refused to take any salary. By 1982 he had singlehandedly raised and spent over $4 million on the mountain carving, and moved 7.4 million tons of granite. A strong believer in the free enterprise system, he twice rejected millions of dollars in potential government assistance. He believed that the interested public, not the taxpayer, should finance an Indian memorial.
Crazy Horse is a non-profit humanitarian project financed primarily from an admission fee. It is a multi-phased undertaking with three distinctive goals: the mountain carving, establishment of the Indian Museum of North America, and the development of the North American Indian University and Medical Training Center.
The estimated date of completion of the memorial, at its present rate, is sometime in the 23rd century.