Leaving Colorado, we traveled through the beautiful Wyoming countryside before arriving in South Dakota to visit the Crazy House Memorial.
The Crazy Horse Memorial is a mountain monument under construction on privately held land in the Black Hills, South Dakota.
It will depict the Oglala Lakota warrior, Crazy Horse, riding a horse and pointing to his tribal land. (You can see the memorial in the background.)
The memorial was commissioned by Henry Standing Bear, a Lakota elder, to be sculpted by Korczak Ziolkowski. Work on the monument continues with the children and grandchildren of Korczak and Ruth.
Crazy Horse was a Native American war leader of the Oglala Lakota. He took up arms against the U.S. Federal government to fight against encroachments on the territories and way of life of the Lakota people.
On November 7, 1939, Henry Standing Bear wrote to the Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who worked on Mount Rushmore under Gutzon Borglum. He informed the sculptor, "My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too.” (Is it fair how cute she is in a hard hat?)😄
They have just started slicing away the stone below. This will be the horse's head. We were standing on his outstretched arm.
They have begun work on the knuckles and finger which will be 29 feet long.
The eye is 7’ x 7’.
The sculpture's final dimensions are planned to be 641 feet long and 563 feet high. The arm of Crazy Horse will be 263 feet long and the head 87 feet high.
The engineering involved in this project is amazing.
View from the top. We took a Van Ride to the top of the memorial. These tours only run after all work is completed for the day and they are pricey. Once in a lifetime experience and well worth it. The details about how the work began are fascinating - at least to me.
Needles Highway on the way to our hotel.