Three rocks off Thunderhead Mountain
You can pick up rocks at Crazy Horse Memorial, so Big and Little did. One each. Then a third one, which is going in the mail to their grandmother, who is a geologist in training.
The carving is on Thunderhead Mountain, granite, part of the same Precambrian body as Black Elk Peak northeast of here, which was called Harney Peak until 2016. That granite went in about 1.7 billion years ago, thousands of sills and dikes shoved up through older rock during the Trans-Hudson orogeny. Whether any of that describes the three rocks riding in the console is a question for the woman who gets the package.
Parking is $15 a person. You cannot drive to the mountain. We parked at the complex, and the head and the roughed-out arm were right there over the lot before we had paid anybody anything, which is either generous or the whole pitch. Finished, the thing would be 563 feet high and 641 feet long. Inside there is a museum, an auditorium running a movie about the carving, a restaurant with a buffet at $23 for an adult and $12 for a child, and a gift shop you leave through. The bus that takes you closer to the base is $5 a person. The van that goes to the top is $125 an adult, written up as a non-refundable charitable gift rather than a ticket. We paid for the parking, the museum, and the lunch, and we talked about the $125 in the lot.
Korczak Ziolkowski spent the summer of 1939 working for Gutzon Borglum at Mount Rushmore. Henry Standing Bear, a Brulé Lakota chief, read about him and wrote to him. “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes also.” The letters started before the war.
Ziolkowski went into the Army at 34, landed on Omaha Beach, and was wounded there. He turned down offers to build memorials in Europe afterward and came to the Black Hills on May 3, 1947. The first blast on the mountain was June 3, 1948. He took no salary for any of it, worked the rock until he died in 1982, and is buried at the base under the epitaph he wrote for himself: Storyteller in Stone, May His Remains Be Left Unknown. Ruth Ziolkowski ran the project for the next thirty-two years. What she had to work from was three books of measurements the two of them had compiled. She decided the face would be finished before anything else. It was dedicated on June 3, 1998, fifty years to the day after the first blast, and it stands 87 and a half feet tall. Ruth died in 2014. Two of their daughters, Monique and Jadwiga, were named co-CEOs.
The mountain is Lakota land by treaty. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty put the Black Hills inside the Great Sioux Reservation, promised absolute and undisturbed use of them, and required the consent of three out of four adult Sioux men before another acre could be signed away. The 1874 Custer expedition found gold. The United States took the Hills in 1877 without the consent. In 1980 the Supreme Court said so, called the seizure a taking under the Fifth Amendment, and awarded $17.1 million plus interest running back to 1877. The Lakota have not taken the money, because taking it would end the claim, and the account sits in the Treasury past a billion dollars, untouched. Not every Lakota wants the carving. Elaine Quiver, a descendant of Crazy Horse, has said Standing Bear had no right to commission it, that the family was never asked, and that cutting a face into the sacred hills where the burial grounds are is not respect. Crazy Horse would not sit for a photograph in his life. The face on the mountain was built from descriptions given by people who outlived him.
Left to carve: the arm, the hand, the shoulder, the horse’s head and mane. A 250-foot crane went up to work on them, with completion estimated for 2037. Big kept his rock. Little kept hers. The third one is in a paper bag in the console, and we drove out toward Rushmore, looking for a post office in Custer.
Where this happened: Crazy Horse Memorial