Crazy Horse Memorial

Conceived as an answer to Mount Rushmore's monument to American presidents, Crazy Horse Memorial is a still-unfinished, entirely privately funded mountain carving meant to honor Native American history and dignity on the same scale the nation gave its presidents.

In 1939, Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear wrote to sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who had worked as an assistant on Mount Rushmore, inviting him to carve a mountain memorial so that 'the white man will know the red man had great heroes, too.' Standing Bear proposed honoring Crazy Horse, the Lakota war leader famous for his role in defeating Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, of whom no verified photograph is known to exist.

Ziolkowski began blasting the mountain on June 3, 1948, working largely alone for years with primitive equipment. He insisted the project remain independent of government money, twice declining offers of $10 million in federal funding so that it would be built, in his words, 'by the people.' The scale of the design is immense: Crazy Horse's face alone measures 87 feet tall, taller than any of the four presidential faces at nearby Mount Rushmore.

Ziolkowski died in 1982, decades before the carving's completion, and his wife Ruth and their children continued the work. The face was finally completed and dedicated in 1998, fifty years after blasting began, but the horse and Crazy Horse's outstretched arm remain unfinished. The site also houses the Indian Museum of North America and the Native American Educational and Cultural Center, funded, like the carving itself, entirely by admission fees and private donations.