Fairmont, MN to Custer, SD

We started driving on I-90 this morning and stayed there almost all day.   We saw many more of the Sears barns as we were going down the road today, but couldn’t stop for more pictures.  Yesterday we saw oceans of wheat.  Today, it was oceans of Sunflowers showing off their bright yellow petals.  We drove through the outskirts of Badlands National Park in the rain.  It was still very pretty and we took several nice pictures of the rock formations.

After driving almost all the way across South Dakota, we stayed in Custer, near the Crazy Horse Memorial.  We only wanted to stop at Crazy Horse to see how it had changed since the last time we were here, but stayed a lot longer than planned and learned a lot more about the memorial than on our last visit. 

In 1947, the Lakota Indians asked Korczak Ziolkowski, a Polish American who was a sculptor and an assistant to the Mt. Rushmore builder, to create a memorial to one of their Indian heroes, Crazy Horse.  They stipulated that the memorial needed to be in the Black Hills, because that is where Crazy Horse’s people lived and died.  Korczak agreed, created a detailed scale model of Crazy Horse on a horse, and started the carving out of a mountain that happens to be about 20 minutes from Mt. Rushmore.  The whole hill will eventually be carved out for 360 degrees to match the model, unlike Mt. Rushmore which is the fronts of the heads.  In our last picture, the white lines on the mountain are the ear and eye of the horse.   The whole of Mt. Rushmore would  fit in the head of Crazy Horse.  The memorial is to be the focus of a very large Indian cultural knowledge and training center, including a school and hospital.

 

For the first years of the project, Korczak climbed 714 steps multiple times a day carrying his tools to work on the carving.  For a long time he was the only person working on it, so when the compressor at the bottom stopped, he had to go all the way back down the steps to start it back up – one day he was up and down 9 times.  Korczak blasted out the hole in the mountain which is the start of the area under the arm.  That hole is 10 stories high!!! 

All sides of the face were completed in 1998, 16 years after Korczak died in 1982.  When he died, he left many detailed notes and drawings with the dimensions of the carving.   His wife and many of his 10 children now oversee the carving of the statue.  It is entirely funded by donations and admission to the memorial.  Korczak twice turned down 10 million dollar grants from the federal government because he felt the government would not complete the memorial.  Instead he wanted the funding to come from people who also shared the dream.