Even if you, like me, have never been to South Dakota, an image will immediately spring to mind when I mention Mount Rushmore (which I just did) (look, left a bit).
We are all familiar with the image of the giant heads of the four former Presidents carved into the side of the mountain, otherwise known as the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. You might also be able to guess that two of the Presidents represented are George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, although the other two are likely to prove more tricky, so I'll give you a hand - Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.
Just a little joke - a first, I accept, for this site - Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.
What you might not know, however, is that just 17 miles southwest of Mount Rushmore is another mountain-carving project so huge and ambitious that it will make the National Monument look like four blokes at a bus stop.
The Crazy Horse Memorial, depicting the revered Native American leader on his horse, will, when completed, be a massive 563 feet high (almost twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, including the pedestal) and 641 feet long. This will make it by far the largest sculpture or work of art on earth, a crown currently claimed by Mount Rushmore, where the heads of the four Presidents are each 60 feet high. Although Crazy Horse's head is 87 feet high, nothing beyond his head is finished, and that's where the story starts to get interesting.
Back in 1939, Korczak Ziolkowski, a Boston-born sculptor of Polish descent, who had been working as an assistant to Gutzon Borglum, the creator of Mount Rushmore, was invited to work on Crazy Horse. He evenutally began work at the site in 1948 and worked on it constantly for the next 35 years, always refusing to take a salary, until his death in 1982 at the age of 74. During that period, he also found time to get married and raise 10 children.
On Ziolowski's death, his family continued to work on the project. Crazy Horse's completed head was finally unveiled in 1998, at a ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the project. Progress has been painfully slow and often dangerous, but the protagonists insist that they will continue working as quickly as funds and conditions will allow, until the memorial is finished. They decline to put a date on when that might be. For those familiar with the principles of project management, this is not so much a critical path as a yellow brick road.
I strongly recommend the official memorial website - www.crazyhorse.org - which has to be seen to be believed. Have a look at "The Story of Crazy Horse Memorial" to see recent progress and a painting of the vision for the finished article.
The penultimate word should go to Henry Standing Bear who said, in explaining the vision for the memorial in 1939, "My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes too".
Which leaves just one question: have they remembered to leave room for Neil Young?
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