We spent the night in Hill City, and after a quick breakfast zipped down the road a few miles to the Crazy Horse monument. We hadn’t been expecting too much. You can see it from the road, and it’s cool and all, but, well…
Well, we went in, and the first thing we did was sit and watch the movie about the man who started it all off. Korczak, started this thing in 1948 with nothing but some hand tools and dynamite. The amount of work and determination was astonishing to me. He married, had ten kids, and this became a family obsession. The whole thing is paid for by fees, and donations, which they make sure to mention time and again—I’m sure they are tired of people thinking it is a federally funded project.
Anyway, I thought the place was amazing. It’s huge. The scale is hard to comprehend. The amount of mountain that has had to be blown up and hauled away is hard to comprehend. The number of years left to completion is impossible to comprehend. About the best way to get a grasp on the size is to visualize Mount Rushmore being completely engulfed by nothing more than the flowing hair of Crazy Horse’s head. His face is eighty-seven feet tall, Rushmore is sixty.
Well, the four of us all thought it was pretty cool. And I thought it was neat to think about the kids coming back here when they are our age to see maybe the horse’s head (that white outline on the rock) complete. Seeing things come to life over so many years is not something our society is used to. To me, this place is a welcome change.
When we were going through the Indian Museum I explained to Ouest that before white man came to America the Indians lived here. I asked her what she thought happened after the white men got here.
“Umm, they killed the Indians?”
So my job was done. That’s like the one fact that usually gets glossed over in American History class.
From there it was a short driving day up to Deadwood. Gambling and beer is pretty much what this town is built on. We had lunner, and walked the entire town in an hour, then called it a day.
5 Comments on “Crazy Horse”
Are you staying in chain motels? Not camping with that little bit of luggage, surely…
Yep, pretty much doing the rounds of the Holiday Inn Express’.
Slow isn’t the word for crazy horse. Glacial is more like it. My wife has a picture of the monument when she was here in the ’70s. We went there a few years ago and took a picture from about the same angle. If they had done anything other than collect fees in that period, it must have been on the side we couldn’t see. The pictures were identical.
Wow, I did not know it was so huge.
Yes, have never been a country to show a lot of kindness to the native Americans. Besides the bullets and Indian wars, at least 60% of the Indian population was wiped out by sicknesses brought in, (and sometimes spread on purpose) by the white man. They say that by the time Pizarro had arrived in Peru, sicknesses which migrated down from Mexico had already wiped out 70-80% of the population. Giving Peru a population somewhere around 80 million before the Europeans arrived. 3 times more than Europe at that time.
Just catching up on your trip since MN. Great Pics. Counting the minutes until our high desert playdate.
I wrote a song called “Medicine Man” that illustrates this little lesson. Here is a little excerpt:
America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, but we killed all the Braves, then imported the Slaves because we killed all the indians.