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On a beautiful Thursday spring day in the Black Hills of South Dakota, below the granite cap of what was then sometimes known as Slaughter Mountain, Polish-American sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski had his photograph taken with Lakota Chief, Henry Standing Bear. The sculptor is in his Ike jacket — he was a war hero wounded on Omaha Beach — and Chief Standing Bear is in full eagle feather regalia. The sculptor’s ironically white plaster model of a warrior named Crazy Horse, mounted and pugnaciously pointing, is interspersed dramatically between the mountain and the two men. The occasion is a dedication for one of the grandest schemes ever instigated by a single artist.
Zoilkowski, orphaned at one, was already forty. Both sensitive and tough from his knock-about childhood, Korczak, as he was known, was still smarting from his departure from the nearby Mt. Rushmore Memorial, where he had been one of the famous Gutzon Borglum’s chief assistants in the now nearly complete “shrine to democracy” depicting four great American presidents. Korczak and Borglum’s son, Lincoln, had squabbled, and Korzcak, as he had so many times in his life, found himself on the outside of a family’s herding instinct. But here, on Slaughter Mountain, the orphan would triumph. He would do something big. He would sculpt, or begin to sculpt, with dynamite and detonation cord, a memorial to a race of outcasts like himself, a memorial that would dwarf those four white presidents that Borglum and Lincoln were knocking out of Mt. Rushmore. It would be the biggest work of art in the history of the planet: a 641-foot statue of a renegade wife-stealer and assassination victim.
Chief Henry Standing Bear and his cohorts had found the right man in Korczak. And Korczak had found the right subject in Crazy Horse. The memorial to all of North America’s indigenous people would be a monument resurrecting the rejected, the despised, the not-quite exterminated, and it would be a mountainous demonstration of the folly and nobility of quixotic pursuits and accomplishments. Riding a horse with a head 22 stories high, his own nine-story visage out-facing history itself, Crazy Horse, a man stabbed in the back while in custody under a flag of truce, will still be pointing to where his dead lie buried, when the civilization that buried them is dust.
For the rest of his life, Korczak would blast away at Slaughter Mountain. He would marry a tough woman many years his junior and sire 10 children to succeed him in his quest. Together, the family, without government funding, would wrest a mighty work from the obdurate granite, and would bend the locals’ original pig-iron ridicule and racism to an unearned familial pride. All of this subsequent history is encoded in the grandeur of the rock and in the decidedly unostentatious photograph of the dedication. The date is June 3rd, 1948.
One year and eleven days later, on a Tuesday, a little past midnight, Roy Dean Doughty, the creator of A Monument of Wonders was born.
You may contact him at contact@amonumentofwonders.com.