The Carving of Mount Rushmore

by Rex Alan Smith

Following service in World War II, Ziolkowski returned to the Black Hills to stay. He came at the request of a group of Sioux Indians led by Chief Standing Bear, who had asked him to carve on a Black Hills mountain a monument honoring the country’s original occupants. For this purpose, Ziolkowski personally bought, some ten miles southwest of Rushmore, a mountain whose top is a solid granite ridge. There, he began carving a statue of the Sioux war chief Crazy Horse, seated on a pony, and since his death in 1982 the work has been continued by his wife and children. This work is not being done in bas-relief as at Stone Mountain, nor as half-round figures on a cliff-face as at Rushmore. Rather it is the conversion of an entire mountain ridge into a single statue in-the-round. Because of this and its gigantic size it is the most ambitious sculptural enterprise yet undertaken by man. Even so—perhaps partly because of Borglum’s discovery at Rushmore that those who control the money may also try to