Crazy Horse Memorial - A Must See

Wednesday, July 10th: 

We left Steamboat early in the morning to head to our last stop, the Crazy Horse Memorial in Custer, South Dakota.  We had been to the Black Hills before and hadn't stopped at the Crazy Horse memorial, and we were very much looking forward to seeing it this time. 

Scenic Drive on Colorado 140

The drive took us through the plains of Colorado, surrounded by beautiful mountains, as we headed up on Colorado Rt 14.     We arrived at our AirBnB, aa cute bungalow in Custer,  and walked around the downtown.    We headed off to bed excited to see the Crazy Horse Memorial on Thursday.

Our AirBnB in Custer - very cute!

Bison statues line the street
in downtown Custer

In one of the local establishments

Thursday, July 11th:

I'm guessing most of you are familiar with the Crazy Horse mountain carving in the Black Hills   We'd read some negative reviews of the Memorial on TripAdvisor, with a few people saying you should just view the carving from the road and not pay the $15 per person entry fee.  We almost decided to not go into the memorial site based on those reviews - that would have been a huge mistake.   Our experience is that the memorial is much more than the mountain carving - it is a first-rate immersion into Native American culture and history, one we won't soon forget.

The scale of the Memorial campus is hard to convey - it includes 4+ museums and 7 different collections of artifacts (and of course, the mountain carving).    We arrived around 9 am and headed to the Welcome Center.   

There are two ways to get a closer view of the mountain carving.   One way is a bus trip to the base of the mountain, which costs $5 per person.  The other option is a $125 private van ride to the carving on the top of the mountain.  This is only available for 8 people at the end of the day (~4:30 pm) after the sculptors are done with their workday.   We opted for the $5 bus trip, and got in line for the 10 am bus.

The bus trip is a must do.   Besides getting closer to the monument, the tour guides have a plethora of interesting information about Crazy Horse, sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski and his family, the construction, and lots of other information.    There is also a 25 minute film in the welcome center that you don't want to miss.   

I'll put a synopsis of the history of Crazy Horse and the Memorial site at the end of this blog if you are interested.  

Here are some of our favorite places we toured on the Memorial campus:

The Indian Museum of North America is huge and has a large number of Native American artifacts, including tools, clothing, transportation like kayaks and many other items.  It is very well done and informative (pix below):

Native American Educational and
Cultural Center

The Native American Educational and Cultural Center has more artifacts, and includes an entire floor dedicated to an American Bison exhibit.   Cindy and I had no idea that there was a concerted effort by  the US government to exterminate the Bison in the late 1800's, with the intention that exterminating the primary source of food, clothing and shelter for the Lakota and other tribes would make them easier to subjugate.   General Sheridan, hero of the Civil War, had a prominent and sad role in this effort, blocking any attempts to protect the Bison until Teddy Roosevelt got personally involved in saving the bison (Gotta love Teddy!).   This museum also has a large collection of Edward Curtis prints, the famous photographer who dedicated his life to capturing Native American culture and practices.   I found this collection especially interesting and inspiring. 

One of Edward Curtis's photographs

The Mountain Carving museum documents all the technology and techniques that go into the mountain carving itself, and the Sculptor Home and Studio museum is dedicated to showing how the Ziolkowski family lived during the early construction of the sculpture. 

Sculptor Home and Studio

 

Sculptor Home

Local Lakota performing a ring dance

Besides the museums, we really enjoyed demonstrations by local Lakota of their song, dance and culture.   Besides the performances, their descriptions of Lakota culture and practices were an important part of the immersive experience.   

1/30th scale model of how the carving will 
look when complete

We really enjoyed our time at the Crazy Horse Memorial.   We spent four hours there and could easily have spent 5 or 6.   We brought our own lunch and ate it in a shady spot in the parking lot before heading back to the museums.  If you ever get the chance to go, we highly recommend it, be sure to do the bus ride and all the cultural immersion experiences.

Live music in Custer!

We headed back to our AirBnB, had a quick dinner and walked around downtown Custer.   One of our favorite aspects of this trip has been making "finds" in the little towns we visit, and Custer was no exception.  The Custer Beacon is a microbrewery, scratch kitchen and live music venue that has a hip vibe.   We watched the band Wild Horses perform (really good!) and then headed back to our AirBnB to prepare for the start of our journey home the next day.   One final blog left, until then...

*Here's my synopsis of Crazy Horse and the Memorial.    The Memorial does a good job transporting you back to the mid-1800s, when Native Americans were being forcibly displaced from their lands, and treaty after treaty they signed was being violated by the United States and it's people.   When gold was discovered in the Black Hills, President Grant decided that all Indians not living in a reservation were going to be forcibly rounded up, disarmed and put into the reservations, most of which were now a small percentage of the land the Native Americans were originally promised.   It's a very sad chapter of American History.

Crazy Horse was a Lakota war leader. He took up arms to fight against the encroachment by white American settlers on Native American territory and to preserve the traditional way of life of the Lakota people.  He participated in several major battles, most notably Little Bighorn, where he and his forces had a major role in defeating General Custer ("Custer's Last Stand").   Later, after the US military pursued the Lakota and hunters had nearly exterminated the Bison the Lakota relied upon, Crazy Horse tried to surrender to the US military, as the Lakota were starving and freezing in the mountains.   What exactly happened during that exchange is unclear, but it resulted in Crazy Horse being bayoneted in the back and dying the following day.

Fast forward many years later.   Chief Standing Bear, a Lakota leader in the 1930's, wrote to the sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who had worked on Mt. Rushmore under sculptor Gutzon Borglum, asking if Korczak would consider making a mountain carving of Native American heroes.  They eventually agreed on Crazy Horse as the subject, and the rest is history.    The Ziolkowski family (he and his wife had 10 children) have been working on the sculpture for the last 75 years.   The current CEO of the Memorial is a local Lakota Indian, and they take no government funding.    The project includes not only the mountain carvings and museums, but also a new university (also on the grounds) specifically designed for underprivileged Native American students. 

There is some controversy about the mountain carving - some Lakota are unhappy that the mountain is being carved and consider it a desecration of sacred land.    Some Lakota are unhappy that Chief Standing Bear didn’t consult the entire tribe before commissioning the project and claim Crazy Horse would not have wanted his image carved in the mountain.   In addition, some people think the Memorial has too much focus on the Ziolkowski family.   I'll leave the controversy to those more closely involved.