Two men with an immense imagination and a capacity for work. The two monuments, while commemorating the nation’s founding fathers and a Native American who cared deeply for his own Indian nation, atruly the story of Gutzon Borglum and Korczak Ziolkowski. 

Gutzon Borglum

Korzack Ziolkowski

Borglum was an American sculptor who started life in a polygamous Mormon family, apprenticed as a machinist, but then went to Paris to study art where he met and was influenced by Rodin. He was fascinated by gigantic scale and themes of heroic nationalism and was initially involved with the carvings of Stone Mountain. One of of his earliest works was a head of Abraham Lincoln carved from a six-ton block of marble. He was a natural choice when South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson began the Mount Rushmore project. Originally, it was only to include Washington and Jefferson, later expanded to include Roosevelt and Lincoln. Borglum didn’t live to see the project completed; he died from complications of surgery about a year before it was completed by his son, Lincoln Borglum, and even then, Roosevelt and Lincoln were both relatively unfinished.

Korczak Ziolkowski came from a very different background. He had worked on Mount Rushmore with Borglum and had learned the important skills necessary for sculpting on an immense scale, in particular the ability to control explosives. He was contacted by Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear to create a monument to Crazyhorse who was an important leader of the Oglala Lakota and a man that the Native Americans viewed as a hero. In the monument he is depicted as a warrior on horseback pointing to the hills where his people are buried. Ziolkowski also did not live to see the completion of his project, but he left behind his wife and ten children, the majority of whom are still involved with the completion of the project, and also the foundation which Ziolkowski and his wife created to support the project. Only private funds raised by the Ziolkowski’s have been used for this project, and they are adamant that no Federal funds will be involved. In addition to the monument, the foundation is also involved with the creation of a Native American university on the land beneath the monument which will someday have a medical school.

I have always been awed by what one person can achieve in this world if they focus all their energy and effort to making it happen. While both of these monuments required many thousands of workers, it could only have been conceived through the imagination of sculptors capable of dreaming beyond the scope of most people’s imaginations.