Coming to the Mountain

He left home at 17 to work in a shipyard. Here, he was introduced to woodcarving when he repaired a ship's large, wooden figurehead. He then carved sculptures for private interests, and began working in stone. He carved a large bust of Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski, which won a people's choice award at the New York World's Fair. He became an accomplished artist even though he had no formal sculpting education. In the early 1940's he created a 13.5-foot tall marble sculpture of Noah Webster for the town of West Hartford, Connecticut. This project took two years, and was his initiation of creating art for a fickle public. During this time, public support for the project rose and fell, and he even mowed lawns for funding.

Several works by Korczak Ziolkowski on display in the family's studio-home.

In 1939, Ziolkowski visited South Dakota briefly, to assist Gutzon Borglum in carving Mt. Rushmore, and soon after, he received a letter from Lakota Chief Standing Bear, of the Sioux tribe, asking him to carve a similar sized memorial for American Indians. "My fellow Chiefs and I would like the White Man to know the Red Man had great heroes, too," the Chief wrote. Korczak considered the project, but World War II had a more pressing call and, at the age 34, he volunteered to fight in the artillery. He survived several battles in the war and, in 1946, he traveled to the Black Hills with Chief Standing Bear to select a mountain to carve. He began work the next year.

Few could argue that Korczak Ziolkowski was a patient man, and that he appreciated monstrous challenges. Carving the Noah Webster statue out of 33 tons of marble was hardly even a warm-up for the task he had just taken on. He was about to carve a mountain - one made of solid granite - and he would carve it "in the round" as opposed to the simple, relief carvings on Rushmore. He first contemplated a statue 100 feet tall, but after many days of staring at his block of a mountain, he chose a much grander scale. He designed a statue 563 feet high and 641 feet long. This mountain would become the largest man-made sculpture in the world.

For the memorial's subject, the Indians selected Crazy Horse, a legendary Sioux Indian hero. Crazy Horse was killed by a U.S. soldier in 1877, at age 34. Ziolkowski carved a model of the man upon a horse, pointing toward the horizon. The legend holds that a white man tauntingly asked the young warrior; "Where are your lands now?" and Crazy Horse pointed and replied; "My lands are where my dead lie buried."