Boston-born Korczak Ziolkowski likes to do things on a big scale. A brawny six-footer who wears a full-blown, eight-inch beard, he can still, at 48, lift a 500-Ib. weight off the floor. His name itself (approximate pronunciation: Kor-chak Jule-fcttjf-ski) is so big a mouthful that even old friends avoid using it so they won't mispronounce it. But the biggest thing about Ziolkowski is his ambition. It is to carve the most mountainous piece of man-made sculpture in recorded history. He is working on a piece of material that is to the measure of his ambition: a mountain.
Sculptor Ziolkowski's subject is Crazy
Horse, the Sioux chief who was captured and killed in 1877, after the slaughter at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, where Custer made his last stand. In 1939 Crazy Horse's nephew, Henry Standing Bear, who knew that Ziolkowski had done some work on South Dakota's Mount Rushmore, asked him to carve a Crazy Horse memorial. Said Standing Bear, after a long look at the faces of the Presidents on Mount Rushmore: "We want the white man to know that the Indian had heroes too."
Man with an Ax. His sympathy for the underdog aroused, Ziolkowski closed his studio at Hartford. Conn., went to the Black Hills of South Dakota to build his monument as a symbol of the down trodden of the earth. But the late terrible-tempered Harold Ickes, then Secretary of the Interior, snapped at him: "I won't permit you to carve up my mountains." That was not enough to stop Ziolkowski: he bought a mountain all his own.
Ziolkowski quickly showed that he had the energy to go with his size and ambition. Ax on shoulder, he went into the woods, felled and milled timber, and built with his own hands a house at the foot of the mountain and a 7Oo-ft. ladder up its side. For two years, until he rigged a makeshift cable hoist and then built a road to the top, he lugged lumber and equipment up the mountain, piece by piece, on his back. He made a model and set out to carve out of the rock mountain the figure of Crazy Horse mounted on a plunging steed. To the derisive question of the white man, "Where are your lands now?", his figure of Crazy Horse points its tragic answer with a 300-ft. arm : "My lands are where my dead lie buried." The figure has been outlined with paint (143 gallons), and is to stand in the round on the majestic scale of 563 ft. in height by 641 ft. in length. Standing Bear touched off the first charge of dynamite on June 3, 1948 (each blast removes about 200 tons of rock), and the sculpting has been going on ever since. So have arguments.