Day 97 -- Wednesday, August 5

The Black Hills and Badlands in South Dakota have more tourist attractions squeezed into a small area than just about anywhere I've visited during the Odyssey. One could easily spend a week here and not see everything. I had about two days to spare and so set about to see as much as I could.

Everyone knows that Mount Rushmore is here and I stopped by for a peek at those huge busts, but I was more interested in a work that's currently in progress, the Crazy Horse Monument.

Designed and begun by award-winning sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, in 1947, the monument was suggested to Ziolkowski by Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear in 1939. The sculptor had just won first prize in New York's World Fair of that year for his marble sculpture of Paderewski. Chief Standing Bear heard of the acclaim his work was receiving and made a proposal concerning the Crazy Horse monument. "My fellow chiefs and I," Standing Bear wrote, "would like the white man to know the red man has great heroes, too." The Boston-born Polish-American Ziolkowski had worked a bit on Mount Rushmore as a young man and was taken with the notion of a monumental work that would honor a Native American. He took on the project some eight years after it was first proposed, knowing full well he wouldn't live to see its completion.

Ziolkowski was a strong believer in the free enterprise system and felt that if the U.S. government was involved in the project, it would be comprised and perhaps altered from his vision and designs. So, from day one, this massive undertaking has been financed by those who take an interest in it, supporting it with donations, admission fees, souvenir purchases and such.

Today, visitors to the monument-in-progress can see Crazy Horse's face beginning to take shape, his outstretched arm becoming visible. Many of the features that will be carved later are etched on the surface of the big rock to aid current day visitors in picturing just how the monument will look in years to come.

There is also, on view, a 1/34th scale model of the monument. It's going to be quite a piece of work, surrounded, eventually, by Native American cultural centers, schools, and museums. Already on the site is the Indian Museum of North America, the studio and home of the late Korczak Ziolkowski (he died in 1982), a large selection of the sculptor's smaller work, a restaurant and sweet shop and, of course, a large area from which visitors can view and photograph the monument.

Work continues on the huge sculpture, according to Ziolkowski's very detailed plans and instructions but officially, no date is projected for its completion. I asked one of the center's employees if she'd ever heard any scuttlebutt about a completion date; 50 years, she said, was what she'd heard. I hope I live to see it. In the meantime, the Crazy Horse monument warrants a BRETTnews Highlight Attraction Award. See it.

I also took a quick spin through Deadwood, now a tourist trap deluxe with the renewal of legalized gambling. I stopped by the site of the #10 Saloon, where Wild Bill Hickock was shot from behind in the 1870s. It's a saloon again but only part of the foundation remains from the original. A huge fire raged down Main Street in the early 1890's, wiping out all the original buildings.

Hickock is buried in Deadwood's Mt. Moriah Cemetery. Right alongside him is Martha Canary, better known as Calamity Jane. Hers was a brief but interesting life. She worked on a bull train, performed in a wild west show and, for a short time, was an unsuccessful prostitute (she was something less than lovely to look at). In fact, in some of the pictures I've seen of her, it's difficult to identify the subject as male or female. She made great sacrifices, though, nursing the sick during an epidemic. She claimed to have been the sweetheart of Wild Bill Hickock; no one, then or now, believes this. Mostly likely, it was a fantasy, something akin to a mousey little highschool freshman floating in a reverie when the captain of the football team says hello to her in the hall at school. Of course, often as not, that football player is a jerk and the little freshman (and perhaps Calamity Jane, too) is better off without him.

In any case, Jane received her dying wish. She was taken from the small mining town of Terry, near Deadwood, where she breathed her last and laid for eternity next to Wild Bill in Mt. Moriah.

image - Wild Bill's graveimage - Calamity Jane's grave

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