TUESDAY, AUGUST 25, 2009
Up the mountain(s) we went to catch Mt. Rushmore in all of her morning glory. The day was perfect, and we beat the rush and crush of the last of the summer crowds. For all of the commercialism in the town below, the Forest Service has kept this venue tasteful and natural. As you walk to the vista point for the mountain, you walk along an “avenue” that is flanked on both sides by flags of all the states. I never knew Oregon was the 33rd state to join the union.
We walked down about 150 stone steps to the ‘sculptor’s house.’ There a Ranger gave a talk on the carving of Mt. Rushmore. As spectacular a sight is the mountain, the facts and story behind its sculpting is more so.
The project was begun simply to bring tourists to South Dakota and the Black Hills. The sculptor Gutzon Borglum agreed to head the project. He conceived the idea, made many models, organized some 400 laborers who dynamited and carved for 14 years. Every morning they climbed hundreds of wooden stairs, hauling all their heavy tools. There was never a death in 14 years. However, there was never enough money to complete the project. What we see, is not the final Borghum vision. You can see in the picture that the 1-to-12 scale model included the four presidents’ clothes and hands.
Our next stop (17 miles away), looked forward to b Brian was the Crazy Horse Monument. In 1939, Boston-born Korczak Ziolkowski was asked by a Lakota (Sioux) chief to create a monument because “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know the red man has great heroes, too.”
Unlike Mt. Rushmore, with a working cast of hundreds, only Ziolkowski worked on this monument, which would dwarf Rushmore. He first carved Crazy Horse’s face in wood. There were no pictures, so he relied on the verbal descriptions of those who knew him. When completed (and no one knows when), it will stand 563 feet high and be more than two football fields in length. Crazy Horse’s face alone measures 87.5 feet (all four Rushmore presidents would fit within just this space). Ziolkowski spent the rest of his life working on this, until his death in 1982. Seven of his 10 children, and his wife now work to complete the project. Twice he turned down funding from the government, accepting only private donations. He started a college scholarship program for the area’s Indian students, an art education program, and his master plan includes the Indian Museum of North America and a state of the art medical training center.
Crazy Horse is pointing out towards the Black Hills, and this quote is pivotal: "My land is where my people are buried!"
South Dakota to Wyoming.
Tonight we finally heard from Britta: she loves her roommate, they serve dinner early from 4:30-5:30 (remember the N-Ms usually eat around 9pm), she auditioned on the French Horn for band, and she has to take math. She misses her kind of jam, and wants us to send garbanzo beans so she can make her own humus (not quite sure how she’s going to puree them). While we were there we did experience the water has quite a bit of sulfur in it and reportedly makes your hair and nails grow fast!
It seems the days grow short as we travel closer each day to Oregon. Tomorrow we will travel to Grand Teton, and Yellowstone which I have never seen.
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