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© St. Petersburg Times, published January 24, 2002
America's other gargantuan man-on-a-horse statue, the 563-foot-tall Crazy Horse monument in South Dakota, continues to emerge from the Black Hills, one dynamite blast at a time. The finished sculpture will show the Lakota warrior Crazy Horse astride his mount.
An update on the Web site www.crazyhorse.org chronicles the progress of the 219-foot-high horse's head.
"For the year more than 22,500 tons of granite were blasted off the mountain. That involved 2,261 bore holes requiring nearly 51/2 miles of drilling," the site says.
Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski began the monumental work in 1948 as a way of honoring all American Indians, just as nearby Mount Rushmore honors the first 150 years of the white American nation. Korczak, as he called himself, died in 1982.
His family has spent decades paring the mountain, dynamiting off millions of tons of reddish granite to block out a rider with his left arm pointing over the head of his galloping horse. The face (based on historical accounts because Crazy Horse was never photographed) is finished, precision-blasted and polished smooth with a 3,400-degree torch. Korczak's son, Casimir, leads a crew of 12 blasting toward the stallion's head.
The Web site offers no guess about when the sculpture might be finished.
Information from Times wires was used in this story.