The Crazy Horse Memorial | History Traveler Episode 82

[Music] when people come to the black hills region of south dakota the thing that most often gets associated with black hills as far as you know tourist attractions or visitation or whatever is mount rushmore but you can't talk about the black hills without talking about the lakota people and you can't talk about the lakota people without talking about men and warriors like sitting bull and crazy horse well today we are at an amazing structure that is still in the works this is the crazy horse memorial all right well what we are looking at is history in the making this is the crazy horse memorial started back in the late 1940s by a man named korjak zulkowski i think is how you pronounce his name um this is the vision of a man who wanted to honor the native american people by carving this giant sculpture out of a mountain in the image and likeness of the great lakota warrior crazy horse all right we're going to go inside and see what we can learn about this sculpture all right we just walked into the museum here at the crazy horse memorial and wow pretty impressive facility right off the bat so we're going to look around and see what they have here so this is the man right here who first had the vision for carving crazy horse out of the mountain and his name i think i'm i'm probably going to mispronounce this but it's korjak jokowski i think is how you say it properly anyway he had worked on mount rushmore and a guy by the name of henry standing bear asked him to do something for crazy horse so this was the this was the vision and he did it all by hand at first and the story behind it is crazy and here's his hat and you can see it is well worn something else this is a picture of some of these survivors of the battle of little bighorn this was at a reunion in 1948 and in the video that we watched earlier they talked about how these guys helped the sculptor um with the image of crazy horse since there's no image of crazy horse himself now for somebody like me who is a bowhunter this is really interesting um this is a bow and a stunning arrow so you'll notice there's no there's no arrowhead or sharp point on it this was designed to stun small animals or birds or things like that so that it wouldn't damage the hide or the skin that way they could like collect eagle feathers and things like that very interesting i've never seen one of those before look at this love looking at these old stone war clubs so interesting apparently this one was uh made in western nebraska now here are some interesting items that i've never seen before you can see this item is made out of a deer hoof so there's the bone and then there's the hoof and then there's some leather on it and it's kind of like a small horse whip kind of cool and then over here they have some indian saddle horns and then what i really thought was interesting was this this is a bridle made out of horse hair okay now this is incredibly interesting to me these are all artifacts that were recovered from the battle of little bighorn so you can see some cartridge casings some bullets buttons there's a buckle down there and then also a few arrowheads horseshoe wow here's another very fascinating item this is a saddle that was used at the battle of little big horn okay so we just walked out of the uh north american indian museum and here you can see the sculpture behind me and we're getting ready to go into the sculptor studio and uh look at a little bit more on kind of the the history of uh this man named korjak who set this carving into motion by the way i think i may have just called this the north american indian museum just for the sake of clarity it's the indian museum of north america so my bad here's a good image of what the crazy horse memorial is going to look like whenever it's finished and man that that is going to be quite a sight his face alone is 87 feet tall so so this thing really is huge they have a bunch of pictures here showing the progression of the sculpture in the mountains here's what the mountain looked like in 1948 originally this is how it looked in 1960 so 12 years later okay in 1968 you can see it starting to take form 1982 you can see the the horse head being drawn out 1991 93 we're starting to see the face 1999 definitely starting to take more shape and then o3 and o5 very cool to see the progression of this work of art wow how amazing is this this is another work by korjak done in 1952 and this is the likeness of crazy horse that he carved out of ponderosa pine this guy really was amazing okay so this is really something else a few days ago i was in deadwood and i filmed a sculpture of wild bill hickok while i was there i had no idea that it was korjakowski that was the sculptor of that and this is a bronze that was cast from the original so the same guy that worked on crazy horse is the same one that did the wild bill hickok sculpture interesting and then here we're just looking at a selection of tools and pieces of stone that have been blown off of the mountain of course they wouldn't be using these now i don't think these are all older but yeah man to think of how this all started in 1947 so this is some of the original equipment that korsak used whenever he started building the crazy horse memorial and i guess this thing was kind of temperamental you see it says kaput up there like the steps that he built to get to the top there were over 700 that he would have to walk up and this thing would die on him and he'd have to go all the way back down get it started again and then go all the way back up dude was a worker and right there is what it's going to look like when it's all said and done man that is going to be something else [Music] all right so we just got out of the sculpture's house in the museum found out that you can actually take a bus to the base of crazy horse so uh yeah we're going to take advantage of it while we're here and jump in and get as close to this thing as we can [Music] all right well here we are and what you are looking at right there is the largest mountain carving in the world the crazy horse memorial just the face alone is 90 feet tall now by comparison the faces of mount rushmore i think are 60 feet and the total height is 500 and some change i can't remember the exact height off the top of my head but man what a spectacular structure and whenever it's finished man that is going to be something else uh interesting story the uh the man who started sculpting this was offered millions of dollars by the government on a couple different occasions and he turned him down both times so whenever you come here to the crazy horse memorial the money that you spend here well you're becoming part of the project very very cool all right well that was the crazy horse memorial very very glad that we came here today uh this really is an amazing structure and i can't wait to see what they do with it over the next 25 30 40 50 years uh you know all the way up into its completion i love that we have mount rushmore and that we have monuments to some of the the men who who really made this country great but i'm also thankful that we have things like the crazy horse memorial too because we're a country with diverse origins and a diverse background in a diverse history and uh to see representation done so well it just makes me feel good knowing that future generations are going to have a more complete picture and a greater appreciation for who we are as a country [Music] you

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 185,564

Rating: 4.9071226 out of 5

Keywords: history, history traveler, history underground, crazy horse, crazy horse memorial, crazy horse monument, south dakota travel, south dakota, black hills, lakota, native american, worlds largest

Id: arqNUwLmVpg

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020