The Mountain-Carver

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.

In the nearby town of Custer, S. Dak. (pop. 3,000), Ziolkowski became a center of controversy. At the Gold Pan Tavern and Flyspeck Billy's along Custer's main street, just four miles from Crazy Horse, sentiment ran high. More than half the town was behind Ziolkowski. but some of the people thought that Crazy Korczak would be a better name for the venture. Financing the work with his own money, contributions and tourist admissions, Ziolkowski has not got on as fast as some of his boosters would like. They persuaded him to seek a federal loan, but when his critics objected that public funds should not be used for so tenuous a venture, Ziolkowski balked. Last week he said with a loud tone of finality: "It was not the white man that asked me to come out here, it was the Indians. Even if the Government does lend me the money, I won't accept it."

Finished at 117? To feed his large-scale family (Ziolkowski and his wife Ruth have six children, are expecting a seventh) and to help finance his dream, he bought cows and established a successful dairy farm, bought and successfully operated a sawmill. He and his wife milk the .cows (by machine), manage the sawmill, shepherd the tourists and keep digging at the mountain. At times they startle visitors by coming in from work in mountain-and-barn clothes and appearing for dinner a few minutes later in formal dress.

So far most of the sculpting has been done by dynamite and bulldozer, but Ziolkowski hopes to get within six inches of the lines of the face by the end of this summer. Then he can get down to detailed carving with jackhammer, and finally with mallet and chisel. On top of his mountain he can see far into the future. "There is where the university will be," he says, "and over here the medical center. The series of lakes will run down that meadow. There will be an airstrip, 7,200 feet long, out there by the highway."

When he began the job nine years ago, Ziolkowski reckoned that he could finish it in 30 years. He has removed about 765,000 tons of rock and still has about 5,235,000 tons to go, is five years behind his 30-year schedule. A local supporter has told Ziolkowski that at the rate he is going he will finish at about the age of 117. "You're a good man," the friend said, "but not that good." Retorts Ziolkowski: "I came out here to carve a mountain, and I'm going to get it done."

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