August 25 - Sept 2, 2017 - South Dakota - Part 4 - Roads and Monuments

We are sitting in a coffee shop in the town of Banff, cold rainy day, waiting for the museums to open.  It’s a good day for inside activities, laundry, and blog updating.

Needles Highway

Part of what we wanted to see in South Dakota included driving on roads and tunnels that were way too narrow for the motorhome.  

It didn’t make sense to tow a car all this way to drive on one small road, so we booked a tour to take us on Needles Highway, to Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Monuments.  This turned out really well.  

We could take pictures out the window all along the way, and it left the difficult driving to someone else.  

155 miles and 8 hours later, we’d seen it all … and we were exhausted.

We started with a drive through needles ‘highway’.  The smallest tunnel we went through was 8’4” wide.  Our motorhome is 8'3" wide – not counting the mirrors that stick out.  If we had been driving, AND pulled the mirrors in, we still would only have had 2” clearance each side.  NO margin for error.  So glad someone else was driving …  in their vehicle!

These rocks are mostly granite, and are among the oldest rocks in North America, dating over two billion years.  

The Cathedral spires got their name as they resemble organ pipes from a cathedral.

Rock climbers from around the world come to climb here.

The roadway was built in the 1920’s and referred to as the “Needless Highway” due to the initial cost.  It has since become a major scenic drive enhancing the tourist economy.

For those of us who love rocks, a drive down this road is heaven!

Crazy Horse

Crazy Horse was a Lokata Sioux warrior who was murdered in 1877 while in custody at Fort Robinson.  

He is regarded as a great hero in the Lakota Sioux Nation.  Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski had been asked directly through written correspondence from Chief Henry Standing Bear to come to the Black Hills and carve a memorial to Crazy Horse. 

The first blast to start the construction was in 1948, witnessed by five of the remaining nine survivors of the Battle of Big Horn. 

The initiation, and progress of this sculpture has become a legacy family mission for the Ziolkowski’s.  

The Ziolkowsi’s had ten children, and seven of them are working at the memorial today.

The sculpting continues – it will take many decades  to complete.  

The face was completed in 1998 (the head is 87 feet tall).  

The Mission of the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation is to preserve and protect the culture, tradition and living heritage of the North American Indians.  To that end, the vast complex of buildings at the site include museums, cultural educational programming and an academic training center for American Indians. 

This is a MONSTER sculpture, tremendously larger than Mount Rushmore.

Mount Rushmore

Mount Rushmore can be seen from quite far away in the approach from Needles Highway.  

In the 1920’s, it was the vision of the governor of South Dakota that a grand monument be built, carved from stone, that would put South Dakota on the map.  The project was proposed to sculptor Gutzon Borglum in 1924.  

Borglum refused a project that would immortalize regional heroes.  He recommended a project more national in scope and timeless in reverence to history.  The four presidents were selected to create an eternal reminder of the birth, growth, preservation, and development of our nation.

The project was proposed in 1923, funded in 1925 and dedicated in 1927 by Calvin Coolidge (who spent extensive time in South Dakota).  Washington’s head was completed in 1930, Jefferson’s in 1936, Theodore Roosevelt’s in 1939, and Lincoln’s in 1941.

The visitor center has great documentation on the sculpting process.  The visit there is so much more than the four faces.

Borglum, the son of Danish immigrants, was 58 when he started designing the project.  He had intended to sculpt the figures down to the waist, but he died before that could be completed.  Each face is 60 feet high.  Over 450,000 tons of rock were removed to carve out the four faces.

We each had each been to Rushmore once before, but somehow this visit was more moving, perhaps due to a better understanding of our history and our current challenges. 

Borglum’s words:

“A monument’s dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events commemorated … Let us place there, carved high, as close to heavens we can, the words of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner they were.  Then breathe a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and rain alone shall wear them away.”

We should be glad an artist chose the faces, rather than the politicians.

 

Next Post – South Dakota Animals and Flowers.