Invited by Chief Standing Bear to carve the memorial, Korczak started the project, alone, in 1947. He married and his large family began helping him when they were old enough. He is dead. His wife is dead. His oldest child is dead. Other children are now too old to work on it. His youngest daughter, some of the grand children and nieces and nephews now work on the site.
It is a pretty big complex. It is not a state or federal monument. It is private. All the money to make it happen comes from entrance fees and sales in the gift shop. The carvers are now working on the head of the horse. Why does it take so long? It is granite. Solid granite. The sculptors must make precision blasts and then use jack hammers and finally chisels. It just takes a long time.
There is a college inside the grounds for Native People to attend. It is not yet accredited and cannot offer degrees, but regional universities will accept credits earned by students who attend and count them towards programs they offer.
A medical school is also planned. As the late Korczak liked to say, "never stop dreaming."
The marble sculpture is what the memorial will look like when completed. If you visit you are permitted to take rocks home. In fact, they encourage it. All of the roads within the memorial grounds are paved using what is blown, carved or chiseled off the mountain. One of the buildings is constructed using boulders.
There are other sculptures displayed here as well.
I don't know when it will be finished and neither does the organization which runs the site. They do not deficit spend. Someday it will be completed. Meanwhile, when you visit, they are up there carving.
On our trip to this memorial we stopped a couple of other places. One of our first stops, unless you want to count gasoline and "pit stops," was in Deadwood. If you took Maryalice's genre class on Westerns the name of the town may be familiar. We visited the cemetery where Wild Bill Hickok and Clamity Jane are both buried.
We also stopped at the Pactola Reservoir Recreation area.
Jan shot some interiors of the place we are staying the next couple of days. I will get some exteriors to go with it tomorrow. It is peaceful. Although it is only a few minutes from "downtown" Custer it is nestled in the woods.
On our way here we also noticed that there is quite a bit of gas and oil exploration going on in North Dakota. The state's officials like to brag they are the number two producer of petroleum in the country after Texas and ahead of Alaska. I also notice there is never any drilling infrastructure where there isn't electricity. Some of the farms in rural parts of North Dakota use generators. If the oil prospects look promising the production companies pay to bring in electricity. Mobile phone towers follow quickly.
South Dakota is dipping its toes into the same waters, but we didn't see as many wells.
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