The Lakota called this range Pahá Sápa — sacred ground, taken anyway. The U.S. broke the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1877, and between 1927 and 1941, Gutzon Borglum and 400 workers blasted 60-foot presidential faces into granite the Lakota had never ceded. The Sioux have never stopped demanding it back. Into that unresolved argument, in 1948, Henry Standing Bear invited Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to Thunderhead Mountain with a clear purpose: the white man should know the red man has great heroes, too. The resulting carving of Crazy Horse — 641 feet long, 563 feet high when finished, the largest mountain carving in the world — accepts no government funding. That decision explains both why it's unfinished and why it matters. Two mountains, four miles apart, carving competing claims into the same stolen rock.
