The street corners of downtown Rapid City, South Dakota, the gateway to the Black Hills and the self-proclaimed “most patriotic city in America,” are populated by bronze statues of all the former Presidents of the United States, each just eerily shy of life-size. On the corner of Mount Rushmore Road and Main Street, a diminutive Andrew Jackson scowls and crosses his arms; on Ninth and Main, a shoulder-high Teddy Roosevelt strikes an impressive pose, holding a petite sword.

As one drives farther into the Black Hills—a region considered sacred by its original residents, who were displaced by settlers, loggers, and gold miners—the roadside attractions offer a vision of American history that grows only more uncanny. Western expansion and settler colonialism join in a jolly, jumbled fantasia: visitors can tour a mine and pan for gold, visit Cowboy Gulch and a replica of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall (“Shoot a musket! Exit here!”), and stop by the National Presidential Wax Museum, which sells a tank top featuring a buff Abraham Lincoln above the slogan “Abolish Sleevery.” In a town named for George Armstrong Custer, an Army officer known for using Native women and children as human shields, tourist shops sell a T-shirt that shows Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Red Cloud and labels them “The Original Founding Fathers,” and also one that reads, in star-spangled letters, “Welcome to America Now Speak English.”

The source from which so much strange Americana flows is Mt. Rushmore, which, with the stately columns and the Avenue of Flags leading up to it, seems to leave the historical mess behind. But perhaps we get that feeling only because we’ve grown accustomed to the idea of it: a monument to patriotism, conceived as a colossal symbol of dominion over nature, sculpted by a man who had worked with the Ku Klux Klan, and composed of the heads of Presidents who had policies to exterminate the people into whose land the carving was dynamited.

Past Mt. Rushmore is another mountain, and another memorial. This one is much larger: the Presidents’ heads, if they were stacked one on top of the other, would reach a little more than halfway up it. After seventy-one years of work, it is far from finished. All that has emerged from Thunderhead Mountain is an enormous face—a man of stone, surveying the world before him with a slight frown and a furrowed brow.

Decades from now, if and when the sculpture is completed, the man will be sitting astride a horse with a flowing mane, his left arm extended in front of him, pointing. The scale will be mind-boggling: an over-all height nearly four times that of the Statue of Liberty; the arm long enough to accommodate a line of semi trucks; the horse’s ears the size of school buses, its nostrils carved twenty-five feet around and nine feet deep. It will be the largest sculpture in the history of the world. Yet, to some of the people it is meant to honor, the giant emerging from the rock is not a memorial but an indignity, the biggest and strangest and crassest historical irony in a region, and a nation, that is full of them.

The monument is meant to depict Tasunke Witko—best known as Crazy Horse—the Oglala Lakota warrior famous for his role in the resounding defeat of Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and for his refusal to accept, even in the face of violence and tactical starvation, the American government’s efforts to confine his people on reservations. He is a beloved symbol for the Lakota today because “he never conceded to the white man,” Tatewin Means, who runs a community-development corporation on the Pine Ridge Reservation, about a hundred miles from the monument, explained to me. “He lived a life that was devoted to protecting our people.” (“Sioux” originated from a word that was applied by outsiders—it might have meant “snake”—and many people prefer the names of the more specific nations: Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota, each of which is further divided into bands, such as the Oglala Lakota and the Mnicoujou Lakota.) There are many other famous Lakota leaders from Crazy Horse’s era, including Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, Spotted Elk, Touch the Clouds, and Old Chief Smoke. But when, in 1939, a Lakota elder named Henry Standing Bear wrote to Korczak Ziolkowski, a Polish-American sculptor who had worked briefly on Mt. Rushmore, to say that there ought to be a memorial in response to Rushmore—something that would show the white world “that the red man had great heroes, too”—Crazy Horse was the obvious subject.

Ziolkowski, a self-taught artist who was raised by an Irish boxer in Boston after both his parents died in a boating accident, came to Standing Bear’s attention after winning a sculpting prize at the World’s Fair in New York. He moved to South Dakota in 1947, and began acquiring land through purchases and swaps. A year later, he dedicated the memorial with an inaugural explosion. “I want to right a little bit of the wrong that they did to these people,” he said.

In the early days, Ziolkowski had little money, a faulty old compressor, and a rickety, seven-hundred-and-forty-one-step wooden staircase built to access the mountainside. His first marriage dissolved, apparently because his wife didn’t appreciate his single-minded focus on the mountain, and in 1950 he married Ruth Ross, a volunteer at the site who was eighteen years his junior, on Thanksgiving Day—supposedly so that the wedding wouldn’t require a day off work. Ruth told the press that Korczak had informed her that the mountain would come first, she second, and their children third. “You can see why we had ten children,” Ziolkowski once said. “The boys were necessary for working on the mountain, and the girls were needed to help with the visitors.”

Korczak Ziolkowski poses next to an early design for the sculpture’s face, in 1955. Photograph from Bettmann Archive / Getty

Ziolkowski, who liked to call himself “a storyteller in stone,” sometimes seemed to be crafting his own legend, too, posing in a prospector’s hat and giving dramatic statements to the media. He made models for a university campus and an expansive medical-training center that he planned to build, to benefit Native Americans. “Of course I’m egotistical!” he told “60 Minutes,” a few decades into the venture. “All my life I’ve wanted to do something so much greater than I could ever possibly be.” In 1951, he estimated that the project would take thirty years to complete. By the time of his death, in 1982, there was no sign of the university or the medical center, and the sculpture was still just scarred, amorphous rock. Ziolkowski had, however, built his own impressive tomb, at the base of the mountain. On a huge steel plate, he cut the words

KORCZAK

STORYTELLER IN STONE

MAY HIS REMAINS

BE LEFT UNKNOWN.

After Korczak’s death, Ruth Ziolkowski decided to focus on finishing the sculpture’s face, which was completed in 1998; it is still the only finished part of the monument. The unveiling ceremony prompted a wave of media attention, a visit from President Bill Clinton, and a fund-raising drive. Most of the Ziolkowski children, when they became adults, left to pursue other interests, but eventually returned to draw salaries at the mountain. Some have worked on the carving and others have concentrated on the tourism infrastructure that has developed around it—both of which, over the decades, have grown increasingly sophisticated.