Crazy About Crazy Horse

Back in the summer of 1965, my family hitched the Apache pop-up camping trailer to our Olds F-85 and headed Out West to South Dakota for our vacation. I wrote about it in a five-part blog series beginning here.

My siblings and me (wearing bolo tie) in a picture from that trip

We saw a lot on that Western trip, with Mt. Rushmore, Deadwood, the Badlands and the Corn Palace being the main places of interest. But Crazy Horse – the Lakota war chief who defeated Lt. Col. Custer and the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn – figured prominently in two attractions we saw. (That's why yesterday I mentioned that the movie Chief Crazy Horse was of interest to me.)

The first one was Crazy Horse Pageant at Hot Springs, South Dakota. Here's the ad that ran in the This Week in South Dakota's Black Hills and Badlands tourist weekly for July 11, 1965.

As described in the tourist book, "The Crazy Horse Pageant is different from any Indian pageant you've ever seen... any place. It tells the story of the great Sioux nation in both its finest hour and its darkest moment – and of its greatest leader, the visionary Crazy Horse, and it tells it from the viewpoint of the Sioux.

"The Sioux nation was the only military force ever to fight the U. S Army to a standstill. Military experts regarded the Sioux as "the finest light cavalry in the world" and Crazy Horse was the most skilled fighter of them all."

As for the pageant, the tourist book noted, "No effort has been spared to make the pageant as authentic as humanly possible.

"The setting is a natural amphitheater on the Fall River which is almost an exact miniature of the Little Big Horn.

"The Crazy Horse Pageant is a memorable and moving experience and there is no other like it in America. It is perhaps the happiest marriage of historical accuracy with high drama which had ever been done."

The other Crazy Horse attraction was, of course, the Memorial. We visited the studio of the sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, who envisioned and designed the world's largest mountain carving as a tribute to Crazy Horse. 

Here's our photo taken at the studio of a miniature version of what the sculpture will look like when finished. 

And here's the mountain itself, as it looked at that time.

There's been some progress in the intervening sixty years.

There's still a lonnnng way to go, though. One of my favorite books, The New Roadside America, humorously described it like this: "When complete, it will be bigger than the Sphinx! The head of his horse alone will be bigger than all of the white men on Rushmore. Completion due date? The middle of the twenty-third century."

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I suspect that Chief Crazy Horse's fame led to the creation of the character Chief Crazy Coyote, who heckled and harassed Huckleberry Hound in several classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons.