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Black Hills, S.D.

Borglum or Ziolkowski?

Within a day of arrival in the Black Hills of South Dakota, you'll run into this question, probably somewhere along U.S. 16 as you roll between two of the largest sculpted mountains on the face of the Earth.

Gutzon Borglum's Mt. Rushmore, of course, is your old friend from elementary school, and you think you know it well. Begun in 1927. Completed in 1941. Scrambled upon by Cary Grant in 1959's "North by Northwest". But all that supposed familiarity may crumble once you see the morning light at play on Washington and Jefferson's noble noses, the volume of Teddy Roosevelt's mustache and the sunken gravitas of Lincoln's cheeks, not to mention his famous mole, which, at this scale, is about the size of a basketball hoop.

Editor's note: Click the thumbnail image at left to download a PDF archive version of former L.A. Times Staff Writer Charles Hillinger's 1980 interview of Crazy Horse sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski. (Image credit: AP Photo/Crazy Horse Archives)

It makes a startling difference, seeing a sculpture in three dimensions after you've gotten to know it in two -- especially when that sculpture tops a 450-foot mountain.

And it may be just as startling to learn that the man who made it spent most of his 50s as a mover and shaker in the Ku Klux Klan.

Now, while that sinks in, let me redirect your attention to a 600-foot mountain that stands 17 driving miles southwest of those faces on Rushmore. As you draw nearer to this mountain, you'll see that it has a face -- a face nine stories high.

This sculpture, begun not quite 60 years ago by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski (pronounced jewel-CUFF-ski) at the invitation of a Lakota (Sioux) chief, shows the warrior Crazy Horse on horseback, pointing southeast to the lands where many of his people lie buried. The Crazy Horse Memorial is far larger than Mt. Rushmore, yet at the insistence of the sculptor, no government money has been spent on it. No big Indian casino money either, so far.

The sculptor has been dead for nearly 25 years, and the project is still far from completion. Also, an adult arriving by car pays $14 to get as close to the sculpture as a Rushmore visitor gets for $8. And we'll never know whether it's a good likeness. No known photograph of Crazy Horse exists, so the artist aimed for a symbolic portrait, not a literal one. "Aha!" you say. "So, is it really necessary to see Rushmore and Crazy Horse? After all, the Reptile Gardens are just up the road, and the drive-through bear park, the wax museum, the miniature golf course. . . ."

MT. RUSHMORE

I started with Rushmore, which gets the better morning light. It's an easy 24-mile drive from Rapid City (where the airport is) or 22 miles from Custer or, easiest of all, three miles from the ticky-tacky tourist town of Keystone just down the hill. If you show up early enough, you'll get a shaded parking place.

From the Grand View Terrace, you can follow the half-mile loop trail that takes you to the base of the mountain and the sculptor's studio. As you move and the clouds drift and the sun advances, the faces change. The eavesdropping isn't bad either.

"Look at the striations!" said Alabama earth sciences teacher Rob Wilburn.

"Whose nose am I picking?" asked one 30ish woman, posing for a snapshot with a finger pointing skyward.

"Thomas Edison," said a boy at the other end of the terrace, identifying faces for his father.

In the evening presentation, the narrator emphasizes the four presidents' persistence amid hardship. It ends with a gathering onstage of the members of the audience who were or are in the military. As they line up, with a patriotic hymn swelling and those four great faces lighted behind them, you may feel a lump in your throat. It's no wonder that the year after Sept. 11, the number of visitors here increased more than 400,000, nearly 15%.

That symbolic power, said Judy Olson, the memorial's interpretation chief, has made it "a very political place" since its beginnings, when the sculptor raised a small ruckus by choosing to include Teddy Roosevelt along with the more venerated 18th and 19th century heroes Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. These days, Olson said, dissent more often comes from Native Americans who believe the sculpture should never have been undertaken in the first place.

Their argument is simple: An 1868 treaty with the U.S. government guaranteed that the Lakota could keep the Black Hills. But once gold was found and confirmed in 1874 (by Lt. Col. George Custer), the U.S. government and prospectors grabbed the land back and forced the Lakota elsewhere.

This land-grab history poses public-relations challenges for park Superintendent Gerard Baker, whose own family tree stems from the Mandan and Hidatsa peoples of North Dakota. And Borglum's résumé poses another such challenge.

If you rely on the pamphlet published by the Mount Rushmore History Assn., you get most of Borglum's story: a smart, talented and stubborn boy, born in 1867 in Idaho to a big immigrant family from Denmark. The boy takes to art early, studies in Europe, returns to take on steadily larger projects, puts down roots with a wife and two kids in Connecticut, has a sculpture acquired by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and says things like "beauty is as undefinable as spirit, and yet it is the dominating force in civilization."

At nearly 60, he takes on Rushmore, improvises techniques as he goes, revises the design nine times to accommodate cracks and other inconsistencies in the rock and produces one of the continent's greatest wonders.

But there is more. As Howard and Audrey Karl Shaff write in their biography, "Six Wars at a Time," Borglum's father, a doctor, was a Mormon bigamist who took a pair of sisters as wives. Christina Borglum, the sister who bore Gutzon, left him and the rest of the family when he was about 4.

Despite his fractured family, Borglum grew up with such artistic talent, charm, good looks and ambition that he not only won friends in high places but also kept them despite anti-Semitic writings ("Jews refuse to enter the mainstream of civilization, to become producing members of the world community . . . ") and other outrageous behavior. (Improbably, some of his good friends were Jewish.)

In about 1915, the Shaffs write, he signed on with the United Daughters of the Confederacy to carve a memorial at Stone Mountain in Georgia and soon rose to the high ranks of the newly resurgent Klan. Later he was fired from the memorial project and chased out of the state by his former boosters.

"My life has been a one-man war from its beginning," Borglum told one interviewer. But a friend, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, may have said it better: "Gutzon was for war, all sorts of war, six wars at a time."

With thousands of Americans and their children lining up daily at the monument for a dose of straight-ahead patriotism, what's the National Park Service supposed to do with these facts?

The Shaffs' book, out of print for several years, is absent from the bookstore, and polygamy and the KKK are absent from exhibition texts and films, which were last updated about a decade ago.