CRAZY HORSE, S.D. – It had been nearly 40 years since I’d visited the Black Hills of South Dakota, a 5,000-square-mile mountain range rising in the middle of the Great Plains.

If you built a Native American monument based on his book alone, in other words, it might look a bit like Crazy Horse emerging from the mountainside at full gallop.

CRAZY HORSE, S.D. -- At Mount Rushmore, more than 2.5 million visitors each year trade stares with presidents Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Lincoln. Carved into a mountain 17 miles ...

In South Dakota’s Black Hills there is a humongous mountain-carving in progress called Crazy Horse Memorial. Envisioned by Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziółkowski back in the 1940s, when ready, it ...

Crazy Horse, center with musket, repels U.S. troops at the Battle of Little Bighorn, June 1876, in a c. 1900 illustration. The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Images Subscribe to Smithsonian ...

But the monument also feels, at certain moments, more like a shrine to its presiding genius, the Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski — a figure of undoubted brilliance and a certain ...