Taking direction from photographs, drawings and written descriptions, Ziolkowski created a model that personified Crazy Horse's spirit. The Black Hills of South Dakota, near to where the battle took place, was chosen for the grand stone memorial. The granite composition of the mountains proved to have some unique properties, which brought along some challenges that deterred the project.
Some of these challenges were easily surmountable while others proved to take longer to accomplish. It was deemed early on in the process to create a monument that surpassed Mount Rushmore in its scope. It was the feeling that the monument would reflect the traditions and spirit of the Native Americans.
All visitors to the Black Hills should visit this historic and moving memorial. Understanding the rich legacy Native Americans have left us enriches our lives, and it is important to understand what Crazy Horse and many indigenous tribes undertook to preserve their heritage and way of life. Challenges do remain.
The magnitude of the project has increased exponentially as the work continues. Time and money each play a role in the project. New technologies are helping, including VSAT services and excavation projection software that help reduce the amount of time it has taken to do the work.
Crazy Horse wanted to preserve the traditions and lifestyle of his people. He refused to let people take photographs of him. With his last breath, he fought Americans who continued to take his people's lands and break treaties. Army troops were sent to destroy him.
The Fetterman Massacre, as it came to be known, proved to be a huge embarrassment for the U. Even after the signing of the Fort Laramie Treaty of , which guaranteed the Lakota important land, including the coveted Black Hills territory, Crazy Horse continued his fight. Beyond his seemingly mystical ability to avoid injury or death on the battlefield, Crazy Horse also showed himself to be uncompromising with his white foes. He refused to be photographed and never committed his signature to any document.
The aim of his fight was to retake the Lakota life he'd known as a child when his people had full run of the Great Plains. Following the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, and the U. Crazy Horse and Chief Sitting Bull refused. On June 17, , Crazy Horse led a force of 1, Oglala and Cheyenne warriors against General George Crook and his brigade, successfully turning back the soldiers as they attempted to advance toward Sitting Bull's encampment on the Little Bighorn River. Following the defeat of Custer, the U.
Army struck back hard against the Lakota, pursuing a scorched-earth policy whose aim was to extract total surrender. But as the winter of set in and food supplies began to shorten, Crazy Horse's followers started to abandon him. On May 6, , he rode to Fort Robinson in Nebraska and surrendered. Instructed to remain on the reservation, he defied orders that summer to put his sick wife in the care of his parents.
After his arrest, Crazy Horse was returned to Fort Robinson, where, in a struggle with the officers, he was bayoneted in the kidneys. He passed away with his father at his side on September 5, There are many Lakota who praise the memorial. Some are grateful that the face offers an unmissable reminder of the frequently ignored Native history of the hills, and a counterpoint to the four white faces on Mt. But others argue that a mountain-size sculpture is a singularly ill-chosen tribute.
When Crazy Horse was alive, he was known for his humility, which is considered a key virtue in Lakota culture.
He never dressed elaborately or allowed his picture to be taken. He learned to ride his horse great distances, hunting herds of buffalo across vast plains. As a young man, Curly had a vision enjoining him to be humble: to dress simply, to keep nothing for himself, and to put the needs of the tribe, especially of its most vulnerable members, before his own.
He was known for wearing only a feather, never a full bonnet; for not keeping scalps as tokens of victory in battles; and for being honored by the elders as a shirt-wearer, a designated role model who followed a strict code of conduct. He later lost the honor, after a dispute involving a woman who left her husband to be with him.
White settlers were already moving through the area, and their government was building forts and sending soldiers, prompting skirmishes over land and sovereignty that would eventually erupt into open war. In , when Curly was around fourteen, he witnessed the killing of a diplomatic leader named Conquering Bear, in a disagreement about a cow.
The following year, he may also have witnessed the capture and killing of dozens of women and children by U. Army soldiers, in what is euphemistically known as the Battle of Ash Hollow. He continued to build a reputation for bravery and leadership; it was sometimes said that bullets did not touch him. The U. But it was also playing a waiting game. Buffalo, once plentiful, were being overhunted by white settlers, and their numbers were declining.
Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone. But, just six years later, the government sent Custer and the Seventh Cavalry into the Black Hills in search of gold, setting off a summer of battles, in , in which Crazy Horse and his warriors helped win dramatic victories at both Rosebud and the Little Bighorn. But the larger war was already lost.
In , after a hard, hungry winter, Crazy Horse led nine hundred of his followers to a reservation near Fort Robinson, in Nebraska, and surrendered his weapons. Five months later, he was arrested, possibly misunderstood to have said something threatening, and fatally stabbed in the back by a military policeman.
He was only about thirty-seven years old, yet he had seen the world of his childhood—a powerful and independent people living amid teeming herds of buffalo—all but disappear. That same year, the United States reneged on the treaty for the second time, officially and unilaterally claiming the Black Hills. More and more Native Americans, struggling to survive on the denuded plains, moved to reservations. Twenty of the soldiers involved received the Medal of Honor for their actions.
And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. In , the U. The tribes replied that what they wanted was the hills themselves; taking money for something sacred was unimaginable.
0コメント