8-12-2019 Hot Springs, SD

The Hot Springs KOA is located at the southeast edge of the Black Hills National Forest and we’ll be here for 4 glorious nights!  This is an amazing part of the country so let me begin!

The Mammoth Site story begins 320 million years ago.  Well, some information takes us back 2.5 billion years, actually, but 320 million is where all the action starts.  First, there were ice ages and glaciers that carved out canyons.  Then there was global warming (This happened before the automobile.) and plate shifting that created the Rockies and the Black Hills.  Water flow weakened substrata and the earth’s crust caved in creating a big sink hole that then filled with warm water and vegetation began to grow.  Over the millennia, the water dried up and sediment and dust filled the sink hole until it became a hill itself.  That’s the Reader’s Digest version.

But wait.  Back up the truck.  Before that, the Columbian and Woolly mammoths migrated over to the USA (legally).  They liked the sink hole, it was full of delicious vegetation and warm water, like a God-sized hot tub.  They either fell in or jumped in but then, the vertical slippery sides would not allow them to get out and they drowned.  These events began to occur about 200,000 years ago. (Makes Adam and Eve seem kinda young!)  All of this was discovered in 1974 by a developer who began excavating the hill to build houses on it.  He found intact bones and tusks.  All work was halted, he donated the land to the archaeological scholars and it became what we have today:  The Mammoth Site.  These researchers have so far uncovered the bones and carcasses of 3 Woolly mammoths and 58 Columbian mammoths as well as a number of other animals such as a giant short-faced bear

That's him!  The giant
short-faced bear!  Yikes!

(Very rare, only 6 have been found on the planet.), wolves, pronghorns and ancient ancestors of the camel.  Also, the fossil beds reveal ancient sea life such as shell fish.  This tour walks one around the periphery of the actual sink hole right where the animals perished and their skeletons remain today.  It is an active archaeological dig. 

Overview of the sink hole

Another overview shot showing
tusks of the Columbian mammoth

A nearly-intact skeleton of a Columbian
mammoth.  His skull is missing and the
scientists don't know why.

Skull and tusks of a Columbian mammoth

 

This is a mammoth bone house (replica).
These have been found in places like
Siberia and have been dated to
27,000 years ago.

Rob and his buddy, the monstrous
Columbian mammoth

"Sinbad," a (replica) cast from the
actual bones of a Columbian mammoth

Korczak Ziolkowski and
Chief Henry Standing Bear

In 1939, Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear wrote a letter to a sculptor by the name of Korczak Ziolkowski.  He requested to meet with Korszak to discuss the possibility of creating a sculpture in the Black Hills depicting a Native American Indian.  He wrote of his wish that, “the white man will know the Red man had great heroes, also.” 

Chief Standing Bear's
letter to Korczak Ziolkowski

Already an accomplished sculptor who had won awards and had worked with Gutzon Borglum on Rushmore, Korczak was fascinated and decided to take on this project.  He lit on the idea of creating the likeness of a warrior named Crazy Horse, a maternal cousin of Chief Standing Bear.  No pictures of him exist so Korczak had to rely on descriptions of tribesmen who knew him.  (Crazy Horse would not allow his photo to be taken, his religious beliefs likening it to an entrapment of his spirit.)  Korczak devoted his life to the project and worked tirelessly to begin the foundations of the sculpture but would not live to see it completed.  Far from it.  He died in 1982 before the head of Crazy Horse even began to materialize.  But his wife, Ruth, and his large family of 10 children had Korczak’s plaster scale model with which to work. 

Korczak's 1/34th scale model of his vision

What you see now in the heart of the Black Hills is the work, to date, on Crazy Horse that neither the sculptor nor Chief Standing Bear will ever see.  Upon completion, it is to stand 563’ tall and 641’ long.  To us, it appears to be a project that will span generations.  Korczak turned down two $10M government grants to help him with his work , worried that a government-meddling takeover of the project would ruin everything.  He was probably right.  (Custer County seems like kind of an “in-your-face” location for the Crazy Horse Monument.  Crazy Horse fought heroically in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Custer’s Last Stand.)

This is a scale model of Korczak's dream

Silhouette of Crazy Horse's head,
all that is finished so far

Crazy Horse Memorial, August, 2019
from a distance