A monumental club project in South Dakota

By Kristen Pope

It would be, quite simply, the largest sculpture in the world: a colossal likeness of Crazy Horse, the Oglala Lakota chief, on a galloping stallion carved into the granite of a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota. But in 1949, about a year into the project, sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski ran into a vexing problem. He needed stairs. Lots of them.

“It was a very tedious process, and he just wasn’t moving as fast as he wanted, so he put a request out to the community,” says Marguerite Cullum, a retired staff librarian at the Crazy Horse Memorial, which manages the site.

Answering the call was the nearby Rotary Club of Custer. The members’ task was to help assemble a 700-foot wooden staircase running from the valley floor to the top of Thunderhead Mountain. They formed a human chain, passing each piece of lumber — 29 tons of it — from person to person up the side of the mountain to help construct the 741 steps. “Think how risky that was for them,” says Cullum, a past president of the club and its current secretary. “And they went and did it, and, as far as I know, they were the only ones that showed up. I couldn’t find that any anybody else attended.”

Thus began a long-standing collaboration and friendship between the Custer club and the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation, which would grow beyond the monument to establish a museum and an educational institution, Crazy Horse Memorial University, that offers college credit in several academic programs and prepares Native American students to succeed in higher education.

Whitney Rencountre II is chief executive officer of the memorial today. He is Crow Creek Hunkpati Dakota from the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe. Because the foundation runs solely on donations and accepts no government funding, partners like the Rotary club are critically important. “As a nonprofit organization, we rely on collaborations and those many volunteers through the years to help us advance the work, our mission, and our dream here,” Rencountre says.

The idea for the monument began in the late 1930s with Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear, who watched Mount Rushmore taking shape 10 miles away elsewhere in the Black Hills and wanted to show that his people had great heroes. The man he chose to honor was his cousin, Tasunke Witko, whose name translates to His Horse Is Wild or Crazy Horse, a leader best known for defeating Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and the Army’s 7th Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

In 1939, Standing Bear wrote to Ziolkowski, a Boston-born sculptor who had assisted at Mount Rushmore, to invite him to take the job. Ziolkowski began construction in 1948 and devoted the rest of his life to the project until his death in 1982 at age 74.

Each year, more than 1 million people visit the memorial, which remains a work in progress. The 87-foot, 6-inch-tall face was finished in 1998, and sculptors are working on other parts of the mammoth artwork, such as the 263-foot outstretched arm.

While the monument is not without critics — some object to the reshaping of a sacred mountain or contend that the some of the funding could have gone directly to tribes — the Rotary club is dedicated to its relationship with the organization. “Crazy Horse is an important part of Custer,” says Club President Jason Ferguson. “And we want to be partners with entities like [them because their] mission is great.”

That mission includes themes important to Rotary members. Intended to honor all Indigenous people of North America, the memorial, according to its website, “stands as a reminder of the importance of reconciliation, respecting differences, embracing diversity, striving for unity, and appreciating life’s deeper meaning as it has always been represented in Native American cultural values.”

With an annual donation, the club has supported the Crazy Horse Memorial University, where hundreds of Native students have earned college credit through short academic programs and gone on to pursue degrees at other colleges and universities. “They get wraparound support to help them understand what [is needed] to be successful in college,” Rencountre says. The school, which also offers internships at the memorial, partners with Black Hills State University and hopes to one day receive its own accreditation. The memorial foundation has also awarded more than $2 million in scholarships.

Over the years, the club has invited representatives of the university and the memorial to present at meetings and share their work and progress. “We appreciate when they come and educate us on what’s going on up there because it’s just fascinating stuff,” Ferguson says. The club had a chance to observe the monument’s progress firsthand when members toured the top of the mountain. “The view up there is unbelievable,” Ferguson adds.

The club has also relied on the memorial as a venue for events like a Christmas party and its wine-tasting and raffle fundraisers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the memorial offered the club a conference room to host remote and socially distanced meetings after the group could no longer gather at its usual location. “That was a huge thing to keep us pulled together, that we didn’t dissolve. We’re still going strong,” says Cullum, who was a club president during the pandemic. “It’s a good bond. It’s good to know that we can ask for help.”

Rencountre shares that sentiment: “The Rotary collaboration that we’ve had through the years has really helped us to advance the work of the mission and the dream, the vision of Crazy Horse Memorial.”

This story originally appeared in the May 2026 issue of Rotary magazine.