CRAZY HORSE, S.D. -- A few dozen feet overhead, a workman sits on scaffolding underneath a massive granite nose, faintly complaining that the stone below the left nostril is harder than he'd expected.
"Just go slow," says his sturdy, gray-haired boss, smiling up at the young man. "Just go slow and you'll get it right."
For the 12 years since her sculptor husband died, Ruth Ziolkowski has been carrying out his final wish: that she press ahead with the mammoth sculpture he began in the side of a mountain here in 1948. He asked that she make sure the 563-foot-high likeness of the American Indian Chief Crazy Horse is done right, no matter how long it takes.
So, with a quiet passion and no apparent regrets, Mrs. Ziolkowski, 76, and her children, who work alongside her, have made this their life's mission.
She spends her days raising money and managing the tourist facility she has developed near the base of the mammoth work-in-progress.
She takes most of her meals in the restaurant set up for the million or so visitors who come here each year.
And, most important, she supervises the painstaking process of measuring, chiseling, blasting and blow-torching that she and her family say will one day produce the world's largest monument to an American Indian.
Korczak Ziolkowski, an acclaimed Boston-born sculptor, drew the attention of Sioux leaders after he won first prize for a marble portrait at the 1939 New York World's Fair.
After that, he joined the team carving four presidents' faces into Mount Rushmore, which is just 17 miles down the road from the Black Hills mountain into which the statue of Crazy Horse, sitting atop his stallion, is now taking shape.
Chief Henry Standing Bear asked Korczak -- the sculptor is known personally and professionally by his first name -- to carve the monument to Crazy Horse, who led his warriors to two famous victories in 1876 in which American Indians take enormous pride, the Battle of the Rosebud and the Battle of Little Bighorn.
Chief Standing Bear reportedly told the sculptor that he wanted "the white man to know the red man had great heroes, too."
After a stint in the Army, during which he participated in the landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day, Korczak moved to South Dakota from Connecticut and never looked back. He had 10 children with his second wife, Ruth, who initially came here from her native West Hartford, Conn., as his assistant, and he spent almost all his time sculpting and drawing three volumes of detailed plans so his work could continue after his death.
"By the time I'm an old lady, the mountain ought to look pretty good," said Monique Ziolkowski, 34, who along with six of her brothers and sisters have stayed to help realize their father's quest rather than work elsewhere. "You see, it's not really that important when it gets finished, just that it does eventually get finished."
No one involved in the project will hazard a guess as to when that will be, except to predict the final touches should be made sometime in the 21st century.
The Ziolkowskis' goal is to transform the entire mountain into a nine-story sculpture, measured from the horse's hoof at the base to a 44-foot feather protruding upward from Crazy Horse's headdress; just his face already is 87 feet high and 58 feet wide. The design is more extensive than Mount Rushmore's (the four presidents' heads together are only the size of Crazy Horse's face), and the statue will stand 8 feet higher than the Washington Monument.
Korczak, who once said he took on this task "to right a little bit of the wrong" that whites had done to American Indians, conceived of making far greater amends than just providing a sculpture.
His plans call for donations and proceeds from tourism to someday pay for a medical training center, a university and an airport on the surrounding grounds.
While the dreams are ambitious, a steady stream of income and the unwavering zeal of the Ziolkowski family leave little doubt they eventually will be fulfilled.