CRAZY HORSE, S.D. -- "I woke up this morning and prayed to God," said Marinka Ziolkowski. "Don't let 50 years of hard work be lost in the fog."

The fog, in fact, did a slow burn-off, the overnight snow flopped off the trees, and by mid-morning on the coldest June 3 on record here, an 87-foot-high granite face was unveiled before thousands of chilled visitors gathered to stare at it from a mile away.

It was the grand opening of the Crazy Horse Memorial, a massive monument to the great Sioux leader that Marinka's late father, Korczak Ziolkowski, had begun carving on another rainy and cold day 50 years before. Marinka, born 13 years into the project, drove from nearby Custer yesterday to see Crazy Horse's face revealed atop Thunderhead Mountain.

"The world asks only one question: Did you get the job done?" Marinka said. "And the only answer is: yes."

This axiom she learned from her father -- the artist, the taskmaster, the stubborn sculptor who loved oatmeal in the morning and Manhattans at night. And yesterday's Crazy Horse 50th anniversary was as much a tribute to Korczak as it was to the man whose stony face glares atop a 700-foot outcropping.

"We've come here to honor three men, three dreamers," said Dennis "Standing Bear" Compos, whose grandfather, Oglala chief Henry Standing Bear, first asked Korczak to build a monument to the Indians. The white men, after all, had Mount Rushmore.

So Standing Bear and Korczak decided to carve Crazy Horse's imagined likeness into these hills.

"I know in my heart the spirits of these three men are here today," Compos said.

In his lifetime, Crazy Horse was never photographed. But yesterday, his mountainous likeness loomed on a Jumbotron screen trucked in for the occasion. Then, the "mother of the Ziolkowski tribe," Ruth Ziolkowski, gave thanks to everyone who had contributed money or muscle to her husband's dream.

"As Korczak said," she told the shivering crowd, "trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle."

Then, by radio, she called to the men on the mountain to uncover Crazy Horse's face. On cue, the drape slithered perfectly off the 87-foot head, past the jutted nose, onto a heap of stone beneath the face of Tashunka Witko -- who the white man called Crazy Horse.

At that moment, Ruth Ziolkowski looked back at the cold sea of visitors. She might have seen her beaming daughter Marinka, whose father called her Cat Who Walks Alone. Marinka was standing, with everyone else. She flashed a thumbs-up sign to her mom, whose own voice had just broken in tears.

Slow progress

All in good time the Crazy Horse monument has come, is still coming. Patience, people. The mountain isn't going anywhere. And, if your beliefs are so inclined, The Great Spirit isn't in any hurry, either.

With distant interest, we all have waited. As children, we had read about a monument being carved to honor the masterful young Oglala leader, Crazy Horse, who defeated George Custer at Little Bighorn in the year of our nation's centennial.

The Crazy Horse Memorial, we read, would be carved out of South Dakota's Black Hills, a land the Indians called Paha Sapa, the place of holy mountains, great spirits and visions. The unveiling would come in 50 years. Our own children heard the story, too.

As adults, we vaguely tracked the story, stopping one Sunday to see on "60 Minutes" a progress report on the memorial. Then, other reports nicked our radar screen:

In 1989, the hairline of Crazy Horse's 32-foot forehead is finished; 1991, both eyes are opened; 1992, 27-foot nose is done (can fit a five-room house in one nostril!); in 1994, "The Famous Nose Blast" blows another 91 tons of pegmatite granite from a memorial in perpetual progress.

When finished, the story went, the Crazy Horse Memorial would be taller than the Washington Monument and larger than the largest Egyptian pyramid. The boys on Mount Rushmore would have blasted-rock envy.

Size does matter -- but not time, not in the world of mountain carving. And so, 50 years to the day since Korczak (CORE-jock) single-jacked four holes for the first blast into his mountain, surviving family members gathered with onlookers to see the completed face of the incomplete, 563-foot-high Crazy Horse Memorial.

Just the face, as the press releases remind. The rest is still to come, maybe in your child's lifetime.

Whose memorial is it?

"It's not really Crazy Horse's face. This has a very Polish look, to my eye," says Dee Brown, whose 1970 book "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West" is a landmark work of nonfiction.

Now 90, Brown remembers his visits to the Crazy Horse Memorial -- at least two visits since work began in 1948. "Wish I was going with you this time," he said last week from his home in Little Rock, Ark. What, he is asked, would Crazy Horse make of all this?

"I don't think he would care for the monument," Brown said. "He wouldn't know what it's all about."

But Jadwiga Ziolkowski knows. It's about trying to get people to understand and respect Native American culture, she says.

Yes, her father took poetic license in crafting Crazy Horse. But he was an artist, she points out, and artists don't work by committee.

"If Dad were here, he would have done the horse's head first because of his love for horses," says Jadwiga, one of Korczak and Ruth's 10 children.

But the pragmatists among the Ziolkowskis said otherwise after his death at age 74 in 1982. Korczak had instructed Ruth to keep and follow his three master books of plans and instructions for the construction of the monument: Crazy Horse atop stallion, arm outstretched and pointing to his Sioux burial grounds. The family did carry on, but decided Crazy Horse's strong chiseled head should be completed before the huge stone stallion he'll ride.

People didn't wait for 50 years and drive through all this road construction to see the world's largest horse's head. The full memorial has been a hard enough sell for their nonprofit foundation, Jadwiga says.

The paying public wants to see progress, and they want to see it now. So the family has given the public Crazy Horse's face first. The mighty and mythical Korczak would have understood, his daughter says.

"I think about Dad and how he would feel. And I hope that he would be proud," says Jadwiga, 45.

While her father remains "the force that keeps it going," it remains up to his family to carry the blow torches, explosives and bulldozers back up the mountain for the rest of their small time on earth.

An obsession

Indeed, to speak of the Crazy Horse Memorial is to speak in tons and decades -- and to speak of a back-breaking obsession as weighty and curious as anything known in modern times.

The story of sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski and his monumental idea must be chipped away at with patience and with sturdy instruments. This is the way the story is told at the sprawling memorial site -- 40 miles south of Rapid City and 17 miles from the famous foursome of Mount Rushmore.

The road to Crazy Horse is a mess for the stream of Winnebagos and minivans trekking through these parts. The state is merely making four lanes from two, but you'd think it was intricately carving up a mountain given all the dust and fuss.

In the fabled Black Hills, visitors stop to picture the craggy, tortoise-neck-wrinkled hills as if they were clouds shaped as dogs or horses. It's easy to picture a famous face. A little TNT, and that hill over there could be made to resemble some other hero of the West, maybe Jack Palance, or James Arness. (In fact, a sign just past Dead Broke Street tells motorists they have entered the "Gunsmoke Snowtrain Episode Filmed Here" region.)

Finally, well into the Ziolkowski's 382 acres, we read that the Crazy Horse Memorial is not a state or federal project. This remains a fiercely proud point with the family. As with Crazy Horse, who signed no treaties and lived on no reservations, the Ziolkowskis, in their way, have also rebuffed the government. And their memorial won't let you forget that.

Before visitors get the full view of the Face, they encounter a mall of gift shops, museums, slide-show theaters, coffee stands, the Laughing Water Restaurant and enough Crazy Horse Memorial photos, articles and posters to give anyone a lasting picture of sculptor Korczak.

This Boston-born man of Polish descent, this man who pitched a tent here in 1939 and with $174 started boring holes into the granite because an Oglala chief had asked him, this upstart who had worked a spell on Mount Rushmore, this man was as crazy as an artist.

"This was an obsession, yes," his daughter Jadwiga says.

And the memorial spread appears to be a tad obsessed with the memory of the sculptor. Unlike the elusive Crazy Horse, Korczak seemingly never stopped being photographed.

A 40-year-old Korczak resembles the star of a B Western as he starts his monument in 1948. As years and back surgeries and heart attacks follow, Korczak becomes a larger-than-life figure -- the Great Bearded One -- whose likeness on T-shirts and paintings are on sale, by the way.

There are wonderful letters on display. In 1939, Henry Standing Bear makes his pitch to Korczak, having heard about the man's first-place sculpting award at the New York World's Fair that year.

President John F. Kennedy, who visited the memorial site in 1962, dropped Ruth and Korczak an encouraging line later that year: "I shall watch the carving of the Crazy Horse Memorial with renewed interest."

A litany of the injuries Korczak suffered also is displayed. In his 34 years of blasting away at the once dome-shaped mountain, Korczak suffered back injury after back injury, and survived two heart attacks, diabetes, arthritis and too many smashed fingers to count.

Yet the self-taught artist plowed ahead through stone, snow and time, often working alone, with only a family of mountain goats for company. Their descendants still look on today, barely visible to the naked eye from the lookout below.

After 50 years and 8.5 million tons of displaced granite, Korczak's memory remains alive and kicking.

And on a cold, muddy day in 1998, his bearded face never loomed larger than on the Jumbotron at the Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

And after another 50 years, it seems certain, our grandchildren will hear the story again.

Pub Date: 6/04/98