Art: Big Chipper

If Gutzon Borglum could carve up a mountain, why couldn’t he? For years he had been itching to, so Boston-born Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, 39, bought a mountain — a small one — in the Black Hills of South Dakota and laid his plans. He was going to chip it down to a 300-ft.-high monument : Sioux Chief Crazy Horse, who wiped out Custer’s cavalry at Little Big Horn.

Crazy Horse, mounted on a wild stallion, would loom even larger than the heads of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt on nearby Mount Rushmore, which Ziolkowski helped Gutzon Borglum blast. With no Government money, as Borglum had, Ziolkowski hoped to finance his work by mining the mountain’s beryl and feldspar as he went along and selling Indian souvenirs to curious visitors. It would take him 30 years, he guessed last week, to whittle Crazy Horse.

*Borglum was first commissioned to decorate Stone Mountain with the heads of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis. When that job fell through, he turned to other heroes, spent 14 years hacking their heads out of Mount Rushmore. When he died in 1941, he left them looming, unfinished, over a vast dribble of scree.