On June 3, 1948, a single blast of dynamite removed 10 tons of granite from Thunderhead Mountain in South Dakota’s Black Hills. It was a modest beginning for a project that would eventually require millions of tons of rock to be drilled, blasted, and cleared away. Nearly eight decades later, the mountain is still being carved into the likeness of Crazy Horse, the Oglala Lakota warrior, and the work has passed from one generation of the Ziolkowski family to the next.
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