All four heads of Mount Rushmore could fit inside the head of the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota. This episode tells the multi-generational story behind it: the Lakota warrior who never signed a treaty and died resisting imprisonment in 1877, the Oglala Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear who wanted the white man to know the red man has great heroes too, and the Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski who set off the first blast on June 3, 1948, and spent the rest of his life on Thunderhead Mountain.

We dig into the 1.7-billion-year-old Harney Peak granite that made carving so brutally difficult, Ruth Ziolkowski's decision to finish the face first to keep the project alive, the completed 87.5-foot face dedicated in 1998, and the modern foundation with $128 million in assets and a $5.2 million tower crane. We also lay out the deep opp ...