Crow Agency: Apsaalooke Homeland and the Teepee Capital of the World

Crow Agency is the headquarters of the Apsaalooke Nation, whose name means children of the large-beaked bird. Early translators misread it as ravens, which became crows, and the name stuck with outsiders. The two-point-two-million-acre Crow Indian Reservation is home to about eight thousand of the tribe's roughly twelve thousand enrolled members.

The agency moved to its present location on the Little Bighorn River in eighteen eighty-four. Each August, Crow Agency transforms into what is called the Teepee Capital of the World during Crow Fair, a gathering first organized in nineteen oh four and held annually since nineteen eighteen. Between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred teepees fill the fairgrounds for a week of powwow dancing, parades, and rodeo.

It is widely considered the largest modern American Indian encampment in the world. The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, where Custer's Seventh Cavalry was defeated on June twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth of eighteen seventy-six, lies just a few miles from this town.