Crow Homeland: The Land Before Carbon County
Near Red Lodge, Montana
Before the coal mines and the immigrant workers and the railroad and the Beartooth Highway, the land where Red Lodge now sits was Crow territory, part of the enormous homeland of the Apsaalooke, the Crow Nation, who occupied the valleys of south-central Montana and northern Wyoming. The Crow name Apsaalooke means children of the large-beaked bird, mistranslated as Crow by early American traders and explorers who encountered them in the early nineteenth century.
The Crow had lived in this landscape for generations, hunting the bison herds that grazed along the Beartooth front and in the valleys running south toward what is now Yellowstone. The Beartooth Mountains themselves were significant to the Crow as a source of game, timber, and the high-country resources that they moved through seasonally. The streams flowing north from the Beartooths, including Rock Creek, which runs through present-day Red Lodge, were productive fishing waters.
A treaty negotiated with the Crow Nation in eighteen eighty opened the area to non-Indian settlement, and the Crow Reservation was left well to the north and east of Red Lodge. That opening created the legal conditions for coal mining to begin near Red Lodge in the late eighteen eighties. Carbon County, in which Red Lodge sits as the county seat, takes its name from the coal, which is itself a form of ancient carbon. The Crow homeland became Carbon County in the space of a decade through a process that federal Indian policy of the eighteen eighties called opening the land, and through which the Apsaalooke lost the southern reaches of country they had occupied for centuries.
