The Apsaalooke and the Yellowstone: Home Country

Long before a railroad survey crew staked the first corner of what would become Billings, this stretch of the Yellowstone River was the heartland of the Apsaalooke, the people known in English as the Crow Nation. Their name for themselves translates roughly as children of the large-beaked bird, and they were, by any measure, a people shaped by this landscape. The Yellowstone River and its tributaries were the organizing spine of their world.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen fifty-one formally defined Crow territory as roughly thirty-eight million acres bounded by the Yellowstone, the Missouri, the Powder River, and the Wind River Mountains. It was an enormous homeland, and it lasted only on paper. Pressure from Sioux expansion to the east and white settlement from the west steadily compressed Crow lands. By the treaty of eighteen sixty-eight, the Crow ceded most of what the earlier treaty had guaranteed, retaining a reservation south of the Yellowstone.

The bluffs above Billings are significant to the Apsaalooke in ways that go beyond the practical. The high rimrocks above the river are the site of traditional vision quests and the place associated with a figure named Four Dance. The river itself and the land along it hold ceremonial and historical memory stretching back generations before any treaty was signed.

Today, the Crow Indian Reservation begins only about ten miles southeast of Billings, covering approximately two and a third million acres, the fifth-largest reservation in the United States. The Crow Tribe's capital is at Crow Agency, and the reservation's northern edge runs close to the Little Bighorn River. The Apsaalooke remain, connected to this country that was theirs before it was anything else.