Crow and Northern Cheyenne Homeland
Near Sheridan, Wyoming
Before the Bozeman Trail, before the railroad, before the cattle ranches and the polo fields, the country around Sheridan was the domain of two peoples who had lived here for generations: the Crow Nation and the Northern Cheyenne.
The Crow, who call themselves Apsaalooke, meaning children of the large-beaked bird, occupied the Bighorn and Powder River drainages as their core territory. They were skilled horse people, and the Bighorn Basin was central to their seasonal round of bison hunting. The Crow signed treaties with the United States and maintained a complicated relationship with the federal government, at times serving as scouts against the Lakota, with whom they had long-standing conflicts over the same hunting grounds.
The Northern Cheyenne had moved onto the Great Plains from the Great Lakes region over the previous two centuries, adopting the horse culture and becoming bison hunters of the first order. Their territory overlapped substantially with the Lakota in the Powder River Basin. The two peoples were close allies, a partnership that would prove decisive at the Little Bighorn in eighteen seventy-six.
After the wars of the eighteen sixties and seventies, the Northern Cheyenne were forcibly removed to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. The removal was a catastrophe. In eighteen seventy-eight, more than three hundred fifty Northern Cheyenne led by Dull Knife and Little Wolf broke out and walked north toward their homeland, nearly a thousand miles through hostile territory and pursuing cavalry. Congress eventually created the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeastern Montana in eighteen eighty-four.
The Crow Reservation, established by the eighteen sixty-eight treaty, occupies two point two million acres in southern Montana. The Northern Cheyenne Reservation adjoins it to the east. Together they are the closest federally recognized homeland to Sheridan, just across the state line. The mountains visible to the west from nearly anywhere in town are the same Bighorns both peoples mapped in song and story long before anyone named them.
