Crow Nation

The Crow, who call themselves Apsáalooke, are a Siouan-speaking people of the northern plains whose homeland centres on the Yellowstone River valley of Montana and Wyoming. Famous as horse breeders, beadworkers and builders of very large tipis, they held their country for two centuries against more numerous neighbours. Today the Crow Tribe of Montana has about 14,000 enrolled citizens and one of the largest reservations in the United States.

Apsáalooke means "children of the large-beaked bird", a name given by their close relatives, the Hidatsa. French interpreters rendered it as "people of the crow", and many Apsáalooke think the bird originally meant was the mythical Thunderbird. Crow and Hidatsa ancestors are thought to have come from the Ohio country south of Lake Erie, moving west and settling south of Lake Winnipeg perhaps in the twelfth or thirteenth century as village farmers and bison hunters. Pressure from the Ojibwe and Cree pushed them to the upper Missouri. Around 1675–1700 a group left the Hidatsa earth-lodge villages in North Dakota for the lower Yellowstone, where archaeologists identify an early "proto-Crow" settlement at the Hagen site.

On the plains the Crow drove Shoshone bands westward and allied with the Kiowa and Plains Apache. Their territory ran from the headwaters of the Yellowstone to its mouth on the Missouri and took in the Powder, Tongue and Bighorn valleys and the Bighorn and Absaroka mountains. By the early nineteenth century they formed three groups, the Mountain Crow, the River Crow and the Kicked in the Bellies; oral history recalls a fourth that may have joined the Kiowa. Horses spread across the plains from about 1730, and the Crow became noted horse breeders with relatively large herds, which made them a target for raids by the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Assiniboine and others.

The Crow have a matrilineal system, and after marriage a husband traditionally moved into the household of his wife's mother. Their kinship terms gave anthropologists the name for one of the six classic kinship systems. Bison were hunted on horseback and at buffalo jumps, and dried meat was mixed with fat and berries into pemmican. Crow beadwork is renowned; the overlay technique is still known as the "Crow stitch", and colours carry meaning, from blue for the sky to black for a victory over an enemy.

The Lakota and Cheyenne, moving west, became the Crow's bitterest enemies. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 recognised a large Crow territory around the Bighorn Mountains, but by about 1860 the Lakota had taken its eastern hunting grounds. A vision of the young Plenty Coups, later the greatest Crow chief, was taken to mean that the Crow could keep land only by staying on good terms with the Americans. After the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty gave the Powder River country to the Lakota, the Crow ceded wide lands and settled for a reduced reservation on the south side of the Yellowstone.

In the Great Sioux War of 1876–1877 Crow men enlisted as US Army scouts against the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Sioux). The Battle of the Little Bighorn on 25 June 1876 was fought on the Crow reservation, and Crow scouts served with Custer. In 1882, under pressure from cattle ranchers, the government pressed the Crow to give up the western part of the reservation.

The Crow Indian Reservation covers about 2.3 million acres in south-central Montana, the fifth largest in the country, with its capital at Crow Agency. About 3,000 people spoke Crow in 2007. A 2001 constitution, whose adoption by voice vote some members dispute, created executive, legislative and judicial branches. The tribe runs Little Big Horn College, and the Crow Fair, first held in 1918, draws people from many nations every August.

Our maps for 1492, 1500, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715 draw an approximate Crow territory, labelled "Crow" or "Apsaalooké (Crow)", along the Yellowstone. On the 1650 map it borders the Blackfoot, the Arapaho, the Cheyenne, the Shoshone and the Teton (Lakota).