Crow

The Crow Indians are a Native American tribe of the Siouan language family of the northern Plains culture area. Originally from the country around Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada, the Crow gradually began to move onto the prairie beginning in approximately 1500, before finally settling in the Yellowstone and Big Horn River Valleys of Montana and Wyoming some time before 1700. The Crow name for themselves is “Absarokee” or “Apsaruke,” translated as “Children of the Large-beaked Bird.” It is unknown to what bird this might refer, but early interpreters mistranslated this to mean the “Crow.”

Initially a northeastern woodlands tribe, the ancestral Crow were horticulturalists, cultivating maize (corn), several types of beans, and squash. According to tribal history, a severe drought forced the Crow to move westward onto the Plains. By about 1550 the Crow were part-time farmers and part-time bison hunters who settled near Devil’s Lake in present-day northeastern North Dakota. Here, two chiefs, No Vitals and Red Scout, were each gifted by a great vision from the “One Above.” Red Scout received an ear of corn and was told to settle down and plant that seed for their subsistence. No Vitals received a pod of tobacco seeds and was told to go west to the high mountains and plant the sacred seeds there. Using a woman’s quarrel over meat as an excuse, some time between 1600 and 1625 No Vitals and his followers split away from Red Scout and began a journey that lasted a century. Red Scout’s people remained behind, planted their corn, and became the Hidatsa tribe. No Vitals and his people eventually became the people now known as the Crow. During this century of wandering the Crow traveled north to Cardston, Alberta, then south to the Great Salt Lake, still farther south to the Canadian River in Texas and Oklahoma, and, finally, north, following either the Arkansas River or the Missouri River, eventually entering into what is now northern Wyoming and southern Montana before 1700.

As with many of the northern plains tribes, the Crow lived on the plains for perhaps as long as 100 years before acquiring horses. According to Crow folklore, around 1725 a Crow war party journeyed to the Green River area in present-day Wyoming and either purchased or stole a stallion from another tribe, probably the Shoshone. A more mystical story tells of a Crow man who saw strange animals in a dream. He later set out to find these animals and finally saw several emerge from a lake. He captured them and brought them to the Crow village. The Crow named this new animal Ichilay, which means “to search with,” perhaps referring to its usefulness for searching for game and enemies. Soon the Crow became rich in horses and thus the target of raiding parties from other tribes.

The Crow culture was, in character, northern plains. Within their territory the Crow hunted, lived in hide tepees, fought with their neighbors, and, generally, built a life around the buffalo (bison). They were regarded as superb warriors and buffalo hunters easily recognized by their magnificently decorated clothing. They were called Beaux Hommes (“Handsome Men”) by the early French. The Crow social structure is rooted in their clan system, kinship established through matrilineal lines of descent, although still highly respectful of paternal kin. Deeply religious, the Crow practiced the Sun Dance and the Tobacco Society Ceremony, a uniquely Crow ritual of adoption.

Today, the majority of 9,155 Crow people live on the Crow Reservation in south-central Montana, south and east of Billings. The total area of the reservation is 2,235,093 acres, mostly grazing land and farmland.

Further reading: Peter Nabokov and William Wildschut, Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).

—Walter Fleming