The Native American Crow Tribe, known in their Siouan language as “Apsáalooke,” lived around the Yellowstone River.
The river which stretches from modern-day Wyoming through Montana and into North Dakota, where it joins the Missouri River.
The name “Apsáalooke” means “children of the large-beaked bird” and was given to them by a neighboring Siouan tribe, the Hidatsa.
French interpreters translated the name as gens du corbeaux (“people of [the] crows”), so they became known as the Crow.
The early settlement of Crow tribe was around Lake Erie in Ohio. However, the Ojibwe and Cree peoples, who attained better access to guns through the fur trade, pressured the Crow to migrate to the south of Lake Winnipeg.
There, the Crows faced another aggressive and not so friendly neighbors, the Cheyennes, who pushed them to the West. Both the Crow and Cheyenne tribe were pushed further west by the Lakota (Sioux) who took control over the territory from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Big Horn Mountains of Montana.
While the Cheyennes allied with the Sioux, the Crow tribe remained a bitter enemy of both tribes.
The Crow people have been concentrated on a reservation south of Billing, Montana since the 19th century. Today, they are enrolled in the federally recognized Crow Tribe of Montana.