Editing Crow Agency, Montana (section)

===The Second Crow Agency (1875-1884)===
[[File:Crow Reservation 06.jpg|thumb|Landforms near Crow Agency, Montana]]
In 1874 miners encroached on the western margins of Crow lands in the Absaroka Range, and the reservation was reduced in 1875.  The first Crow Agency was within these ceded lands and so the Agency was  relocated eastward to a new site just south of modern-day [[Absarokee, Montana]]. The second Crow Agency (1875-1884) was still located north of the [[Absaroka Range]] of Mountains but about 66 miles further east of Fort Parker in the Yellowstone Valley, on the Stillwater River which was a tributary of the Yellowstone River.

The nine year period from 1875 to 1884 was a time of rapid transition on the plains of eastern Montana and Wyoming.  In 1876 the Crows provided scouts for the United States military forces in the [[Great Sioux War of 1876]].  The defeat by the Sioux of [[Custer|George Armstrong Custer]] at the [[Battle of the Little Big Horn]] in 1876 resulted in a concerted military backlash against the Sioux, and by 1877 and 1878 the hostile bands of Sioux had either fled to Canada, or they had surrendered and were confined to reservations along the Missouri River in the Dakotas. This initially left the Crows more secure in their use of the buffalo ranges on the eastern Montana and Wyoming plains, but in 1876 and 1877 federal forts were built across this area.  With hostile Indian presence essentially neutralized, hide hunters came to harvest the northern buffalo herds. By 1882 the buffalo were gone from this area.  Also, in 1880 the Northern Pacific Railroad began building eastward from Bismarck, ND, and in 1882 they completed their northern transcontinental line, which passed up the Yellowstone River valley just as the last of the buffalo disappeared.  Almost at once large Texas trail herds arrived in the Montana Territory to exploit the now empty open range on the vast plains of central and eastern  Montana.  These successive rapid changes in this 9-year period eliminated the herds of bison and reduced other wild game on which the Crow culture relied, and ended forever the Crow's nomadic way of life.