A Brief History of Montana's Custer Country

The Bozeman Trail, blazed in 1866 as a “safe route” for wagons bound from Fort Laramie to Montana’s gold country, sliced through the south-west corner of today’s Custer Country. Not a wise move. The route ran smack through the Sioux’s prime buffalo hunting country. Two wagon trains got through in 1866, but Indian attacks rendered the trail less than popular. Meanwhile, Fort C. F. Smith was constructed two miles below the mouth of Bighorn Canyon in order to protect emigrants on the Trail. So fierce was Sioux harassment that the fort was abandoned after two years. The Sioux had postponed the inevitable spread of settlers for a decade.

Little Bighorn

The Little Bighorn victory of Chief Crazy Horse and his Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors over Custer and the Seventh Cavalry was a valiant last hurrah. The 1877 Nez Perce War and the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation were yet to occur. But the Indians’ open plains, buffalo hunting lifestyle was doomed. The slaughter of the buffalo put the quietus on the way of life that had, for countless centuries, defined Native American culture, religion and tradition.

Northern Cheyenne bands began farming along the Tongue River and several nearby creeks in 1880. The Tongue River Reservation was established in 1884. In 1900 it was enlarged to its present 444,679 acres, some 98% of the land being controlled by the tribe. Today, it is known as the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.

Fort Laramie Treaty

The federal government tried initially to assimilate the Northern Cheyenne with neighboring non-Indians and with their traditional enemy, the Crows. The fiercely independent Northern Cheyenne weren’t having any of that. Today, though the Northern Cheyenne and Crow Reservations share a commmon boundary, the two are completely separate.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 gave the Crows a huge swath of land covering north-central Wyoming and southern Montana. The second Fort Laramie Treaty, signed in 1868, pared the Crow lands to a big chunk of southern Montana. In 1880, the Crows signed an agreement further whittling the reservation to it’s present 2,235,092 acres. It lies south of Billings and includes the shores of the Bighorn River from the Wyoming line north to Hardin.

Early 20th Century

The Northern Pacific Railroad was completed across Montana in 1883, around the time the last of the buffalo were being slaughtered. By 1906, the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul had built road beds across Custer Country, roughly paralleling today’s US Highway 12. The Northern Pacific pitched the Montana Plains to farmers, but those efforts paled beside the flim-flam operation launched by the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul. The idea was to sell prospective homesteaders on farming the fertile plains, milking them for transportation to Montana and further milking them for services provided by towns bankrolled by the railroads. The weather cooperated, sending fortuitous rains. Fortuitous for the railroad barons, less so for gullible farmers. Many were foreign immigrants with little or no knowledge of the Plains’ harsh weather and cyclical droughts. In time, the wet cycle gave way to a more typical dry cycle. By the 1930s, most of the farms carved out by homesteaders had been abandoned, their fences torn out to allow cattle to range freely. Weeds choked the now-dusty streets of the railroad towns. The Homestead Era was over. The cattle era had returned.