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Crow Indians Receiving Presents from the Indian Peace Commissioners, Fort Laramie, Dakota Territory

Title: Crow Indians receiving presents from the Indian Peace Commissioners, Fort Laramie, Wyoming; Individuals in front of encampment at Fort Laramie as rations are distributed; Individuals sit and stand around an encampment at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, as rations are distributed.

Credit Line: Owner: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution; This record is part of the Catalog of American Portraits, a research archive of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Permission to reproduce images (if available) must be obtained from the portrait owner. Please note that if an owner is listed above, this information may not be current.

Exhibition Label: The primary intention of the Fort Laramie Treaty was to establish reservations on the northern Plains. These reservations were intended to abolish traditional, nomadic lifeways, and to encourage farming as a means of assimilating (or “civilizing”) the region’s indigenous peoples. The 1868 treaty set the boundaries of the Crow reservation between the Yellowstone River and the Bighorn Mountains, adjacent to the Powder River Basin. Claimed by the Crow in opposition to the allied Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho, the Powder River Basin lay in the “unceded Indian territory” (which abutted the Great Sioux Reservation), and the treaty permitted all four tribes equal access to the territory so long as there was buffalo to hunt. Before the army formally withdrew from the Powder River Basin, the Lakota resumed their decades-long rivalry with the Crow. In the coming years, the army used this traditional conflict to its advantage, for instance employing Crow scouts in George Armstrong Custer’s military campaigns against the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho.