1966 Shane Pictorial Historical Map of Crow Indian Reservation, Montana

Children of the Large-Beaked Bird.

This is a circa 1970 Ralph M. Shane pictorial historical map of Montana's Crow Indian Reservation, conceived to preserve stories of the Crow homeland alongside the better-documented history of battles and treaties. Its dense annotations connect sacred places, intertribal conflicts, schools, and tribal government to a landscape often presented primarily through Custer's defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn, toward top here, in 1876. A Bureau of Indian Affairs road engineer, Shane developed his reservation maps as a personal educational project intended to encourage understanding of Native American history.

A Closer Look

Executed throughout in blue, the map centers on the Bighorn and Little Bighorn river valleys, extending from the Yellowstone near Billings south through the reservation. A township-and-range framework organizes the geography, while pictorial mountains give particular prominence to the Pryor Mountains, Bighorn Canyon, and the divide east of the Little Bighorn. Roads, railroads, and historic trails connect contemporary communities with battlefields, missions, archaeological sites, and places associated with Crow traditions. The surrounding illustrations range from buffalo hunting and mounted warriors to dinosaur excavation, a river steamer, and a reconstructed view of Fort C. F. Smith.

An inset at right traces the contraction of Crow lands, placing the modern reservation within the much larger territory recognized by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, distinguishing successive cessions with dates and boundaries. The accompanying text describes the treaties and later congressional actions through which this reduction occurred. A second inset, titled 'Custer Battlefield,' diagrams military movements and the Native village along the Little Bighorn. Rather than treating the Crow as interchangeable with the peoples who defeated the cavalry, Shane names Custer's six Crow scouts and describes their participation. This distinction reflects the regional struggle over territory: Crow service with the United States Army took place amid sustained conflict with Lakota and Cheyenne rivals. The Battle of the Little Bighorn, fought on June 25 - 26, 1876, thus appears within a broader history of competing Indigenous interests and alliances.

Chief Plenty Coups (1848 - 1932), the last Crow leader to become a chief through traditional means and a key figure in the nation's modern history, dominates the lower-left corner in a large portrait. Nearby passages discuss his military leadership, advocacy of education, diplomatic work, and home at Pryor, which is also illustrated. Schools receive sustained attention, with Shane recording parents' objections to compulsory hair cutting and contrasting the system of boarding schools (which aimed at forced cultural assimilation) with the day school at Lodge Grass, which allowed children to remain at home. Elsewhere, he describes Crow college graduates and the general council government established under the tribe's 1948 constitution. These passages carry the narrative into the mid-20th century rather than ending Crow history with the nineteenth-century Indian Wars.

Sacred geography is similarly integral to the map. Pryor Gap is associated with fasting and vision quests; Big Iron's grave is accompanied by an account of his rescue by a bighorn ram; and the medicine wheels near Fort Smith and on Medicine Mountain are connected through the story of Scarface. Shane identifies such accounts as traditions requiring preservation, although his distinction between written history and orally transmitted legend remains characteristic of an outside compiler. His signed statement beneath the title acknowledges that accounts of encounters with settlers and soldiers largely survive from the non-Native point of view.

Historical Context

The 1950s and 1960s thrust the Crow Nation into high-stakes battles over land loss and resource control that permanently reshaped tribal advocacy in Montana. While navigating the federal government’s urban relocation policies, which sought to dissolve tribal status and disperse populations to urban centers, the Crow successfully maintained their reservation base and direct-democracy General Council governance. The defining crisis of the era emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s along the Bighorn River, where the federal government seized Crow canyon land through eminent domain to construct a hydroelectric project, ironically christening it Yellowtail Dam despite fierce opposition from Crow statesman Robert Yellowtail (1889 - 1988) over water rights, lost land, and suppressed royalties. As that construction concluded in 1966, commercial energy conglomerates simultaneously moved to secure cheap leases across the reservation’s considerable coal reserves. Confronting both federal condemnation and corporate exploitation, Crow leaders spent the late 1960s organizing resistance against unfavorable Bureau of Indian Affairs lease approvals, laying the groundwork for landmark sovereignty and mineral-rights litigation that would dominate federal courts in the subsequent decades.

Publication History

This map was prepared by Ralph M. Shane around the year 1970 (as it refers to Marcus Reno's September 9, 1967, reburial, it must have been published later than that date). A February 1970 National Park Service report by historian Edwin C. Bearss cites the map, noting that it was produced in Billings, Montana, in 1968, though this might have been an early draft of the map. In any event, the map is held by the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection (which dates it to 1970). Due to uncertainty over the date of publication, the map is listed in six separate listings in the OCLC, with suggested dates between 1967 and 1974, being held by nine institutions (ten if including Rumsey / Stanford).

Cartographer

Ralph M. Shane (1910 - July 12, 1984) was an artist and U.S. government engineer. Born near Edelstein, Illinois, Shane's parents moved the family to Pipestone, Minnesota, where he attended public school. After high school, Shane attended the University of Colorado before transferring to the South Dakota School of Mines, where he graduated in 1935 with a B.S. in engineering. He found work with the South Dakota State Highway Commission and drafted strip and right-of-way maps. In November 1936, Shane joined the Bureau of Indian Affairs as an engineering draftsman. He was promoted to junior road engineer the following year. The Bureau transferred him to Sacramento, California, in January 1939 to work as chief of a road survey party. Shane worked as a road engineer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs across the western United States through the 1940s and 1950s, except for a four-month furlough in 1943 when he served as a Navy ensign. He left the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1955 and bought a newspaper in New Town, North Dakota, which he edited for two years before returning to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He retired from the Bureau in 1979. Shane was married twice. First to Jeanette Wildman, whom he married in 1936, then to Carolyn Mae Hodgkinson, whom he married on July 14, 1944. He had four children.   Further Details...

Condition

Fine.

References

Rumsey, 13655.000. OCLC 31864035 et al. Bearss, Edwin C., Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, Montana-Wyoming: History Basic Data, vol. 1 (1970), Foreword and p. 14, note 43.