Robert Yellowtail was born at Lodge Grass in 1889, sent away as a boy to government boarding schools as far off as the Sherman Institute in California, and came home to spend his life defending Crow land. Plenty Coups called on him to carry the tribe's fights to Washington. In 1934 he became the first Native person appointed superintendent of his own tribe's reservation, and in that job he got white ranchers to return some 40,000 acres and brought in horses and cattle and bison from Yellowstone.
Just after World War II the government came for the Bighorn River, and for the canyon the Crow held sacred. Yellowtail fought the dam with everything he had. If it had to be built, he said, the government could lease the site for a million dollars a year for fifty years, after which dam and land would come back to the Crow. The tribe split over it, and government agents spread word that he meant to sell out his people for his own gain. In the end the Crow sold the land, about 12,000 acres, outright. Construction began in 1961, and the dam that rose 525 feet across the mouth of Bighorn Canyon was dedicated on October 31, 1968, under his name.
The dam backed up Bighorn Lake some seventy miles through the canyon into Wyoming, and Congress made the canyon a national recreation area in 1966. Its cold, steady releases turned the river below into one of the most famous trout streams in Montana. Yellowtail lived until 1988, long enough to lead the tribe again in the 1970s fight over the coal under Crow land and to tell his side in the documentary Contrary Warriors.
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