In the third week of August the cottonwood bottoms along the Little Bighorn River at Crow Agency fill with tipis, as many as fifteen hundred of them in a good year, set up by families who come back from all over the reservation and beyond. For most of a week the camp is a town of its own, with a powwow, a rodeo, horse races and a parade every morning. The Crow, the Apsáalooke, host it, and it has billed itself for years as the tipi capital of the world. It started as something else entirely.
A fair for farmers
In 1884 the government moved the Crow Agency to its present site in the Little Bighorn valley, and federal officials set about making the Crow into farmers. In 1904 the agent, Samuel G. Reynolds, worked out with Crow leaders a plan for a country fair, the kind any farm county held: exhibits of crops, baked goods and handwork, ribbons and cash prizes for the best. To draw people in, he made an exception to government policy and allowed dancing, singing, races and parades, the very things the reservation system was trying to stamp out. By 1905 the agency had a half-mile racetrack and an exhibit hall.
The races and the dancing proved more popular than the produce. Reynolds called the fair off in 1906 and 1907 over them. In 1908 Plenty Coups and other Crow leaders met with him, and the fair came back with both halves, the farm exhibits and the Crow celebration side by side. Dance exhibitions and a rodeo were part of it by 1920. The fair stopped during the Second World War, and again in the late 1950s during the bitter fight over the Bighorn Canyon land wanted for Yellowtail Dam. After the war the agricultural exhibits fell away altogether, and the celebration that was left grew into one of the largest Native gatherings in North America. Joseph Medicine Crow, the tribe's historian, gave its Crow name as Um-basax-bilua.
The week itself
Each morning a parade winds out through the camp and along the road: riders on horses dressed in beaded and painted Crow saddles and trappings, families in their finest, and Crow beadwork that is counted among the most accomplished anywhere. The Parade Dance moves through the camp to the dance arbor, where the powwow runs into the night. The rodeo, an all-Indian competition with its youth events and its horse races, is held at the Edison Real Bird Memorial Complex. On the last day the tribe chooses the committee that will put on the next year's fair.
Visitors are welcome, and many come for the parades and the powwow. The camps are family homes for the week, so walk through them as a guest would, and ask before photographing anyone. The Little Bighorn battlefield lies a couple of miles away, and many visitors see both on the same trip; for the families in the cottonwoods, though, the fair is not about the battle. It is the week the whole people comes home.