When the Office of Indian Affairs sent Superintendent Calvin Asbury to the Crow Indian Reservation in 1919, he settled in like the bone-chilling winds of that Montana winter, slowly dripping the toxic waste of human oppression onto Crow culture. The Crow Tribe remains forever affected by this zealot who deprived them of their personal freedoms and wealth while expanding his own political power.

The federal policy at that time focused on converting American Indians to Christianity and capitalism: dividing up communally held tribal lands into individual allotments and selling the “surplus” to non-Indians, prohibiting Native spiritual ceremonies, and punishing children at boarding schools who dared to speak their Native languages. The allotment policy usually enriched neighboring non-Indians at the tribes’ expense. The federal government sent superintendents to each reservation to enforce its policies. As one of those agents, Asbury’s zeal brought him respect from his colleagues but eventually pushed him beyond federal and state laws.

His efforts to repress Crow religion and to kill off Crow horses exemplify his fanaticism. At that time non-Indian ranchers leased vast acreages of grazing land on the Crow Reservation and other nearby reservations for 30 cents an acre. The ranchers complained bitterly about the number of  “worthless and wild Indian ponies” eating what the ranchers considered to be “their” grass. So the federal government ordered the roundup of all Indian ponies on the Northern Cheyenne, Crow, and Wind River Reservations.

Last year Joe Medicine Crow, 90, talked to faculty of Little Big Horn College and Montana State University about the incident. Asbury’s campaign against the horses broke the heart of the Crow people, according to Medicine Crow, an author and tribal historian.  “The horse is our brother,” he said. “We ride them, parade them; we use them in ceremonies; and we give them away to our brothers-in-law. The horse is completely involved in Crow culture.”

The Crow perspective eluded Asbury when he ordered the roundup of the horses. The owners, if known, were paid $2.50 for each animal wearing their brand; unfortunately most of the horses were unmarked. In 1924, he took his campaign against horses another step, collaborating with a non-Indian reservation rancher, Matt Tschirgi, who was also a county commissioner. Horses were appraised as personal property. When individual Indians could not pay the horse tax, the horses were sold and the $2.50 per horse deducted from the sale proceeds. This scheme failed when a Crow man named Four Tops, the owner of some 6,000 horses, took the case to the Montana Supreme Court and won.

Not to be deterred, Asbury began the slaughter, as authorized by the federal Commissioner of Indian Affairs. “A contract went out to Tschirgi to exterminate all wild horses. They gave us two months to find our horses and bring them in,” Medicine Crow said. “The government gave them $4 for each pair of ears they cut off from those ponies. Some Indians did it for a while, too,” he said. “But the government only gave them $2 each pair, and then the elders told them, ‘Stop that. These are your brothers,’ so they did.” The cowboys also tired of the horse deaths, so the rancher brought in gunmen from Texas.

“There were dead horses everywhere. It was a horrible smell,” Medicine Crow said. “And then to add insult to injury, they came from Billings with wagons and loaded the bones of our brothers, the horses, to take them for fertilizer.” Finally the United States government intervened, saying they had gone too far. “They said they killed 44,000 horses, but it was way more than that,” he said.

Asbury continued to forge policies that undermined Crow culture and identity while receiving accolades from others in the Office of Indian Affairs for his efforts. Asbury implied that he had “his Indians” under control, forging new lives as assimilated Christian Indian farmers. He received letters from superintendents at several Montana reservations complimenting him on his approach to the “horse problem.” While fighting the “peyote problem,” Asbury received a letter from a superintendent in Oklahoma who was eager to work with him because Asbury had stayed at the Crow Agency longer then any other superintendent. When the Crows called for Asbury’s removal, Washington sent an agent to investigate, who, unsurprisingly, decided that their claims were unfounded.

When Asbury had arrived, the Crows’ key religious groups still practiced faithfully, and a new religion, the “peyote way” or Native American Church, was taking hold. Intolerant of religious and social gatherings, Asbury urged the Crow Indians to “stay away from celebrations and tend their farms.” Crows persisted, however, with the planting ceremonies of the Tobacco Society, an important religious organization that considers the tobacco plant to be sacred. Asbury ordered tribal police to disperse such gatherings, arresting suspected leaders and publicly humiliating them in the Crow Agency Public Park, bound at their hands and feet.

Asbury bragged he was sent to the Crow Reservation because of his earlier work for anti-peyote laws as a superintendent in Nevada. The use of the hallucinogen, peyote, is an essential sacrament of the Native American Church. Upon his arrival in Montana, he made inquiries to discover which Crows were peyotists, referring to them as “addicts.” The National Archives contains a flurry of letters from Asbury’s pen calling for laws to stop peyote use. He distributed anti-peyote material not only to state officials but to local civic organizations as well.

At the same time he tried to keep his lobbying campaign against peyote secret from Crow people. In 1923, Asbury wrote to Montana state officials saying he would not attend the vote on the bill to outlaw the possession, transport, or use of peyote in Montana. He did not want to arouse suspicion about the bill; he did not want the Crows to know about and have a voice in the legislation. In a triumphant letter to colleagues, Asbury reported the anti-peyote law passed unanimously. When Crows began having shipments of peyote sent to the nearby state of Wyoming, Asbury initiated anti-peyote legislation there as well. To Asbury’s chagrin, however, the federal government took the position that tribal members were allowed to possess and partake of the peyote sacrament as long as they did so on tribal lands.

In 1926, the anti-peyote crusaders suffered a serious defeat in court. Two years earlier, a Crow man named Big Sheep had been arrested and taken away in handcuffs, hobbles, and a ball and chain for possessing peyote. Not surprisingly, he pled “not guilty,” saying he had no knowledge of the law forbidding peyote in Montana. In January 1926, the Montana State Supreme Court reversed the conviction because he was a tribal member on tribal lands, not because Big Sheep’s First Amendment, freedom of religion rights were violated.

Educated Crow tribal members understood their rights and used the system to fight zealots like Asbury. Ironically, the assimilation policies that brought the white man’s education to young Crows created “young radicals,” as Asbury labeled them, who effectively defended their tribe and lands on a new battleground.

In 1929, a Denver Post reporter witnessed this first hand when Barney Old Coyote Sr. sought legal advice from Sheridan, WY, attorneys in the fight against anti-peyote legislation. “You have killed our game, you have substituted your civilization for ours until we have only one right and that one right is embodied in the Constitution of the United States. It is the right of adoring God.”

Asbury had a lasting impact on some aspects of Crow culture, including their sense of self-worth and the Tobacco Society. However, he did not succeed in assimilating “his Indians.” The people never lost their love for and ability to handle horses, and the horse retained its stature in Crow culture. Today the Crow once again own large herds of horses, and a horse remains the most sacred of gifts. Visitors to Crow Agency see youngsters riding horseback along the streets and through the city park, and guests at the annual Crow Fair view daily horse parades. Little Big Horn College offers a course covering the history of the horse among the Crow as well as a degree program in equine training and management.

Public pressure forced the federal government to eventually pass the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978. Little Big Horn College Crow Studies Instructor Dale Old Horn tells his classes that Asbury was the last evangelistically-driven superintendent who prohibited Native culture. The superintendent served during the tenure of President Woodrow Wilson, whose public statements completely contradicted his administration’s assimilationist Indian policy. Ironically, Old Horn reminds his students, Wilson said, “America’s beauty and strength is in her diversity.”

Carrie Moran McCleary (Chippewa Cree) lives on the Crow Reservation with her husband, Tim; their children, Austin Denny, 8, and Katherine Nova, 6; and their horses. She teaches basic writing at Little Big Horn College.

For more information on Crow history see The Way of the Warrior, Stories of the Crow People, edited by Phenocia Bauerle, compiled and translated by Henry Old Coyote and Barney Old Coyote Jr. (2003). Also The Handsome People: A History of the Crow Indians and the Whites by Charles Crane Bradley (1991).