Ashalaho

The Ashalaho, also known as the Mountain Crow, were the largest of the four historic bands of the Crow, who call themselves Apsáalooke. Their name means 'Many Lodges'.

Tradition holds that they split from the Awatixa Hidatsa and were the first Crow group to travel west: their leader No Intestines followed a vision and led his band on a long migration in search of sacred tobacco before settling on the upper Yellowstone River.

They lived in the Rocky Mountain foothills along the Wyoming-Montana border, around the Big Horn and Absaroka ranges. Like the other Crow bands they had left the Hidatsa earth-lodge villages on the Upper Missouri in the late seventeenth century, became mounted bison hunters after horses reached the northern Plains around 1730, and through the eighteenth century dominated the Yellowstone valley while resisting the Lakota and Cheyenne.