Ashshipite

The Ashshipite, 'the Black Lodges', are better known as the River Crow, self-styled Binnéessiippeele, 'those who live amongst the river banks'. They were one of four historic bands of the Crow, or Apsáalooke, a Siouan-speaking Plains people related to the Hidatsa.

Tradition holds that they split from the Hidatsa proper after a quarrel over a bison stomach, which earned the Crow nation the Hidatsa nickname 'those who pout over tripe'.

Leaving the Hidatsa earth-lodge villages of the Upper Missouri in the late seventeenth century, they settled along the Yellowstone and Musselshell rivers and the Big Horn and Powder valleys, later called the Powder River Country. After horses reached the northern Plains around 1730 they became mounted bison hunters, and through the eighteenth century they shared in Crow dominance of the Yellowstone country while warring against the westward Lakota and Cheyenne.