Aashbikkaashee

Aashbikkaashee lies on the Montana side of the Beartooth Mountains, near the headwaters of the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone. The country rises from woods and creek valleys to high plateau, with cold, dry weather and timber on the slopes.

Crow bands, the Apsáalooke, ranged through these mountains and valleys in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, after driving Shoshone groups such as the Bikkaashe, the "People of the Grass Lodges," farther west. The woods supplied lodge poles, and game moved between the high plateau and the plains below. From the 1820s fur trappers worked the streams of the Yellowstone basin and traded with the Crow.