Choosing Their Enemies: The Apsaalooke Between Empires, 1740-1890
By Marcus Whitfield Brady
Length4h 14m
About this audiobook
Some Hidatsa traditions remember it as an abandonment. The Apsaalooke remember it as a birth. In the story as it comes down, a woman sets a parfleche of dried corn and a horn spoon outside an earth-lodge door on the upper Missouri before dawn, walks to the river, and does not turn around. Her husband's family sleeps inside. Her father's family has already gone.
The split, sometime around 1700, was never quite a war and never quite a divorce. What made it possible was the horse. Corn does not run, and the settled Hidatsa towns had no need to chase the herds, but for the faction already halfway out the door, "the horse was the door." They rode west up the Yellowstone into the country of the Bighorn, the Musselshell and the Powder, and called themselves children of the large-beaked bird. Traders called them Crow.
Between 1740 and 1890 they defended that country between rival powers: the Blackfeet to the west, the Lakota pressing in from the east, and finally the United States. The fur-trade rendezvous, the Fort Laramie treaty of 1851, the Powder River war, the Crow scouts who rode with the Army, and the Nez Perce flight across their land in 1877 all come before the last of the bison, the reservation, and the long fight over its boundary.
Every August the Apsaalooke raise their lodges by the hundreds along the Little Bighorn for Crow Fair, where the book ends. They went looking for a better country, and they are still in it.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 14 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 18, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The People Who Split
2Chapter 2: The Country of Rivers
3Chapter 3: The Blackfeet and the Western Door
4Chapter 4: The Lakota Come West
5Chapter 5: The Rendezvous Years
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6Chapter 6: The Treaty of Fort Laramie, 1851
7Chapter 7: The Powder River War
8Chapter 8: Scouts
9Chapter 9: The Flight of the Nez Perce and the Crow Country
10Chapter 10: The Bison and the Ledger
11Chapter 11: The Reservation and the Fight for the Boundary
12Chapter 12: Crow Fair
13About the Author
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