Absaroka and the politics of resentment
The secession plan, drafted by local citizens in town meetings and reprinted in syndicated newspapers nationwide, stated that Absaroka would be composed of approximately 27 counties across Wyoming, Montana and South Dakota. These were the ancestral homelands of the Crow people—also known by the autonym Absaroka, or “children of the long-beaked bird”—until they were forced onto reservations after the Plains Wars of the 1870s. (Effectively no thought, voice or notice was given to Indigenous people in the debates over Absaroka, which would have encompassed the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations in southern Montana.)
Under the Absaroka proposal, Wyoming would be practically split in half. The northern portion of the state—including Yellowstone, Devils Tower, the Bighorn Mountains, and the deep canyons and wide plains in between—had been cut off since 1869, when the transcontinental railroad clustered power, influence and money in the southern cities of Cheyenne, Laramie and Green River. As the state struggled through the Great Depression, towns with state institutions like prisons, universities and mental hospitals seemed to fare much better.
Eastern Montana faced practically the same issues. “Its interests have been pretty thoroughly dominated, in a political way, by the western counties,” reported the Picket-Journal, a newspaper based in Red Lodge, a town north of Yellowstone. “No eastern Montana man has ever occupied the office of governor of Montana, or indeed any of the other principal offices.”
South Dakota was no different. “Resentment has been smoldering in the Black Hills for years against supposed discrimination on the part of the South Dakota legislature,” Indiana’s Hammond Times explained. The Dust Bowl had dried out the agricultural eastern portion of the state. In 1935, the only consistent tax revenue came from the tourism, lumber and mining industries in the Black Hills, where Mount Rushmore, an even bigger boon, was still six years away from completion.
“Legislators from eastern counties have turned toward the Black Hills industries as sources of revenue,” the Hammond Times said. “This has fanned the resentment of Black Hills residents who have struggled for years for a decent highway system that would bring tourists from the [Midwest] to enjoy the mountain scenery, fishing and hunting.”
Resentment was nearly synonymous with Absaroka. But mobilizing resentment into a viable political campaign for secession from three states was challenging.