Today, the Crow Nation exists on its reservation in Montana. There is no Crow state (although the reservation is technically sovereign per the NCSL), and generally, Crow culture ends at the reservation's borders. But there was a time when the Crow tribe gave its name to an attempt to create a new state out of Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

In 1939, Republican and libertarian voters of Northern Wyoming were increasingly disenchanted with the distribution of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal funds. According to South Dakota Magazine, Wyoming's Democratic Party favored larger towns and industries in the south of the state, over the rural, mostly-Republican north. So the inhabitants of Northern Wyoming, joined by Montanans and South Dakotans, set up their own state called Absaroka with its capital at Sheridan. The new state's boundaries included the Crow reservation.

It is unclear why the partition's proponents chose a Crow name for their state. Absaroka's core lands in Wyoming, which historically belonged to the Crow under the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty. But there is nothing that speaks to the tribe's view on the venture. One can speculate, however, that they probably opposed it. According to Little Big Horn College, the Roosevelt Administration appointed Crow chief Robert Yellowtail as superintendent of the Crow reservation, the first Native American to hold the post. Yellowtail engineered the cession of over 40,000 acres of land to the Crow Tribe from White ranchers and used federal money to economically develop the Crow lands. Thus, it is possible that the ranchers that supported Absaroka were in part motivated by these land disputes with the Crow. How ironic, then that the new state should have been named after the tribe.

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