Page 24 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

24 About Tippet Rise
Before Tippet Rise by Alexis M. Adams
Long before Tippet Rise, the Crow Indians roamed this wide-open land freely and subsisted from it skillfully. They hunted bison, deer, elk, and bear. They gathered wild edibles: berries, greens, roots, and herbs. When food was scarce, they ate pemmican, which they made from dried bison meat ground with berries and fat. They called themselves Apsaalooké. Often translated as “Children of the Large-Beaked Bird,” it is the origin of the name of the mountains south of Tippet Rise—the Absarokas—and of the town, Absarokee, northeast of here. The Crow people lived in tipis (many still use them for fairs and pow- wows). Made with hides stretched over wooden poles cut from the lodgepole pine, it is the kind of housing that is easy to raise and easy to dismantle: the perfect solution for a nomadic people. Once collapsed, the tipi poles created a travois: a horse-or dog-pulled sleigh-like structure used to carry children and belongings from campsite to campsite.