Awaxaawippíia — an exclusive excerpt from ‘The Crazies: the Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West’

Excerpted from “The Crazies: The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West” by Amy Gamerman. Copyright © 2025 by Amy Gamerman. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. May not be republished without the express permission of Simon & Schuster.

In the beginning, there were the mountains, and the wind flowed over them. Sediment cores drawn from the muddy depths of an ancient lake west of the Crazies are banded with thick layers of silt, blown there some fifteen thousand years ago by masses of cold air whipping off the receding glaciers. There’s pollen embedded in that ancient mud as well, borne on great gusts from the grasses and sages and the flowering broadleaf plants called forbs that flourished on the steppes and tundra that was Sweet Grass County.

The first people arrived at the end of the last Ice Age. We know that they traveled and hunted and gathered food in and around the Crazies for thousands of years. The mountains are networked with aboriginal trail systems, some marked with ancient stone cairns that have sunk into the earth like wisdom teeth. It was a fertile place, with abundant fresh water and game. Streams flowed downslope from the mountains in every direction, drawing herds of mastodons and woolly mammoths and ancient bison to its valleys. Even then, the Crazies were a fantastic piece of real estate.

For the first people, the best places were ones where you could hide from the creatures that would kill you while scoping out the creatures you could kill. A mix of high and low places, wide-open places and enclosed hidden ones, an interplay of sunlight and shadow. Prospect and ref­uge is the phrase a geographer came up with back in the 1970s to sum up the essence of great scenery. Our most primitive instincts draw us toward landscapes that offer both safety and opportunity. Tens of thousands of years ago, the hills and river valleys sheltered by these mountains telegraphed a message: Here, you will survive. By 2019, that message had become a slogan on a T-shirt at Gusts department store: Last Best Place. 

The mountains officially became Crazy in 1876, when a War Department cartographer labeled the island range west of Big Timber as the “Crazy Woman Mtns.” There are various stories about how the Crazies got their name, the most popular of which involves a pioneer woman who went raving mad after her family was massacred by Indians, disappearing into the mountains and haunting them with her cries. This almost certainly did not happen. Although there were some gruesome attacks on wagon trains on the Bozeman Trail, none seem to have occurred in the Crazies. Diaries kept by emigrants from that period don’t refer to the Crazies at all.

There are more prosaic explanations. The drainage from the mountains, which runs in every direction, is crazed. The toxic, purple-blossomed locoweed that grows in the foothills drives cows and horses crazy, causing weakness, extreme nervousness, and eyes dull and staring. The fierce winds that whipsaw the mountains and the dangerous unpredictability of the weather up there — truly insane. Some point to the irregular, or crazed, landforms of the mountains themselves.

But the word that the Crow, or Apsáalooke, people know the mountains by offers a better portal to their otherworldly mystique: Awaxaawippíia. Awaxaawé is the Apsáalooke word for mountain. The meaning of Ippíia is more elusive. It’s an archaic term that means dangerous or ominous. You can find it in the Crow word for nightmare: baashíalippiia. Otherwise, ippíia no longer exists in the Apsáalooke language.

Awaxaawippíia — a high, jagged place with a bad reputation or omen. It’s usually translated as the Ominous Mountains. Some call them the Bad Dream Mountains.

… The island mountain range is the spiritual locus of Crow Country, with Crazy Peak at its epicenter: a notched black pinnacle, piercing the sky. For the Apsáalooke, the Crazies were a place to experience life-changing visions, a literal dreamscape. If you were an ambitious young person, eager to prove yourself to the elders, you climbed high into the mountains, built a fasting bed from rocks, and lay there for days, praying to be visited by a presence from the spirit world. Dreams were power. Fasting in the Crazies as a teen in the early 1800s, Eelápuash — also called Sore Belly — saw a fearsome thunderbird who imparted the art of war to him while shooting out lightning bolts. That vision — paired with his prowess as a horse thief — propelled Sore Belly’s rise to chiefdom.

The Crazies are still held sacred by Apsáalooke people. The mountains are a repository of stories. Some are rarely spoken of. Timothy McCleary, a scholar of Crow tribal culture and language, has led an ongoing project called the Apsáalooke Place Names Database since 1996 at Little Big Horn College. Because the Crow named places for the events that took place there, the database provides a vivid history — a story map of the past.

The database contains a tantalizing fragment of information provided by Barney Old Coyote Jr., a revered elder. In the Second World War, Old Coyote was a gunner on B-17 Flying Fortresses and a windtalker — part of an elite group of Crow combatants who used Apsáalooke code words to relay crucial information about enemy positions during bombing sorties. He flew seventy-two combat missions, earning seventeen medals for his service — the most decorated Native American to serve in the Second World War. Old Coyote, who died in 2012, was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2015. 

Old Coyote spent some of the last days of his life driving around Montana with McCleary, pointing out places that were important to the Apsáalooke people and telling stories about the things that happened there. Old Coyote told McCleary that the Crazies were where the Outcasts went — people who had been scalped but survived. Scalping was the ultimate insult. If you had been dishonored in this way — whether in battle or in an enemy raid — you could no longer live among your own people. It was too embarrassing, Old Coyote explained, and offensive to others. “When a person is scalped the skin on their forehead droops over their face, so yeah, it’s kind of gruesome,” McCleary said.

The Outcasts occupied an existential gray zone. They became another kind of being: alive, yet not alive. Barney Old Coyote’s daughter, Rachel Sue Old Coyote, told me a story about her nephew, who once hiked into the Crazies with some friends to a mountain hot spring they knew about. They sat in a hot pool, laughing and drinking. A rock hit her nephew from behind. He looked around, but didn’t see anyone.

“And everybody else started saying, ‘Hey, somebody just hit me with a rock.’ And a couple of the guys, emboldened by alcohol, got out and were scouting around, and then a couple of larger rocks started landing in the pool,” Old Coyote told me. The young people left in a hurry. They were not welcome there, she said. “I attribute it to the lack of respect that was being shown.”

Rachel Sue Old Coyote described the Crazies as a massive battery, a storehouse of energy and collective memory. You could also say they are a magnet. The mountains have drawn human beings almost from the moment they emerged from the ice sheets that covered Montana in the Last Glacial Maximum. The Apsáalooke had always known this; the rest of the world would begin to discover it one spring day in 1968, when a construction worker named Ben Hargis tore into a sandstone cliff near the town of Wilsall with his front-end loader.

The cliff was on a piece of land directly west of the Crazies’ Wilsall Peak, which was owned by Melvyn Anzick, a large-animal veterinarian. Mel and Helen Anzick brought their children there on weekends to picnic and fish on Flathead Creek, which wound around the cliff. Anzick had given Hargis permission to collect talus, or loose rock, for a construction project at the local high school.

Hargis had scooped about ninety yards of sandstone talus out of the side of the outcropping when a large, shiny rock slipped out from the front-end loader’s claws. It was a fluted stone tool of some kind, with a fine, tapering point. Hargis collected a bucket of talus to dump in a pothole, and another shiny stone — a large biface of hard, fine-grained quartz, called chert — fell out. It was oblong and the size of a hubcap. Both stones were coated with powdery red stuff.

That evening, Hargis returned with his wife, Faye, and their friends Calvin and Mary Sarver. They went to the spot where the stone objects had tumbled out of the outcropping and started to dig. They soon found more artifacts — many more, about a hundred in all. Each time they pulled out a stone, another one clinked down on top of it. The tools were as neatly stacked as a row of candy bars in a vending machine. The treasure hunters dug and dug until they came upon something that stopped them short: the delicate skull of a child, covered in the same thick, red dust that coated the tools.

Hargis and his friends had unearthed the oldest grave in the Ameri- cas. The skeletal remains of the person who would become known as the Clovis, or Anzick, child have since been radiocarbon dated to between 12,707 and 12,556 years. The child, who was between the age of one and two, had been buried beneath an extraordinary trove of objects. There were large projectile points — some a half foot long, the tips and edges still sharp. There were blades and hand axes and large, irregular, flaked stones the size of potlids, and delicately cross-hatched, beveled rods of bone or antler. The stones were glossy, richly colored—moss agate, chalcedony, porcellanite. Some came from ancient quarry sites hundreds of miles from the burial grounds. All the artifacts were coated in red ocher — a ferrous iron-oxide mineral that Paleo-Indian people often carried with them on their travels.

The stone tools were the product of untold hours of work. They had been created by a complex process that involved slowly heating the stone to a high temperature, which made it easier to flake into sharp-edged instruments for hunting, butchering, and scraping hides. Heat produced chemical alterations in the stone, giving it luster and translucency. Different types of stone require different temperatures; the people who made the objects understood that. Each projectile point had a shallow groove so that it could be fitted to a spear — the product of a distinctive flaking technique called fluting that is the hallmark of the late-Pleistocene Clo- vis culture.

Although one of the bone rods had been deliberately—perhaps ritualistically — broken, none of the stone tools showed any signs of wear. They had been created to be buried. The array included flaking tools and preforms — partially worked points that had yet to be knapped and turned into tools — and large stone pieces called cores, from which more tools could be made. The child had been buried with everything one would need in the afterlife. Because the lithic artifacts represented every phase of the toolmaking process, some scholars have compared the burial assemblage to a teaching kit—an instruction manual with an ancient culture’s most vital information, written in stone.

Hargis and Calvin Sarver eventually revealed their discovery to Mel Anzick, who suggested that they divvy up the find. He numbered the stone and bone artifacts with a pencil and they drew lots: Anzick got half, Hargis and Sarver each got a quarter. He sent the skeletal remains, which Hargis had been carrying around in the glove compartment of his dump truck, to the University of Montana.

The Anzicks’ daughter, Sarah, was about two years old at the time of the discovery — the same age as the buried child. As a little girl, she caught her first fish in Flathead Creek, just below the ancient child’s resting place. For many years, the Anzicks kept their share of the stone and bone artifacts in their home, in glass-topped boxes lined with cotton. From time to time, Sarah would take out the stone tools from the box and run her fingers over the swirled patterns and the flaked edges. They were heavy, the colors ranging from bright yellow to purple, brown and blue. A few still had traces of red ocher on them. Holding one made her heart drop. It was an indescribable sensation, the pull of deep time. Part of a child’s skeleton was found with the tools, she’d been told. She wondered where the rest of the child was.

Because the human remains and stone tools had been discovered on private property, they were not subject to the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, which applied only to artifacts recovered on federal or tribal land. The skeletal remains were kept at the University of Montana until 1999, when they were returned to the Anzick family in a bankers box.

By then, Sarah Anzick had become a molecular biologist with the National Institutes of Health, a member of the team working on the human genome project. In 2001, the project’s international consortium published the first draft of the human genome sequence. Inspired, Sarah decided to try to crack the genetic code of the Clovis child — her spectral twin. Working on her own time, she tried to extract DNA from one of the child’s rib bones, but was unsuccessful. In 2010, she contacted Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cophenhagen who was doing pioneering work with ancient DNA. Willerslev had sequenced the entire genome of a Paleo-Eskimo man from a four-thousand-year-old clump of human hair dug out from the Greenland permafrost. Willerslev asked how soon Anzick could get herself on a plane to Copenhagen with the bones.

Working with a tiny fragment of DNA retrieved from the dense bone of the child’s inner ear, Willerslev and his team would spend the next four years identifying and organizing over three billion jigsaw pieces of ancient code. By the time they were finished, they had created a genetic snapshot of the oldest skeleton in the Americas, who they now knew had been a little boy.

The toddler’s genome told an extraordinary story — an origin story. About one-third of his DNA linked him to a boy who lived twenty-four thousand years ago in Siberia, whose skeleton was unearthed near the village of Mal’ta. The other two-thirds of his genes flowed from ancient East Asia — specifically, from a forty-thousand-year-old man who left his bone fragments in the Tianyuan cave near Beijing.

When it came to pairing the child with people living today, the researchers found no relationship to modern Chinese or Siberians—or to any population west of the Bering Strait. But there was no question whom this child belonged to. The Clovis child — the most ancient American ever discovered — was related to 80 percent of all indigenous North and South American groups from whom DNA exists for comparison. He was a direct forebear of people in forty-four tribes in Central and South America, and a close relative of seven northern Native American tribal groups from Canada and the Arctic. He is very likely an ancestor of Native Americans in the United States as well, though limited genetic data exists to establish this. (After decades of ethical abuses by the American scientific and medical establishment, many tribes have rebuffed attempts at genetic research, and some have banned it altogether.)

Willerslev’s theory goes like this: two groups of Upper Paleolithic people — ancient Siberians and ancient East Asians — encountered one another in Beringia, a vast region that once extended from Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula to the Yukon, joined by a land bridge across the Bering Sea. They banded together to form a new nomadic tribe. Willerslev believes it was a small group—perhaps as few as a hundred people. These people were among the first human beings to reach Montana as it emerged from the ice sheets some thirteen to fourteen thousand years ago. Their descendants peopled the Americas. The proof was right there, in the child’s genome.

The discovery drove a Clovis spear point through the Solutrean hypothesis, which held that the first Americans were actually European seafarers who crossed the Atlantic Ocean — a hypothesis popular with white nationalists that still held currency in some circles. The Clovis child affirmed what Native Americans said all along: We’ve always been here.

Willerslev describes the boy as the Adam of the Americas. “If you should ever use a word like ‘Adam’ in a scientific context, then it is the Anzick child,” he said. “I mean, this child, and the group he belonged to, have delivered a legacy across all the Americas. It’s an evolutionary success story.”

Nothing is known about the boy, how he lived or how he died. The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that out of all the places the child’s people could have chosen for his final resting place, they chose this one.

The ancient ones knew it well. The sandstone cliff was a landmark visible for miles, the nexus of several trail systems. It occupied the highest spot in a fertile river basin sheltered by mountains on all sides. It rose up from the valley floor like the prow of a ship, sailing toward the Crazies. The boy’s people dug out a small chamber in the side of the cliff and placed him there with all the tools he would ever need — the finest tools in creation. His resting place faced directly east. It would be lit by the first rays of the sun as it climbed above the Crazies every day, for all days. The views, needless to say, were spectacular. It was a very good place — the best place in the world.

If the child was America’s Adam, then this was Eden.

Excerpted from “The Crazies: The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West” by Amy Gamerman. Copyright © 2025 by Amy Gamerman. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. May not be republished without the express permission of Simon & Schuster.