Rocky Boy (Chippewa leader)
Formed from part of Fort Assiniboine, which was closed, it is located in Hill and Chouteau counties in north central Montana.
As a young man, Asiniwiin was a member of the band led by Monsomos (Moose Dung) or Red Robe, a signor of the 1864 Pembina treaty.
He worked to keep the Ojibwe tribal identity alive in Montana, at a time when more whites were settling the land, and expected the Indians to disappear.
Many of Chief Rocky Boy's people failed to understand the implications of their true sovereign attributes and endured many decades with lack of access to an education.
Ironically, this is the very reason Chief Rocky Boy petitioned for a homeland after the illegal sale of his 100,000 acres in Thief River, Minnesota.
He would also dispossess the band through illegal imposition of the McLaughlin Roll that contained 451 names for approval for final enrollment.
In 1904, the government of the United States debated over finding a home for the Ojibwe of Montana on the Flathead Reservation, but the bill was not ratified.
The Chippewa of the Flathead Reservation were not the only tribe to be forced by the United States to assimilate among the Kootenai and Salish, so were the Nez Perce.
Though they had legal permission to hunt, the game warden told them he would return the next day and if they had not left the Swan Valley they would be arrested.
To ease the unrest the Ojibwe felt about the Land Acts to open up the Flathead and Fort Peck Reservations to white settlement, the United States sent Indian Inspector Frank Churchill to Montana to negotiate with Rocky Boy in that same year of 1908.
Representatives from the United States continued to negotiate with Rocky Boy after the Valley County, Montana Ojibwe reservation quest.
In 1909, Rocky Boy reached an agreement with the United States for a new home for the landless Ojibwe from western Montana and Idaho, on the Blackfeet Reservation, between St. Mary, Babb, and the Canada–US border.
The federal government would oversee the wholesale destruction of the Rocky Boy Band of Chippewa Indians by implementing the 1917 McLaughlin Roll.
Through federal abuse of power, overreach, and outright incompetence, the original Ojibwe band members enumerated in the 1908 census were improperly removed from the tribal roll.
As a result, and due in large part, to the Cree malfeasance and contest for power, the majority of Chief Rocky Boy's people were illegally dispossessed from their own tribe.
In later years, the Secretary of Interior would illegally deny a trust responsibility to the tribal members residing there.
Hill 57 was initially settled by Jim Loud Thunder Gopher, who was a hard worker, and honest Ojibwe leader of Saginaw descent.
Jim Gopher was the son-in-law of Chief Rocky Boy's brother, Charles Chippewa or Walking Stone.
Between 1900 and 1910, a period of great unrest occurred in Montana and the rest of the western United States, as the Land Acts took effect and Reservations were opened up to white settlement.
