The State That Never Was:

Absaroka and the Depression-Era Rebellion on the Northern Plains

Origins and Grievances

The name Absaroka carries a history far older than the political movement that briefly borrowed it in the 1930s. Derived from the Hidatsa language, the term is the autonym of the Apsáalooke, the people settlers came to call the Crow, and it translates roughly as “children of the large-beaked bird.” The Apsáalooke had occupied the country stretching from the headwaters of the Yellowstone River across the Bighorn Basin and into the Black Hills for generations before American expansion forced them onto a reservation in southeastern Montana following the Plains Wars of the 1870s. When Depression-era discontents reached for a name for their proposed new state in the late 1930s, they took this one without apparent reflection on its Indigenous meaning — a telling omission that would characterize the movement throughout its short life.

The Absaroka proposal emerged from the intersection of geography, economic desperation, and political resentment in three states: northern Wyoming, southeastern Montana, and western South Dakota. The first documented public discussion of carving a new state from this territory appeared on March 2, 1935, the same day the Daily Inter Lake, a Montana newspaper, ran a front page dense with Depression-era calamity — headlines about deadlocked relief legislation, labor disputes, and insurgent forces abroad. The juxtaposition was not coincidental. The rural corners of Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota were suffering acutely, and the news columns of that morning captured the general mood of exhaustion and abandonment that would fuel the Absaroka campaign.

What bound together these remote counties across three states was their shared distance — physical, political, and economic — from the capitals and population centers that controlled their fates. Sheridan, Wyoming, which became the informal capital of the proposed state, sat roughly 300 miles from Cheyenne. Residents of the region had long complained that they could not even reach their own state capital by train without first crossing into other states. As one Sheridan local put it in the pages of the Daily Inter Lake, the northern counties of Wyoming had for years been treated as “an orphan or stepchild” of state government. Southeastern Montana’s small towns — Forsyth, Miles City, Glendive — fared little better at the hands of a Helena government oriented toward the more populous western part of the state. The Red Lodge newspaper, the Picket-Journal, observed with some bitterness that the eastern portion of Montana had been “pretty thoroughly dominated, in a political way, by the western counties,” and that no man from eastern Montana had ever served as governor.

The New Deal and Political Fracture

The onset of the New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 deepened rather than resolved the sense of abandonment. Federal relief programs, which were filtered through local institutions, tended to concentrate in towns with universities, hospitals, and established infrastructure. Well-connected communities in the southern tier of Wyoming or the western reaches of Montana received improvements; the isolated northern and eastern fringes did not. Towns with state institutions like prisons and universities fared measurably better during the early years of the Depression, while ranching and farming communities on the high plains waited in vain for programs that seemed always to benefit someone else.

The political dimension was equally charged. The counties that would become Absaroka were populated predominantly by conservative, Republican-leaning ranchers and farmers who already viewed Roosevelt’s New Deal with deep suspicion — some regarded it as a form of socialism designed to override local control and reward urban constituencies. They resented their state governments, which in Wyoming were controlled by Democrats representing the southern, railroad-corridor cities of Cheyenne, Laramie, and Green River. The Union Pacific transcontinental line had since 1869 concentrated political and economic power in Wyoming’s southern tier, and the New Deal’s institutional bias toward populated areas simply extended that historical imbalance into the Depression era.

For the people of would-be Absaroka, the grievance was not merely philosophical. Drought and grasshopper plagues had hammered the agricultural economy through much of the early and middle 1930s. The ranching economy offered little cushion. Federal aid, when it came at all, arrived late and in insufficient quantities. The secessionist sentiment that bubbled up in 1935 was, at its root, an expression of exhaustion with distant governments that collected taxes from remote communities and returned very little in exchange.

A.R. Swickard and the Architecture of Protest

The man who most visibly embodied the Absaroka cause was A.R. Swickard, the street and water commissioner of Sheridan, Wyoming. Swickard had arrived in Sheridan in 1908 from Illinois, initially to play minor league baseball. His professional athletic career went nowhere — he never advanced beyond the minor leagues — and he settled into municipal work, unsuccessfully running for mayor in 1927 before securing his commissioner’s post in 1931. He was a local figure of modest achievement and considerable ambition, a man who, as the Billings Gazette would later observe with careful understatement, had “never broken out of the minor leagues, either in baseball or life.”

Swickard’s entry into the Absaroka movement was characteristically oblique. In early 1939, he circulated a petition to have Sheridan County detach from Wyoming and join Montana, arguing that the county had again been “forgotten by Wyoming.” The petition was a deliberate provocation, a way to get names in newspapers on both sides of the state line. When local businessmen approached him and offered to finance a broader revival of the 1935 statehood idea, Swickard was receptive. He convened an informal gathering in the basement of the Sheridan Rotary Club, which served as the rebel headquarters, and there he and a small group of like-minded citizens sketched out the boundaries of their new state: a square chunk removed from southeastern Montana, a straight line drawn across northern Wyoming, and a portion of western South Dakota, encompassing approximately 27 counties in all. The lines were political rather than geographic — no natural boundary like the Missouri River guided them — and the map changed several times over the course of the movement’s brief life.

Swickard declared himself governor of Absaroka. The Wyoming newspapers responded by referring to him sardonically as “His Excellency,” and at least one legislator in Washington dismissed the proposal as “too preposterous to even consider.” But Swickard was not working through legislative channels. The movement was, as the South Dakota Magazine later characterized it, “half kidding and half serious” — a calculated use of spectacle to generate the sort of media attention that had eluded the region for years.

Symbols, Spectacle, and the Limits of Seriousness

Swickard understood that a state, however unofficial, required symbols. License plates were printed bearing the motto “Absaroka: Playground of the Nation” — a slogan that reflected the movement’s sincere belief that the region’s tourism potential, anchored by Yellowstone National Park, Devils Tower, the Bighorn Mountains, and the partially complete Mount Rushmore, could sustain a viable state economy. Coins were minted. A flag was designed. In 1939, a Miss Absaroka pageant was held, in deliberate imitation of the Miss America competition, and Dorothy Fellows of Sheridan was crowned the first and only Miss Absaroka. The license plates, the beauty queen, and the self-appointed governor generated syndicated newspaper coverage across the country.

The proposed state made it to Capitol Hill in a roundabout way when Samuel W. King, the congressional representative for the Hawaii Territory, rose to declare that Hawaii held prior claim to the status of 49th state and that Absaroka was welcome to be 50th. The remark was not entirely humorous. Hawaii’s advocates were genuinely concerned that a continental secessionist movement, however improbable, might complicate their own long-standing push for statehood. That the Absaroka proposal could prompt even a passing legislative response indicated that it had accomplished at least some portion of what it set out to do: it had made noise.

The summer of 1939 also produced what Swickard’s supporters billed as the first official state visit to Absaroka, when King Haakon VII of Norway passed through southeastern Montana and Wyoming on a tour of the American West. Swickard located the king and arranged to be photographed with him, and Absaroka partisans promptly claimed the event as diplomatic recognition. Norwegian officials declined to confirm any such interpretation.

Montana’s Marginal Role and the Indigenous Silence

The Montana counties included in the Absaroka proposal — roughly four in the southeastern corner of the state — contributed relatively little to the movement’s organizational life, which remained centered in Sheridan. But their inclusion was geographically and rhetorically significant. The Crow Reservation and the Northern Cheyenne Reservation both fell within or adjacent to the proposed boundaries of Absaroka, a fact that the movement’s organizers registered with complete silence. Neither tribe was consulted, invited to participate, or mentioned in any of the grievance hearings Swickard convened. The name Absaroka — borrowed without acknowledgment from the Apsáalooke people — was understood by the movement’s boosters simply as a colorful regional designation, not as the living cultural identity of people who still occupied the land in question.

This regional impulse toward political redesign followed a well-worn path on the high plains. Historian Watson Parker connected the Absaroka movement back to an 1870s scheme to organize a new territory from portions of three adjacent territories — a proposal that similarly drew its logic from the geographic coherence of the region while ignoring its Indigenous occupation. The 1930s iteration inherited this exact visual frame: it targeted land that was newly settled by white ranchers following the Plains Wars, operating with a frontier spirit of experimentation that viewed the geography as an open slate for administrative updates, completely uncoupled from the living heritage of its native inhabitants.

Collapse and Consequence

Swickard’s grievance hearings in Sheridan attracted a genuine cross-section of rural discontent. Residents of the proposed state came to air specific complaints about road conditions, tax inequities, and the maldistribution of relief funds. The hearings generated press attention, and the press attention embarrassed state governments in Cheyenne and Helena in ways that internal lobbying had never managed. The 1941 Works Projects Administration guide to Wyoming, Wyoming: A Guide to Its History, Highways and People, noted that the resulting publicity “was generally regarded as bad for the state government, and most claims were adjusted to the satisfaction of the Absarokians.” The movement, in other words, achieved its practical purpose without achieving its stated one: it pressured state and federal officials into directing more resources toward the neglected rural periphery. WPA-funded sidewalks appeared in Absaroka-area towns. Rural infrastructure received belated attention.

The movement subsided through late 1939 and collapsed entirely with the onset of World War II. Swickard ran unsuccessfully for governor of Wyoming in 1942 and then, in a revealing postscript, resigned his Sheridan post after protesting the assignment of a Japanese American federal employee to his city in the weeks after Pearl Harbor. He relocated to Arizona and died there of a stroke in 1947. The Billings Gazette marked his passing with a brief notice calling him “a colorful character in Sheridan politics.”

Absaroka made one brief reappearance. In 1977, residents of Decker, in southeastern Montana, circulated a petition to revive the statehood proposal. A chief judge on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Marie Sanchez, offered a pointed response. “I can’t see their reasoning,” she said. “In fact, it’s a very elementary mentality.” Her words brought into focus what the 1930s movement had steadfastly refused to confront: the land under discussion was not simply neglected ranch country awaiting better governance, but a landscape with its own prior and continuing history.

The Absaroka movement belongs to the Depression-era archive of protest and improvisation — a category that includes boycotts, rent strikes, and farm foreclosure blockades — in which people with limited institutional power used spectacle to make themselves visible to governments that preferred to look away. It accomplished something real in extracting greater attention and resources for isolated rural communities. But it accomplished this through a politics that reproduced, without examination, the same erasure it claimed to resist: the insistence that the land in question was simply available, that its governance was simply a matter of rearranging lines on a map, and that the people whose name was borrowed for the effort had no standing in the conversation.

Works Cited

Federal Writers’ Project. Wyoming: A Guide to Its History, Highways and People. Oxford University Press, 1941.

Montana Historical Society Education Division. “Chapter 18: The Great Depression Transforms Montana, 1929-1941.” Montana: Stories of the Land, Montana Historical Society, mhs.mt.gov/education/StoriesOfTheLand/Part3/Chapter18/Ch18Educators. Accessed 17 June 2026.

Parker, Watson. Gold in the Black Hills. University of Nebraska Press, 1966.

Sheridan Press. “Absaroka: 49th State Again Proposed.” 5 Mar. 1939. Rpt. in SweetwaterNOW, 2021, sweetwaternow.com/the-plot-to-divide-wyoming/. Accessed 17 June 2026.

South Dakota Magazine. “The State of Absaroka.” South Dakota Magazine, southdakotamagazine.com/absaroka. Accessed 17 June 2026.

Wizevich, Eli. “How the Great Depression Fueled a Grassroots Movement to Create a New State Called Absaroka.” Smithsonian Magazine, 14 Aug. 2024, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-great-depression-fueled-grassroots-movement-to-create-a-new-state-called-absaroka-180984873/. Accessed 17 June 2026.