From 1875 to 1884, this was the site of the second Crow Indian agency. In 1875, the federal government ordered the first agency to be relocated from Mission Creek, east of present-day Livingston, to remove the Crow people from the destructive influence of whiskey traders. Agency employees chose this place, at the confluence of East Rosebud and Butcher Creeks, for the new agency in the spring of 1875. When completed, a stockade enclosed a square place of considerable extent with eight large buildings, many built of adobe, along with a residence for the agent and several log cabins and warehouses within the heavy plank wall. Thirteen small adobe cabins called Doby Town stood outside the stockade next to the present highway, inhabited mainly by Crow Indians. A ditch supplied water to the agency and to small cultivated fields of corn, wheat, oats, and turnips. When the Crow gathered here in 1876 to collect their annuities from the federal government, a visitor reported white lodges dotting the plain and gleaming through the trees while thousands of horses ranged the surrounding hills. The Absaroka Agency represents a difficult and sorrowful period in Crow history as the people transitioned from self-sufficient life following the bison herds to a more sedentary life on the reservation and dependence on the federal government for food and other necessities.