The Marias Massacre occurred on January 23, 1870, in Montana Territory as part of a broader campaign by the United States Army to suppress Mountain Chief's band of Piegan Blackfeet during the Indian Wars. The U.S. Army, under the command of Major Eugene Mortimer Baker, launched an attack that was intended to target Mountain Chief's band, but instead struck a different band led by Chief Heavy Runner, a leader to whom the United States government had previously promised protection.
The massacre resulted in the deaths of approximately 200 Native people, the majority of whom were women, children, and older men. The attack represented a significant violation of federal commitments to the Piegan Blackfeet and demonstrated the vulnerability of Indigenous peoples despite government assurances of safety.
The massacre prompted widespread public outrage and catalyzed a substantial shift in federal Indian policy. In response, President Ulysses S. Grant moved toward a "Peace Policy" approach to Indian affairs. Grant maintained the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a division of the Department of the Interior, preventing the War Department from regaining control of the agency. He appointed Indian agents recommended by various religious clergy, including Quakers and Methodists, in an effort to reduce the corruption that had previously plagued the department and to establish a more humane approach to federal-Indian relations.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
Approximately 200 Native people killed, most of whom were women, children, and older men.
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