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. The U.S. government had previously promised protection to Chief Heavy Runner's band, yet the Army attacked this different band instead, resulting in the deaths of approximately 200 Native people, the majority of whom were women, children, and older men.
Major Eugene Mortimer Baker commanded the U.S. Army forces that carried out the massacre against the Piegan Blackfeet. The operation represented a significant violation of the government's prior commitments to protect Heavy Runner's people, conflating distinct bands and groups within the Piegan nation and attacking those the military had promised to safeguard.
The massacre precipitated substantial public outrage and catalyzed a long-term shift in Federal Indian policy toward what became known as the "Peace Policy," championed by President Ulysses S. Grant. In response to the crisis, Grant ensured the Bureau of Indian Affairs remained within the Department of the Interior rather than allowing the War Department to regain control. He then appointed Indian agents recommended by various religious clergy members, including Quakers and Methodists, with the expectation that such appointments would reduce the corruption Grant had previously identified within the department.
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 Piegan Blackfeet killed, most of whom were women, children, and older men
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