The Marias Massacre occurred on January 23, 1870, in Montana Territory as part of the United States Army's Indian Wars campaign against Piegan Blackfeet peoples. The U.S. Army, under the command of Major Eugene Mortimer Baker, launched the attack ostensibly as part of a campaign to suppress Mountain Chief's band of Piegan Blackfeet. However, the Army mistakenly or deliberately attacked a different band led by Chief Heavy Runner, a leader to whom the United States government had previously promised protection.
During the massacre, United States Army forces killed approximately 200 Native people. The vast majority of those killed were women, children, and older men rather than warriors, making this a predominantly civilian casualty event. The attack on Heavy Runner's band, despite the government's prior assurances of safety to that leader, represented a fundamental breach of trust.
The massacre resulted in significant public outrage and catalyzed a major shift in federal Indian policy. The incident prompted President Ulysses S. Grant to advocate for and implement a "Peace Policy" approach to Native American affairs. Grant maintained the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a division of the Department of the Interior, resisting attempts by the War Department to regain control of Indian affairs. In an effort to reduce corruption within the Bureau and promote more ethical treatment of Native peoples, Grant appointed men recommended by various religious clergy, including Quakers and Methodists, to serve as Indian agents.
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, mostly women, children, and older men.
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