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 massacre represented a critical moment in Indian Wars policy, as it involved the attack on a band led by Chief Heavy Runner—a leader to whom the United States government had previously promised protection. This violation of that promise became a pivotal event in shifting federal Indian policy.
Major Eugene Mortimer Baker commanded the United States Army forces that carried out the massacre against the Piegan Blackfeet. The attack resulted in the deaths of approximately 200 Native people, the majority of whom were women, children, and older men. The targeting of Heavy Runner's band, despite the government's prior protection pledge, demonstrated the indiscriminate nature of the military campaign.
The massacre prompted significant public outrage and catalyzed a fundamental shift in federal Indian policy toward what became known as the "Peace Policy," championed by President Ulysses S. Grant. In response to the massacre and the corruption Grant identified in Indian Affairs administration, he maintained the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of the Interior rather than allowing the War Department to regain control. Grant then appointed individuals recommended by various religious clergy—including Quakers and Methodists—to serve as Indian agents, with the intention that clergy-recommended appointees would operate free from the corruption previously endemic to 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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