The Marias Massacre occurred on January 23, 1870, in Montana Territory as part of the United States Army's campaign to suppress Mountain Chief's band of Piegan Blackfeet. The engagement was initiated under the command of Major Eugene Mortimer Baker as part of the broader Indian Wars. However, the attack targeted a different band led by Chief Heavy Runner, to whom the United States government had previously promised their protection, making this a significant breach of federal commitment.
The massacre resulted in the deaths of approximately 200 Native people, the majority of whom were women, children, and older men. The attack was carried out by United States Army forces under Major Baker's direct command against the Piegan Blackfeet, a member nation of the Niitsitapi Confederacy.
The massacre provoked substantial public outrage and became a turning point in federal Indian policy. The event catalyzed a long-term shift toward a "Peace Policy" advocated by President Ulysses S. Grant. In response to the controversy and the corruption Grant had identified in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he maintained the bureau as a division of 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, in hopes that their involvement would eliminate the corruption previously found in 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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