Marias Massacre

In the winter of 1870 the Army went looking for Mountain Chief's band, whose members included Owl Child, blamed for killing the rancher Malcolm Clark. Major Eugene Baker led the 2nd Cavalry up the Marias River in late January.

The camp he found on 23 January was Heavy Runner's. Heavy Runner was known as a friend of the whites and carried papers from the government saying so; the scouts told Baker he had the wrong camp. He attacked anyway. Heavy Runner walked out holding up his safe-conduct papers and was shot. Most of the band's able-bodied men were away hunting, and many of those in the lodges were sick with smallpox. The soldiers killed 173 people by the Army's own count, and by other accounts around 200 to 217 - the great majority women, children and elders. They then burned the lodges and food stores and took the horses, leaving the survivors on the plains in January.

The Montana press called Baker a hero. As the details came out the account unravelled, and the massacre became an argument in Washington - it helped sink the proposal to hand Indian affairs back to the War Department. Baker was never disciplined. The Blackfeet remember it as the Baker Massacre.