Blackfeet Territory and the Marias Massacre
Near Great Falls, Montana
The Piegan Blackfeet claimed the land around the Great Falls of the Missouri for generations before any European or American arrived to document it. The Salish had hunted the bison here seasonally until around sixteen hundred, when the Piegan moved west and established the falls region as their own. When Lewis and Clark arrived in eighteen oh five, they entered Blackfeet territory, and both parties knew the ground was contested.
The Blackfeet's historical range ran from north of present-day Edmonton south to Yellowstone, and east from the Rockies to the Black Hills. The falls of the Missouri sat near the southwestern edge of their plains territory, a landmark on a hunting landscape they understood in detail the expedition did not.
The relationship between the United States government and the Blackfeet deteriorated through the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In August of eighteen sixty-nine, a Blackfeet man named Owl Child killed a white rancher named Malcolm Clarke. When the army demanded the perpetrator be surrendered and he fled, orders went out to strike.
On January twenty-third, eighteen seventy, Major Eugene Baker of the Second Cavalry led soldiers to the Marias River. He attacked the wrong camp. The camp he destroyed belonged to Heavy Runner, a peace chief who had always maintained friendly relations with the government. Baker's own scout, Joe Kipp, recognized the error and told Baker directly before the attack began. Baker ordered it anyway.
Between one hundred and seventy-three and two hundred and seventeen Blackfeet were killed. Approximately ninety-five percent were women, children, and elderly men. One United States soldier died. The event is documented in the historical record as the Marias Massacre. It is not well known outside Montana. The Blackfeet have not forgotten it.
