The Marias Massacre and the Blackfeet Starvation Winter

January twenty-third, eighteen seventy. Major Eugene Baker led four companies of the Second Cavalry to the Marias River in northern Montana on orders to find and punish a band of Blackfeet accused of stealing horses and killing a settler the previous year. What Baker's force found on that frozen morning was not the band they were looking for. It was the camp of Heavy Runner, a chief who held papers from the American government certifying his band as peaceable and friendly.

Baker's scouts identified the camp as the wrong one. The attack went forward anyway. The soldiers opened fire on the village before dawn. When it was over, one hundred seventy-three people were dead. The documented breakdown, according to records compiled in the aftermath, was that more than ninety of the dead were women and children, and that perhaps a third of the adult men in the camp had already been incapacitated by smallpox. Heavy Runner himself was shot as he ran forward waving his papers.

The precise casualty count has been debated by historians, with figures ranging from one hundred seventy-three to over two hundred dead. The Montana Historical Society and the National Park Service use the one hundred seventy-three figure based on Army field reports, and note those reports likely undercounted. The exact number of survivors and their subsequent fate is incompletely documented in available archival sources.

The massacre was investigated by the Army. General Philip Sheridan defended Baker's action. Congress held hearings. No charges were filed. The event is known in Blackfeet oral history and community memory as the Backbone of Many Glaciers massacre. Today the site near the Marias River is not marked by a federal monument.

The starvation that followed the massacre was its own catastrophe. With bison herds collapsing through the eighteen seventies and the reservation system cutting off traditional hunting ranges, the Blackfeet faced a hunger crisis that peaked in the winter of eighteen eighty-three and eighty-four. An estimated six hundred people, roughly one quarter of the reservation population, died of starvation and disease in what the Blackfeet call the Starvation Winter. Federal ration deliveries had been cut, and the agent in charge underreported conditions to Washington for weeks.