Blood on the Marias: 

The 1870 Massacre that echoes through Montana

It was a hard, pale morning on January 23, 1870 — the kind of winter day that makes sound bite and breath alike. On the low, willow-lined bends of the Marias River, under canvas lodges weighed with frost, a Piegan (Piikuni) camp lay asleep. By the time smoke and the echo of rifles cleared, scores — perhaps hundreds — of people lay dead: women, children, elders, and a few men. The soldiers who fired on that camp called the operation a military success. For the Blackfeet people, and for many later observers, it became known simply as a massacre — one of the most brutal and least-remembered slaughters of the Indian Wars. 

To understand how a headline-making frontier vendetta became the slaughter on the Marias, we must go back a little. In August 1869 Malcolm Clarke, a white trader who had lived among the Piegans for decades, was killed near his ranch. Clarke’s death set in motion a demand among Montana settlers and military officers for immediate retribution. General Philip Sheridan, seeking to impose order across the Northern Plains, authorized an expedition to “strike them hard” — language that framed vengeance as policy. Major Eugene Mortimer Baker was selected to lead an expedition into the Marias River country to punish those deemed responsible. 

Baker’s column moved out from Fort Ellis and Fort Shaw in early January 1870, a mixed force of cavalry, infantry, and civilian scouts. Critical to the story are the scouts Joe Kipp and Joseph Cobell (often spelled Kobell), men who knew Blackfeet geography and band affiliations intimately. They were supposed to tell the army which camps were hostile and which were friendly. Instead, their presence and testimony would become part of a bitter dispute over responsibility and intent. 

What happened in the pre-dawn gloom has been recounted in military dispatches, Native oral testimony, and years of historical investigation — and the accounts do not match neatly. Baker found a camp he suspected belonged to Mountain Chief’s hostile band but, as later evidence would show, it was the camp of Chief Heavy Runner, a man who had previously sought peace and even carried documents that should have protected his people. According to multiple witnesses and later historians, scouts warned that this was the wrong encampment; one scout, Joe Kipp, later claimed he shouted that they were attacking the wrong camp and that Baker threatened to shoot him if he tried to intervene. Heavy Runner allegedly ran out waving a safe-conduct paper and was shot. From the ridgelines the soldiers opened fire into tepees filled with sick and sleeping people. 

The numbers from that morning have been contested from the first. Major Baker’s official tally reported 173 killed; other contemporaries and later sources suggested higher counts — 200, or 217, a figure remembered by Joe Kipp decades later when he told his version to later chroniclers. Whatever the exact number, prominent evidence indicates that most of those killed were noncombatants: women, children, and the elderly, in part because a smallpox outbreak had left many men away or immobile. Soldiers who survived the day described a scene of devastation; one officer later called it “the greatest slaughter of Indians ever made by U.S. troops,” a brutal appraisal that haunted public memory even as military and local leaders defended the action. 

In the immediate wake of the massacre, the army and eastern humanitarian figures came into open conflict. Army officers — including Baker’s superior officers — framed the event as a decisive blow that would “end Indian troubles in Montana.” Inspectors and reformers, by contrast, raised objections. William B. Pease, the Blackfeet agent, sent reports suggesting that the majority of the dead were women and children, which landed on the desk of the reform-minded Vincent Colyer and was read in Congress. General William T. Sherman demanded precise accounting — “exactly the number, sex, and kind of Indians killed” — reflecting the alarm some officials felt at the scale and nature of the attack. Yet formal discipline for Baker and his officers never followed: the military ultimately praised the troops and Baker faced no court-martial. The political and military calculus of the frontier — manifest destiny, expansionist pressure, and the desire for a swift end to incursions — outweighed calls for legal reckoning. 

For the Piegan people the immediate consequences were devastating and long-lasting. Mountain Chief’s band fled north into what is now Canada; survivors buried the dead as best they could, and the psychological wounds endured for generations. Historians argue that the massacre expedited the dispossession of Blackfeet lands, as fear and disease left the nation weakened and less able to resist the steady pressure of settlers and federal policy. Researchers such as Paul Wylie and Andrew Graybill have placed the event in the broader arc of Montana’s transformation: the gold rush, the fur trade’s decline, shifting federal Indian policy, and racialized violence on the frontier. 

Memory has been contested on the ground as well as in the archives. The site of the massacre was for years a quiet bend of the river until survivors’ descendants, Blackfeet community members, and local historians insisted on commemoration. On anniversaries, elders and students place stones, drum, and tell the story to new generations; in 2010 a memorial plaque and ongoing educational efforts have sought to keep the truth visible. Yet for decades the episode remained marginalized in mainstream histories, often mentioned in passing behind the more famous names from the Plains Wars. Scholars and indigenous communities have worked — through books, oral histories, and public ceremonies — to recover voices omitted from earlier military-centered narratives. 

Why has the Baker or Marias Massacre been so easy to forget — and so hard to forgive? The answers are layered. On one level are the structural incentives of nineteenth-century America: territorial expansion, settler demands for safety, and a military culture that equated punitive measures with civilized order. On another level are the human choices on that frozen morning — decisions by commanders who preferred force to verification, the dismissal of scouts’ warnings, and the willingness of some men to view Indigenous people as obstacles rather than neighbors. On yet another level are the silences that follow violence: children who did not grow up to tell their stories, records lost or obscured, and official reports that sought to frame the killing as a battle rather than a massacre. Modern historians have slowly reassembled these pieces, using military correspondence, agent reports, newspapers, oral testimony, and archival letters such as those of Joe Kipp to reconstruct a more complete and painful picture. 

Recent scholarship has not simply filled in blanks; it has reinterpreted the episode’s significance. Paul Wylie’s Blood on the Marias treats the event as part of a continuum of frontier violence tied to economic pressures and federal policy, while Andrew Graybill’s The Red and the White situates the massacre within tangled family and community networks — including the Clarke family’s centuries-spanning entanglements with the Blackfeet — to remind readers that kinship and commerce shaped the stakes of revenge. Artists, novelists, and Blackfeet scholars have also kept the memory living, reminding broader publics that national myths of progress often required human costs borne by Indigenous nations. 

The ledger of the Marias remains open. Different communities count differently: 173 in the army’s earliest tally, 217 by the count remembered by Joe Kipp and preserved in Piegan oral histories. The disagreement is not merely numerical — it is about how American institutions accounted for, explained, and responded to the killing of noncombatants. It is about whether frontier violence should be absorbed into uncontested narratives of expansion or registered as state-sanctioned atrocity. In classrooms, at memorial ceremonies, and in the pages of recent monographs, the Marias Massacre has become a touchstone for debates about culpability, memory, and redress. 

When a documentary camera pans now over the Marias’ icy bends, we see the same river but a changed landscape of meanings. The modern task for historians and citizens alike is neither to castigate the living for the sins of the dead nor to whitewash the past. Rather, it is to name what happened, to listen to the survivors’ descendants, and to weave the many sources — agent letters, military reports, Native oral testimony, newspaper editorials, and scholarly reconstructions — into an account that tells the whole, terrible story. The memory of that January morning refuses to be simple. It is a call to reckon with how power, pride, fear, and policy can conspire to make massacre possible — and to ensure that forgetting is no longer the final verdict. 

Further reading and sources (selected):

Montana Historical Society — Marias (Bear Creek) Massacre lesson and primary excerpts; History.com — “Soldiers massacre sleeping camp of Native Americans” (Jan 23, 1870); Paul R. Wylie, Blood on the Marias: The Baker Massacre (University of Oklahoma Press); Andrew R. Graybill, The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West; Joseph (Joe) Kipp letters and testimony (Archives West); Equal Justice Initiative historical calendar entry and commemoration materials; reporting and remembrance pieces in Montana outlets such as the Flathead Beacon.