Marias Massacre - Background

Background

The Marias Massacre occurred in the context of massive European-American westward expansion. Relations between the Blackfoot Confederacy (comprising the Blackfoot, Blood, and Piegan tribes) and whites had been largely hostile for years. Amid this tension, the event which touched off the massacre involved a young Piegan Blackfoot, Owl Child, who in 1867 stole some horses from Malcolm Clarke, a white trader, as payment for his own horses, whose loss he blamed on Clarke. Clarke and his son tracked Owl Child down and beat him in front of a group of Blackfeet. In response, on August 17, 1869, Owl Child and a group of other Piegan warriors shot and killed Clarke, and seriously wounded his son. Malcolm Clarke raped a Blackfoot woman, the relative of his wife who was also a Blackfoot woman. Clarke's rape victim was Owl Child's wife. The raped woman gave birth to a child as a result of the rape.

The killing of Clarke inflamed European-Americans, and there were widespread calls for revenge. The United States Army demanded of the Blackfoot Confederacy that Owl Child be killed and his body delivered within two weeks; Owl Child, meanwhile, had fled and joined the band of Mountain Chief, the head chief of the Piegans. When the two week deadline had passed, General Philip Sheridan sent out a squadron of cavalry (the Second US Regiment), led by Major Eugene Baker, to track down and punish the offending party. He ordered:

If the lives and property of the citizens of Montana can best be protected by striking Mountain Chief's band, I want them struck. Tell Baker to strike them hard.

Sheridan's plan was a dawn attack on a village in heavy snow, when most of the Indians would be sleeping or huddling inside to keep warm (a strategy he had employed before, when George Custer attacked Black Kettle's band of Cheyennes in the Battle of Washita River).