January 23, 1870 – U.S. Cavalry Massacre of Piegan Blackfeet Indians on the Marias River in Montana

On this day in history, the U.S. Cavalry under Major Eugene M. Baker massacred 173 Piegan Blackfeet in the Montana Territory, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly.

The Army in the area was commanded by William Sherman and Phil Sheridan. Sheridan, appointed by Grant in 1867 to head the Department of the Missouri and “pacify” the Plains, allegedly declared that “The only good Indians I know are dead.” Sheridan steadfastly denied ever saying that, but he wrote to Sherman, the Commanding General of the U.S. Army:

In taking the offensive I have to select that season when I can catch the fiends; and if a village is attacked and women and children killed, the responsibility is not with the soldiers, but with the people whose crimes necessitated the attack.”

Sherman responded to Sheridan:

I will back you with my whole authority… I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow no mere vague general charges of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their hands, but will use all the powers confided to me to the end that these Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not again be able to begin and… carry out their barbarous warfare.” (American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900 by H.W. Brands, p. 180)

Baker had been searching for a band of rebellious Blackfeet warriors known as “the Renegade Indians” under the leadership of Mountain Chief. Montanans had demanded that Owl Child and his followers be punished, and the government ordered the forces garrisoned under Major Eugene Baker at Fort Ellis (near modern-day Bozeman, Montana) to strike back.

Philip Sheridan

Baker led his troops in search of Mountain Chief’s band, and on January 22, discovered an Indian village along the Marias River. Postponing his attack until the following morning, he reportedly spent the evening drinking heavily. As the darkness faded, Baker’s scout, the Army’s half-Mandan, half-white guide, recognized that the painted designs on the buffalo-skin lodges were those of a peaceful band of Blackfeet. One story claims the scout warned Baker he was heading to the wrong camp. Baker reportedly replied, “That makes no difference, one band or another of them; they are all Piegans [Blackfeet] and we will attack them.”

At daybreak on the morning of January 23, 1870, Baker ordered his men to surround the camp in preparation for attack. Baker’s soldiers began blindly firing into the village, catching the peaceful Indians utterly unaware and defenseless. Knocking down lodges with frightened survivors inside, the soldiers set them on fire, burnt some of the Blackfeet alive, and then burned the band’s meager supplies of food for the winter. Baker initially captured about 140 women and children as prisoners to take back to Fort Ellis, but when he discovered many were ill with smallpox, he abandoned them to face the deadly winter without food or shelter.

As reported in a history of the massacre in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Gen. Alfred Sully, Montana superintendent of Indian affairs for the Interior Department, raised questions about the number of warriors killed:

Lt. William Pease, the Blackfeet agent, reported that of 33 Indian men killed, only 15 were of fighting age, and the dead included 18 old men, 90 women and 55 children and babies. The ‘sickening details’ of Pease’s report were leaked from the Commissioner of Indians Affairs in Washington.”

Major Eugene Baker, center, 9th from left leaning on railing, poses with Army officers at Ft. Ellis in this 1870 photo via Pioneer Museum

When word of the massacre reached the east, many Americans were outraged. But Baker’s superiors supported his actions, as did the people of Montana, with one journalist calling Baker’s critics “namby-pamby, sniffling old maid sentimentalists.” The Bozeman Pick and Plow newspaper noted that Montanans at a mass meeting on Feb. 10, 1870 passed resolutions about Baker’s actions, including:

That our thanks are due, and are hereby gratefully tendered, to Col. Baker and his men, for their toilsome march in an inclement season to chastise our savage robber foes, and for the deserved though terrible punishment inflicted upon them….”

According to historian Ron Chernow in his biography of Grant, Sheridan had likely contributed to the ferocity by hectoring Baker to ‘strike them hard!’ And Sheridan blithely characterized the massacre as ‘well-merited punishment.’ (Grant by Ron Chernow, p. 659)

Nevertheless, there was a Congressional backlash of sorts. Congress banned military officers as Indian agents, although it was “a move that was partly Congress’s way of reclaiming the lucrative patronage powers lost to it.” (Chernow, p. 659)

Neither Baker nor his men faced a court martial or any other disciplinary actions.

Sheridan, in forward-looking praise of fake news, said of the incident:

‘I prefer to believe,’ Sherman wrote, ‘that the majority of those killed at Mountain Chief’s camp were warriors; that the firing ceased the moment resistance was at an end; that quarter was given to all that asked for it; and that a hundred women and children were allowed to go free … rather than the absurd report that there were only thirteen warriors killed, and that the balance were women and children, more or less afflicted with small pox.’”

You can watch a video giving a history of the massacre (alternately known as the Piegan Massacre, the Marias Massacre, and the Baker Massacre, on Youtube.