Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award. One of the American West's bloodiest--and least-known--massacres is searingly re-created in this generation-spanning history of native-white intermarriage. At dawn on January 23, 1870, four hundred men of the Second U.S. Cavalryattacked and butchered a Piegan camp near the Marias River in Montana inone of the worst slaughters of Indians by American military forces in U.S.history. Coming to avenge the murder of their father--a former fur-trader namedMalcolm Clarke who had been killed four months earlier by their Piegan mother'scousin--Clarke 's own two sons joined the cavalry in a slaughter of many of theirown relatives.

In this groundbreaking work of American history, Andrew R. Graybillplaces the Marias Massacre within a larger, three-generation saga of the Clarke family,particularly illuminating the complex history of native-white intermarriage in theAmerican Northwest.