they believed was Mountain Chief's large band. This was not Mountain Chief's band, but was rather that of Chief Heavy Runner. Before the Marias Massacre, Mountain Chief and his band of South Piegan warriors, the intended target, had been warned and fled to safety in Canada before Major Eugene Baker reached them traveling downstream. The cavalry was readied to ambush the South Piegans until Heavy Runner (Blackfoot/South Piegan) came out with a safe-conduct paper, which was signed 23 days before the massacre by General Sully proving that Heavy Runner was a friend of the United States army. Despite this paper, Army scout Joe Cobell shot and killed Heavy Runner and the cavalrymen shot at the lodges and massacred the Piegans. Of the 140 people that were captured alive, all were turned loose without clothing, food, and horses and many froze to death on their return to Fort Benton. Mountain Chief had close ties to Heavy Runner's camp. Good Bear Woman, Mountain Chief's daughter, was at Heavy Runner's camp at the day of the massacre and Heavy Runner's wife was Mountain Chief's sister. General William Tecumseh Sherman was confronted with outrage in Congress after the massacre, but he insisted that most of those killed in the incident were warriors in Mountain Chief's camp. The people of Montana and General Sherman had been given permission to attack the South Piegans if they were not within reservation boundaries, but the cavalrymen attacked the South Piegans on reservation territory that had been established in 1868. Two news articles written in February and March 1870 mentioned that Mountain Chief's son, Red Horn, was killed in the massacre. In a letter to Philip Sheridan on March 24, 1870, Sherman stated that, “I prefer to believe that the majority of the killed at Mountain Chief’s camp were warriors." Fools Crow (1986), a novel written by James Welch (Blackfoot/A'aninin), included the story of the Marias Massacre. Political involvement Blackfoot Confederacy leaders signed three peace treaties in 1855, 1865, and 1868, all of which decreased the size of the territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Mountain Chief's father and Chief Lame Bull signed a treaty in 1855 between the United States and the Blackfoot Tribe with President Franklin Pierce. Mountain Chief signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie on April 29, 1868. Mountain Chief gained prominence through warfare with the Crows and Kutenai and facilitated treaty negotiations in the 1880s and