The Red and the White · A Family Saga of the American West

At dawn on January 23, 1870, four hundred men of the Second U.S. Cavalry

attacked and butchered a Piegan camp near the Marias River in Montana in

one 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 named

Malcolm Clarke who had been killed four months earlier by their Piegan mother’s

cousin—Clarke ’s own two sons joined the cavalry in a slaughter of many of their

own relatives. In this groundbreaking work of American history, Andrew R. Graybill

places the Marias Massacre within a larger, three-generation saga of the Clarke family,

particularly illuminating the complex history of native-white intermarriage in the

American Northwest.