[2] Mountain Chief was involved in the 1870 Marias Massacre,[3] signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868,[4] and worked with anthropologist Frances Densmore to interpret folksong recordings.

[1] In Mountain Chief's childhood, his father gave him a buckskin yearling, a bay horse whose color resembles that of tanned deerskin.

[7] In 1869, Mountain Chief's half-brother Owl Child (Blackfoot/South Piegan) stole several horses from Malcolm Clarke, a white ranch owner in Montana.

[3] Bear Head (Kai Okotan), a Pikuni (Blackfoot/Piikani) informant to James Willard Schultz, also claimed that Clarke had made sexual advances towards Owl Child's wife.

When Baker's forces arrived along the Marias River, they approached the small camp of Gray Wolf, which was infected with smallpox[3] (the Blackfeet Nation suffered from an epidemic of smallpox in January 1870[11]), and the troops learned that a large band of the South Piegans was encamped down the river, which they believed was Mountain Chief's large band.

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.

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.

[3] 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.

[3] Two news articles written in February and March 1870 mentioned that Mountain Chief's son, Red Horn, was killed in the massacre.

[3] 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.

[6] Mountain Chief was a member of the Indian Congress held from August to October 1898 in conjunction with the Trans-Mississippi International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska.

[6] Mountain Chief also travelled with a delegation to Washington, D.C., in 1903 to provide information related to the Blackfeet Nation and to speak with the United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

[5] During the summer of 1898, Yale graduate Walter McClintock visited the Blackfeet Reservation and used a wax cylinder phonograph to record tribal elders, including Mountain Chief.

Mountain Chief also appeared in Joseph Kossuth Dixon's book The Vanishing Race wearing an upright feather headdress with ermine fur and holding a horse efficacy.

"[6] To create this memorial, Dixon gathered President William Taft, his cabinet members and military officers, the governor of New York, and 32 Plains Native Americans, including Mountain Chief, on February 22, 1913.

[6] Dixon noted how "the nobility of his presence, the Roman cast of his face, the keen penetration of his eye, the breadth of his shoulders, the dignity with which he wears the sixty-seven years of his life, all conspire to make this hereditary chief of the Fast Buffalo Horse band of the Blackfeet preeminent among the Indians.

In Daughters of the Desert: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest (1988), Barbara Babcock and Nancy Parezo recorded his name as "Big Brave.