[Ben Mugged]

1763 Smallpox outbreak at Fort Pitt Main article: Siege of Fort Pitt There is one disputed incident in which British soldiers in North America may have discussed intentionally infecting native people as part of a war effort. During Pontiac's Rebellion in 1763, a number of Native Americans launched a widespread war against British soldiers and settlers in an attempt to drive the British out of the Great Lakes region. In what is now western Pennsylvania, Native Americans (primarily Delawares) laid siege to Fort Pitt on June 22, 1763. Surrounded and isolated, William Trent, the commander of Fort Pitt gave representatives of the besieging Delawares two blankets and a handkerchief from the Pittsburgh smallpox hospital, "out of our regard to them" when the two Delaware men came to talk to him.[15] There are also letters between two other British officers, Jeffrey Amherst and Henry Bouquet, explicitly advocating the idea of using using smallpox-infested blankets to kill Indians.[15] There is, however, some dispute over whether Trent was acting with the intent expressed by Bouquet and Amherst. Whatever Trent's intent, a number of recent scholars consider the evidence connecting his gift of blankets to the eventual smallpox outbreak to be very doubtful. These scholars believe that the disease was most likely spread by native warriors returning from attacks on infected white settlements.[16] In other words, while some officers did want to use what would now be called biological warfare, smallpox was so widespread and so easy to catch that it would be difficult to separate the results of intentional action from the natural spread of the disease. Others attribute the smallpox outbreak to the common Indian practice of digging up recent European graves to retrieve the clothes of the those buried--some of whom had died from smallpox. [edit] Vaccination After the Edward Jenner's 1796 confirmation of the efficacy of smallpox vaccination, the inoculation technique became more well known and smalpox became less deadly in the United States (and elsewhere). Vaccination was used on many colonists and on natives. Although situations such as the 1831 inoculation of Yankton Sioux at Sioux Agency (the Santee Sioux refused inoculation and many died) protected some during that outbreak and others, the disease often was carried beyond containment attempts or trade demands broke quarantines.[4] [edit] Ward Churchill's claims about the 1837 Mandan outbreak Further information: 1837-38 smallpox epidemic The Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado at Boulder reviewed a claim by Ward Churchill, comparing to the cited source his claim that in 1837 the United States Army deliberately infected Mandan Indians by distributing blankets that had been exposed to smallpox, and reported "Professor Churchill therefore misrepresents what Thornton says." Most other historians who have looked at the same event disagree with Churchill's interpretation of the historical evidence, and believe no deliberate introduction of smallpox occurred at the time and place Churchill claimed it had.[17][18]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_American_indigenous_peoples#Deliberate_infection.3F

Now I recognize your arguments as those of the discredited moron Ward Churchill.

[macebowman]

Nice try. I merely documented the case during the French and Indian War, which admitedly was done by British troops. I will not support the argument that American forces did it against the Mandan. Dismissing one will not destroy the documented letters of the other.