<p>Apparently the claimed smoking gun was an excerpt of a letter taken completly out of context. The blankets were given to a friendly Indian group with good intentions.</p>
<p>The quote out of context</p>
<p>"“Out of our regard for them (two Indian chiefs) we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect (William Trent).” </p>
<p>The complete story:</p>
<p>"Journal of William Trent, excerpt:
[May] 24th [1763] The Turtles Heart a principal Warrior of the Delawares and Mamaltee a Chief came within a small distance of the Fort Mr. McKee went out to them and they made a Speech letting us know that all our [POSTS] as Ligonier was destroyed, that great numbers of Indians [were coming and] that out of regard to us, they had prevailed on 6 Nations [not to] attack us but give us time to go down the Country and they desired we would set of immediately. The Commanding Officer thanked them, let them know that we had everything we wanted, that we could defend it against all the Indians in the Woods, that we had three large Armys marching to Chastise those Indians that had struck us, told them to take care of their Women and Children, but not to tell any other Natives, they said they would go and speak to their Chiefs and come and tell us what they said, they returned and said they would hold fast of the Chain of friendship. Out of our regard to them we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect. They then told us that Ligonier had been attacked, but that the Enemy were beat of "</p>
<p>There were no other mentions of the blankets or their impact. If indeed they had been sent as a weapon some follow-up would have been indicated. Most scientists believe the small pox infection was spread through the fighting and related blood and fluids contact.</p>
<p>Many researchers have studied that devastation that European crowd diseases from leprosy to measles to smallpox to flu to TB made of the American populations that were previously unexposed. There is no question that by the time Europeans made it to the West Coast, 9 of 10 native Americans had died of one disease or another. It didn’t require any effort at infection, with blankets or anything else. </p>
<p>However, it is also quite clear that efforts were made to infect native Americans with European diseases.</p>
<p>Calling for an action and doing it are not the same. There is no credible evidence his ideas were ever carried out. If you want to censure him for bad thought fine. But there is no corpse.</p>
<p>Some people have such a need to be mad about something and thus create an opportunity to deliver emotionally charged lectures, (which is their real joy), that they will reach back any number of generations to find and self-interrupt their source material. </p>
<p>White treatment of natives was generally shameful but a few blankets did not kill them off or weaken their resistance. It was a lot of disease. And this was done by the British, not by America. Lord Amherst was not a colonial; he was the British commander. </p>
<p>But we don’t really know the population of the US before British settlement. De Soto recorded going through many empty, large villages, apparent signs of plague and social collapse. Farther out, the natives didn’t really live on the plains until horses arrived with the Spanish - and it really helped when they got guns - and it’s very difficult to trace native locations because warfare, British settlement, and other pressures pushed tribes west in large numbers.</p>
<p>And then one should look at context. Take Mexico. We have real descriptions of the ruin caused by Spanish slaving raids - even when made illegal - written by white men (including de Vaca). We don’t know the pre-invasion population of Mexico but it appears the Spanish may have killed off 50 to 80 million, partly through disease and partly through slavery - in mines and on farms. </p>
<p>To take another example, the islands of the Caribbean were largely depopulated by the Spanish - and they’d complain the natives couldn’t survive working as slaves (so they brought in black people). In the great tendency to look only at American evils - which I’m not denying - consider that Britain ran the slave trade for 100+ years and that British colonies in the Caribbean had a massive rate of death. Some islands now have populations 1/4 the number of slaves imported, meaning hundreds of thousands died. By contrast, American slavery, as awful as it was, constantly increased numbers, meaning people lived. (And one really weird irony is that the South became more addicted to slavery - not less, as the Founders hoped - because banning the Atlantic slave trade caused the internal slave trade to boom, which made slave women and children valuable, which meant they lived, which is in weird ways more humane but also less, and the internal slave trade pushed the South toward the Civil War.)</p>
<p>Why anyone would care to spend time and energy attempting to debunk the idea about the blankets is beyond me. Let’s pretend I agree with what was written in the OP. Who cares?</p>
<p>I’m glad I wasn’t one of the people who attacked the Indians a few hundred years ago whether intentionally (with an infected blanket or with a musket) or unintentionally (by carrying some disease that would have had unanticipated effects). I do happen to be white but I hope no one holds me responsible for everything some other whites, whether my ancestors or not (and the likelihood is not), did to some other people hundreds of years ago or even yesterday. Doesn’t that smack a little of racism in and of itself? I didn’t have a lot of choice in selecting the race I was born with.</p>
<p>This puzzles me. I am not knowledgeable enough on this period of history to know one way or another if the infection by blanket was deliberate or not, but why is it not a legitimate thing to question this assertion or debunk if it is indeed false?</p>
<p>Lergnom makes some very valid points, which I’ve also heard straight from the mouths of distinguished professors who’ve reviewed the period and practices in question at great depth. For some reason, in Americans’ historical knowledge about the slave trade, Britain and Spain have gotten a pass because the uninformed are quite content to only condemn slavery in the U.S. As for historical treatment of Indians, the British, Spaniards, Canadians and Americans have nothing exemplary to point to.</p>
<p>Broetchen: the point that was being made is that debunking established facts is a waste of time, just as it’s a waste of time to claim that the holocaust never happened or that humans never walked on the moon.</p>
<p>^ But the topic of this thread and the ensuing comments indicate that this is not an <em>established</em> fact. The OP researched the assertion of deliberate infection by blanket and there seems to be some disagreement if this was indeed done, or to what extent it was done. </p>
<p>Why is this not a legitimate pursuit of information?</p>
<p>dmd77–your post is neither accurate nor fair. Trying to paint a serious fact-checking which found clear doubt over the truth (one man established this “truth” by selectively quoting one source out of context–someone that was an advocate of Indian interests similar to the discredited Ward Churchill) with the brush of holocaust denial is way off base. It is demagoguery. If you want to claim Amherst wrote about taking such action against the Indians, fine. That is true. But that’s where the factual trail ends. Anymore is speculation about what could have happended but there is no proof.</p>
<p>No. Or are you under the impression that people are subjected to racism in America because their ancestors were black and not their skin color?</p>
<p>People can pursue whatever they want and I do think there is value in as accurate a record as possible. However, I have developed a deep skeptism of these lines of inquiry. For instance, in the alleged quest for truth they lead to statements such as “fighting” when the correct term is genocide.</p>
<p>Barrons: please define what you would consider adequate proof. It is my opinion that plenty of proof exists and that pretending that native Americans were not given smallpox blankets is ridiculous. </p>
<p>(My father (born 1908) said that his father (born 1870s) said that his father–a Kansas settler in 1843–was well aware of the practice (and, I might add, decried it). I first heard of this in the 1960s when I questioned the need for my own smallpox vaccine.)</p>
<p>There are those on this board who feel that questioning and censuring past inhumane practices is inappropriate or guilt mongering. My feeling is that “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” (quotation from George Santayana)</p>
<p>I think America does a better job than almost every other country in acknowledging its many flaws. I don’t see a point in beating them to death.</p>
<p>Ireland is now wrestling with the revelations about decades of Church abuse - or they would if the economy hadn’t collapsed and driven it off the front page. Britain thinks of itself as the good guy when they weren’t at all - from massacres in our revolution, to mass murder in the Caribbean, to 100+ years of slave trading, to unreal depredations in India, it’s as if ending the Atlantic Slave Trade - after our freedom had made it unprofitable to British merchants - made them into the good guys. The British media barely covers past issues, like the centennial of the huge massacre in India when they turned machine guns on a crowd. </p>
<p>France likes to believe they were all in the resistance when instead they were mostly collaborators. The Dutch run a memorial to Ann Frank and try not to remember it was Dutch people who kept turning in the Dutch Jews for death. Politicians in Poland have been threatened for mentioning that Jews were massacred when they returned after WWII. Japan presents itself as the victim because we dropped the bomb on them, as though they hadn’t killed millions of people (in China alone). Russia still barely admits murdering all the Polish officer core at Katyn. </p>
<p>Think the Swiss talk much about collaborating with the Nazis? How much does neutral Sweden admit they supplied the Nazi war machine with metal? When it comes to WWII, the only nations to discuss their faults are the Germans and the US. We argue about whether it was right to fire bomb Hamburg - Dresden was mostly a British thing, btw. They have more of burden to shoulder. </p>
<p>The US treatment of natives was awful. At least we talk about that.</p>
<p>dmd77–we were dealing with a specific story regarding a specific person and even in history. Your Kansas stories deal with alleged events 100 years later with no historic documentation I have seen. If you can find one feel free to post it. So far this is well into the urban myth category. One sentence clearly taken out of context is all the support known for this story. That’s pretty thin.</p>
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