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1763 Smallpox outbreak at Fort Pitt
Main article: Siege of Fort Pitt
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In one incident, British soldiers in North America were said to 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 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.[33] Letters exist between two other British officers, Jeffrey Amherst and Henry Bouquet, that explicitly advocate the idea of using smallpox-infested blankets to kill Indians.[33] Historians disagree as to whether Trent acted with the intent expressed by Bouquet and Amherst.
In Carl Waldman's Atlas of the North American Indian [NY: Facts on File, 1985]. Waldman writes, in reference to a siege of Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh) by Chief Pontiac's forces during the summer of 1763: ... Captain Simeon Ecuyer had bought time by sending smallpox-infected blankets and handkerchiefs to the Indians surrounding the fort—an early example of biological warfare—which started an epidemic among them. Amherst himself had encouraged this tactic in a letter to Ecuyer. [p. 108]
Whatever Trent's intent, a number of recent scholars consider doubtful the evidence connecting his gift of blankets to the smallpox outbreak. These scholars believe that the disease was most likely spread by native warriors returning from attacks on infected white settlements.[34] In other words, while some officers expressed the desire to use biological warfare, smallpox was so widespread and so easy to catch that there were other opportunities for Native Americans to be infected. Others attribute the smallpox outbreak to the common Indian practice of digging up recent European graves to retrieve the clothes of those buried[citation needed], some of whom had died from smallpox.
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