"If there are any lingering doubts as to whether the invaders
deliberately spread disease among North American Indians, it is time to
lay them to rest once and for all. Contrary to the orthodoxy that the
Europeans who came to the New World were ignorant of how disease spread,
it had been a practice since at least as early as Tamerlane (Timur),
circa 1385, to catapult the corpses of plague victims and the carcasses
of diseased animals into besieged cities. While such early experiments
in biological warfare were generally unsuccessful, they do demonstrate
unequivocally that the Old World, or at least its military leadership,
had learned the mechanics of rudimentary epidemiology well before 1492.

In North America, where wave after wave of epidemics, and several
pandemics, wracked native populations, often with a timing uncannily
convenient to those who had set out to conquer or eradicate them, the
first instance in which there is clear reason to suspect these lessons
were being applied occurred in 1636. This came with the execution of
Captain John Oldham, an officer/diplomat for Massachusetts Colony by the
Narragansetts. The Indians apparently believed-rightly or wrongly-that
Oldham had deliberately infected them with smallpox in 1633, probably by
dispensing contaminated "gifts," unleashing an epidemic which claimed
more than 700 of their people and numerous of their allies. He was
therefore brought before the council of Narragansett sachems on Block
Island, tried for this and possibly other offenses, and paid the price.

There is considerable duplicity involved in what happened next. While
they were certainly aware of who had killed Oldham (and why), both
Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop and William Bradford, his
counterpart on the Plymouth Plantation, publicly blamed the Pequots for
the "murder," thus predicating the almost total annihilation of that
people in 1637. Since it was actually the more powerful Narragansetts,
not the Pequots, who were convinced the colonists might be seeking to
reduce their numbers through intentional contamination, the idea must be
considered a contributing factor to the outbreak of "King Philip's War"
some forty years later. Such suspicions are known to have been harbored
by several of the lesser nations -- the Eastern Niantics, for example,
and the Nipmucks -- who, along with the larger Wampanoag confederation
under Metacom ("King Philip"), aligned with the Narragansetts against
the English in the fighting.

It is not until another ninety years had passed, however, during the
last of the so-called "French and Indian Wars" before positive proof
emerges that England was indeed using biological techniques, as such, to
eradicate native populations. In 1763, having been fought to a
humiliating stalemate in the Ohio River Valley by a French-aligned
indigenous military alliance organized by the Ottawa leader Pontiac,
Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the English commander-in-chief, wrote a letter to
a subordinate, Colonel Henry Bouquet, suggesting that a peace parley be
convened and, as was customary at such events, gifts distributed.

“Arnherst...wrote in a postscript of the letter to Bouquet that smallpox
be sent among the disaffected tribes. Bouquet replied, also in a
postscript, "I will try to [contaminate] them with some blankets that
may fall into their hands, and take care not to get the disease
myself"... To Bouquet's postscript Amherst replied, "You will do well to
[infect] the Indians by means of blankets as well as to try every other
method that can serve to extirpate this [execrable] race." On June 24,
Captain Ecuyer, of the Royal Americans, noted in his journal: "...we
gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital.
I hope it will have the desired effect."”

To say that it did would be to understate the case. The disease spread
like wildfire among the Ottawas, Mingos, Miamis, Lenni Lenapes
(Delawares), and several other peoples. By conservative estimate, the
toll was over 100,000 dead, a matter which effectively broke the back of
native resistance in what the United States would later call the
"Northwest Territory," allowing its conquest less than thirty years
later. Amherst's maneuver, which displays a considerable familiarity
with the notion of disease as a weapon, has been erroneously described
as a "milestone of sorts" in military history by Robert O'Connell, in
his book Of Arms and Men. Actually, since the specified the group
targeted for "extirpation" as being not just opposing combatants, but an
entire race, the "Ohio Valley incident" is not properly understood as an
example of biological warfare. Rather, it indisputably was an instance
of genocide pursued through microbes."

Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, p 151-154

--
To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the
uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
<http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>