In your article about the top democidal regimes, you mention that Native mortality was due “inadvertently” to epidemic. Because you’re the smartest man in the world, I’m sure you know of the disease-ridden blankets that were gifts to First Nations from “the White man.” I’ve read that this was far from inadvertent, but actually biological warfare - to rid the New World of an obstacle.
Thanks, Chris W, Ontario.
Ummm, I think that you are referring to this
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_066.html
event, which the All-Wise, All-Seeing Cecil Adams has already covered.
What you don’t seem to know, CknowEVIL , is covered in this article
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_100.html
which makes it clear that not all disease outbreaks were deliberate. There were many different kinds of illness that contributed to the problem. Heck, not even all the smallpox cases were deliberate.
True, there were cases of deliberate attempts to spread disease to the natives, but they’re a drop in the bucket compared to the natural spread of European diseases.
Admittedly, the spread of disease obliterated many cultures off the face of the planet, but, is it possible that some “evil” physician back in the day could have deliberately encouraged the spread?
Almost anything is possible, but that doesn’t make it true. I think the proper question would be whether there’s any convincing evidence to support that theory, and I think The Great One reported that evidence in the columns to which Bosda provided links.
Estimates of a massive die-off of Native Americans are based on rapid spread of disease during the exploration of the Americas, before any English settlers arrived. However dastardly the blanket trick might have been, it was much too late to have been the cause of that massive extinction. Piecemeal destruction of whole villages and small tribes was certainly intended (in many cases), but was usually carried out by more…um, direct means.
The fact that the natives did not have any natural immunity to the diseases brought by the Europeans demonstrates that there was no major contact before then. Maybe the Norse explorers were healthy, and there were few of them and didn’t establish permanent colonies/traderoutes. Otherwise, the Americas would have been hit by the plagues in waves, as were the Asians/Europeans, and getting exposed all at once wouldn’t have wiped out 90% of them. This is a terrible calamity, and is glossed over in history books if it’s mentioned at all.
Way back when, I asked in the Cecil Adams Usenet group why they knew to throw blankets used by sick people into native camps when they didn’t have the theory of germs. I got back asinine replies like “You’re just trolling”, which is why I let the group slide. Still, I got one good response (sorry for not remembering who), to the effect that while they might not have known about germs, they knew that using diseased blankets was associated with catching the disease. This was an early example of bio-warfare, “weapons of mass destruction”.
But, as Nametag pointed out, this incident was well after most of the deaths by disease, and whatever casualties it caused (does anyone have a number?) were minor in the overall death rate. Still, a shameful incident.
While it seems to be “common knowledge” that whites spread disease through infected blankets, I have only found two references to the act.
In the first, we have a series of letters between the British officers, General Amherst, Colonel Bouquet, and Captain Ecuyer along with the diary of a militia commander Trent regarding the use of smallpox-infected blankets among the inhabitants of the Ohio valley in 1763. (This, of course, was more than 150 years after the inadvertant spread of several diseases along the Eastern seaboard had made it possible for the colonies at Massachusetts and Virgina to establish themselves among recently depopulated lands.)
http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/amherst/lord_jeff.html
The second is more problematic. The steamer St. Peter travelled up the Missouri through the Mandan communities with supplies that were desperately needed by the trading posts to honor commitments made both to fur trappers and to the Indian nations. A sailor broke out with smallpox shortly after the trip had begun and the captain chose to continue the voyage rather than suffer the economic loss. While the decision was cleary reckless negligence, there has never been any evidence that the captain deliberately wanted to destroy his own trading partners–he was simply too shortsighted to realize the ultimate destruction he was inflicting.
http://www.outriderbooks.com/smallpox.htm
Aside from these two incidents–which were horrible and indefensible–I have not encountered evidence that the practice was widespread. I have not even discovered any other documented cases of such events.
One correction: while the two columns supplied by Bosda are both related to the topic, the actual column referenced by CknowEVIL was Was Andrew Jackson one of the world’s biggest mass murderers?
If they’d tried – which can’t be utterly ruled out in view of the one documented blanket incident – I doubt the result would have been much worse than what physicians of the 1500’s-1800’s did to people they were actually trying to cure. Dr. Semmelweiss, who pioneered the concept that it might be a good idea for doctors to wash their hands in between handling corpses and handling patients with open wounds, didnt’ propose his bright idea until (web search) 1847 or so, and the idea took many years to catch on.