24 June 1763; July correspondence
Smallpox transmission as a proposed weapon
Ohio country; Indigenous nations resisting Britain
At Fort Pitt on June 24, 1763, William Trent’s journal recorded giving two blankets and a handkerchief from the smallpox hospital to Delaware visitors, hoping to spread the disease. In an undated memorandum attributed to early July, Jeffery Amherst asked Henry Bouquet about spreading smallpox among resisting Indigenous peoples. Bouquet proposed using blankets on July 13; Amherst approved on July 16.
Dates preserve the source’s precision. This entry is part of a selected historical record; its qualifications and sources are retained below.
Context / qualification
The June transfer preceded the surviving July correspondence; those letters do not establish an Amherst order for that earlier act. The records do not demonstrate that the blankets caused a particular epidemic or establish a death toll.
Sources
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014), chapter 4
- Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, chapter 5, p. 87; supplied print pages, edition/year unidentified
- William Trent’s journal, June 24, 1763, in Mary Carson Darlington, ed., Fort Pitt and Letters from the Frontier (1892), pp. 92–93; printed journal ↗
- Henry Bouquet to Jeffery Amherst, July 13, 1763, postscript; NativeWeb transcription and linked microfilm image ↗
- Jeffery Amherst to Henry Bouquet, July 16, 1763, postscript; NativeWeb transcription and linked microfilm image ↗
- Elizabeth A. Fenn, Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst (2000), Fort Pitt section, paragraph 5 and note 6; reproduces Amherst’s undated memorandum, apparently a July 7 postscript ↗