The British, the Indians, and smallpox: what actually happened at Fort Pitt in 1763?

An entrenched part of the multicultural canon can be summed up by quoting from a book intended for undergraduate college students: "In the 1760s the British at Fort Pitt gave blankets from the smallpox hospital to Delaware Indians as a form of germ warfare."' The story has been repeated time and again and has now become dogma, or so it seems. This essay will reexamine this familiar tale and what historians have alleged about it to determine what is credible about the incident at Fort Pitt. Despite the persistence of the story, not every scholar is in agreement. In 1983, for example, Donald R. Hopkins called an exchange of letters between British General Jeffrey Amherst and Colonel Henry Bouquet suggesting that Indians be infected with smallpox via contaminated blankets "the most notorious instance of smallpox being deliberately recommended as a weapon against North American Indians." But Hopkins was compelled to observe: "The result of this conspiracy is unknown."2 Still more pertinent is the skepticism expressed by Alfred W Crosby, whose book, The Columbian Exchange, made disease a subject all historians of early America had to take very seriously. In his Ecological Imperialism Crosby devoted an appendix to smallpox and, in a note, discussed what he called "the old legend of intentional European bacteriological warfare." Asserting that the