Review of Barbara Mann, The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion Margaret M. Bruchac Barbara Alice Mann . The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009. 172 pp. Cloth, $34.95. Pathogenic diseases, whether accidentally or intentionally introduced, have long been associated with colonial arrivals in Indigenous territories. Barbara Mann identifies disease agents as tools of imperial expansion during an era when Indian removals were part of America's official public policy. Through painstaking analysis and source criticism, she illuminates key moments between 1760 and 1850 when virulent diseases were deliberately spread among Native American populations. Evidence is presented in four chapters concerning the 1763 introduction of smallpox (Variola major) via tainted blankets to Native groups around Fort Pitt; the 1832 forced transport of Choctaw people into the midst of a cholera (Vibrio cholerae) epidemic; an 1837 epidemic of hemorrhagic smallpox (Variola vera) along the Upper Missouri River; and the 1847 poisoning of Native people in the Oregon territory. Mann highlights primary documents that reveal colonizing intent, secondary sources that evade or gloss over the evidence, and oral traditions that testify to the memories of these events among survivors. Chapter 1 examines the correspondence of eighteenth-century British officers expecting to do battle against Native forces at Fort Pitt. Mann describes the gift-giving philosophies that characterized relations among both the Six Nations Haudenosaunee and Native nations along the Ohio frontier and the influence of those relations on colonial strategies. In 1763, when Lenape emissaries promised peace to forestall looming threats, Capt. Simon Ecuyer and Capt. William Trent responded by gifting them with infected blankets from the smallpox hospital. To spread the tainted gift to other Native nations, Col. Henry Bouquet told Lord Jeffrey Amherst, "I will try to inoculate the bastards with [End Page 135] some blankets . . . and take care not to get the disease myself" (15-16). The stratagem worked; a smallpox epidemic struck the Lenape and Shawnee, spread to the Haudenosaunee, and reached southward, infecting thousands. Despite the dense evidence of this cause and effect, Mann notes, later historians employed sanitizing measures to conceal official complicity. Chapter 2 investigates the 1832 relocation of Choctaw people during a cholera outbreak. Federal agents characterized this removal as a voluntary emigration; Mann labels it a form of genocide (19). Choctaw people were starved, moved to the epicenter of the outbreak, and packed onto disease-ridden steamboats. Mann describes the insistence of government officials, resistance of Choctaw leaders, entreaties of physicians, and vain efforts of humanitarians. Proving intent to infect, she documents readily available protective measures (vaccination, isolation, and avoidance) that were specifically rejected in the case of the Choctaw, despite their usage to limit the impact of virulent diseases among whites. The third chapter concerns an 1837 outbreak of hemorrhagic smallpox on the Upper Missouri. This epidemic has been variously blamed on a drunken frolic by Arikara women, the theft of smallpox-ridden blankets, flawed vaccinations, and accidental contact with an infected mulatto. Mann delivers a scathing critique of popular histories, noting: "Official documents are scanty, vague, or cryptic, secondary accounts are demonstrably falsified, and eyewitness accounts are fragmented, confusing, and often deceitful" (43). Several groups were then lusting after Native land, including the American Fur Company, white settlers, railroad barons, and the US Army. In exhaustive detail, Mann traces each vector responsible for carrying a disease "so malignant that death ensued within a few hours" (73), killing approximately 90 percent of the Mandan, 70 percent of the Hidatsa, and 50 percent of the Arikara populations.1 Mann describes Native familiarity with epidemic disease to the point of actively resisting variolation (inoculation with live smallpox virus) in preference to vaccination (inoculation with less-deadly cowpox), effectively counteracting the propaganda depicting ignorant, superstitious Indians. Chapter 4 reviews the facts surrounding the 1847 execution of fourteen white missionaries on a charge of deliberately poisoning Cayuse, Nez Perce, and Walla Walla peoples in order to seize their territory. In 1843 a wagon train sent by the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions first arrived in Oregon territory and was met with cautious welcome by Native peoples. When colonial impulses took over, "the settlers simply took anything they...