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Book Reviews
Barbara Alice Mann. The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier
Expansion. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009. 172 pp. Cloth, $34.95.
Margaret M. Bruchac, University of Connecticut
Pathogenic diseases, whether accidentally or intentionally introduced, have long
been associated with colonial arrivals in Indigenous territories. Barbara Mann
identifi es disease agents as tools of imperial expansion during an era when In-
dian removals were part of America’s offi cial public policy. Through painstak-
ing analysis and source criticism, she illuminates key moments between 1760
and 1850 when virulent diseases were deliberately spread among Native Ameri-
can 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 tradi-
tions that testify to the memories of these events among survivors.
Chapter 1 examines the correspondence of eighteenth-century British offi -
cers 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
infl uence of those relations on colonial strategies. In 1763, when Lenape em-
issaries 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
136 american indian quarterly/winter 2011/vol. 35, no. 1
some blankets . . . and take care not to get the disease myself” (15–16). The strat-
agem 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 offi cial 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 offi cials, resistance of Choctaw
leaders, entreaties of physicians, and vain efforts of humanitarians. Proving in-
tent to infect, she documents readily available protective measures (vaccination,
isolation, and avoidance) that were specifi cally rejected in the case of the Choc-
taw, 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, fl awed vaccina-
tions, and accidental contact with an infected mulatto. Mann delivers a scathing
critique of popular histories, noting: “Offi cial documents are scanty, vague, or
cryptic, secondary accounts are demonstrably falsifi ed, 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 vec-
tor 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 fi rst arrived in Oregon
territory and was met with cautious welcome by Native peoples. When colo-
nial impulses took over, “the settlers simply took anything they wanted” (97).
To protect their gardens, they injected toxic doses of tartar emetic into melons
that they knew would be consumed by Native people. When an outbreak of
measles hit, the missionaries offered to treat the Natives with the current rem-
edy—strychnine (nux vomica)—only administered at such high dosages that a
50 percent death rate resulted.
Book Reviews 137
There are a few shortcomings in Mann’s book. She ends, too abruptly, with
chapter 4. A closing chapter with synthesis and suggested applications of this re-
search in current debates would have been very helpful. Her terse introduction
offers little guidance for alternative or collaborative research models, and there
are moments in each chapter when her ironic tone detracts from the power of
her arguments. The intentional outbreaks of the 1700s and 1800s could have
been better positioned in the aftermath of accidental outbreaks in the 1600s;
these were exploited by eastern colonists as supposed evidence of God’s choice
to “sweepe away by heapes the Salvages,” thereby clearing the land for Christian
settlement.2 In this light, it would have been interesting to hear Mann’s chal-
lenge to the historical characterization of disease in the Americas as “virgin soil
epidemics” that enabled (theoretically) biologically superior European popula-
tions to thrive.3 Lastly, in the absence of any nuanced discussion of the posi-
tive effects of European trade and social intercourse that enhanced Indigenous
economies and cultural relations, Mann inadvertently creates the impression
that all gifts were tainted.
Overall, Mann’s work is provocative, informed, and refreshing. She provides
crucial historical evidence that effectively answers the charge (by some modern
scholars) that disease epidemics were largely accidental and that complaints of
genocide are merely polemical. She stresses the need for meticulous research to
establish clear lines of accountability. Most important, she makes it clear that
the intentional spread of disease abetted a general discourse of destruction that
promoted death (by whatever means) as an appropriate “fi nal solution” to the
Indian problem. That toxic dream informed the vision of manifest destiny, res-
onates in American popular culture, and continues to threaten Indigenous sur-
vival today.
notes
1. Michael K. Trimble, “The 1837–1838 Smallpox Epidemic on the Upper Mis-
souri,” in Skeletal Biology on the Great Plains: Migration, Warfare, Health, and
Subsistence, ed. D. W. Owsley and R. L. Jantz (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1994), 82.
2. Thomas Morton, New English Canaan (1637; New York: Burt Franklin,
1967), 120.
3. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Eu-
rope, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 196.
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