The Tainted Gift

For the first time, an accomplished scholar offers a painstakingly researched examination of the United States' involvement in deliberate disease spreading among native peoples in the military conquest of the West. The speculation that the United States did infect Indian populations has long been a source of both outrage and skepticism. Now there is an exhaustively researched exploration of an issue that continues to haunt U.S.-Native American relations. Barbara Alice Mann's The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion offers riveting accounts of four specific incidents: The 1763 smallpox epidemic among native peoples in Ohio during the French and Indian War; the cholera epidemic during the 1832 Choctaw removal; the 1837 outbreak of smallpox among the high plains peoples; and the alleged 1847 poisonings of the Cayuses in Oregon. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Mann's work is the first to give one of the most controversial questions in U.S. history the rigorous scrutiny it requires.