Stealing History: Part 1 - Ward Churchill and the Mandan Smallpox-Blanket Genocide Fraud
History
| March 5, 2005
| Tim
In the 1990s, we began to hear that the US Army had deliberately set out to commit genocide against Native Americas by deliberately supplying them with blankets which had been formerly used by smallpox victims.
Now, almost a decade later, most of us have accepted this idea as truth. It has entered our collective consciousness, and influenced a decade's worth of thought on the matter. (And I myself cited the incident as true just recently.)
So imagine my surprise at learning the story seems to have been fabricated. The fraud appears to have been perpetrated one very angry political activist who apparently hoped to gain some personal fame and power from the idea. Perhaps you've heard of him. His name is Ward Churchill.
According to Thomas Brown, the story begins with in 1992, with Ward Churchill being arrested for attempting to disrupt a Columbus Day parade in Denver. (An activity he still organizes: see here and here.)
At trial, Churchill claimed that by opposing the Italian-Americans, he was combatting genocide, and told this story (among others) to prove the point:
At Fort Clark on the upper Missouri River… the U.S. Army distributed smallpox-laden blankets as gifts among the Mandan. The blankets had been gathered from a military infirmary in St. Louis where troops infected with the disease were quarantined. Although the medical practice of the day required the precise opposite procedure, army doctors ordered the Mandans to disperse once they exhibited symptoms of infection. The result was a pandemic among the Plains Indian nations which claimed at least 125,000 lives, and may have reached a toll several times that number.
Churchill repeated this story numerous times, and altered it slightly in 1998.
Brown goes on to debunk Churchill's account: First, Russell Thornton, the source from which Churchill claimed he obtained the story, said nothing of the sort:
At 3:00 P.M. on June 19, 1837, the American Fur Company steamboat St. Peter’s arrived at the Mandan villages... Some aboard the steamer had smallpox when the boat docked. It soon was spread to the Mandan, perhaps by deckhands who unloaded merchandise, perhaps by chiefs who went aboard a few days later, or perhaps by women and children who went aboard at the same time.
There are also a host of other problems with Churchill's account, including:
- Thornton only cites 30,000 who died in the outbreak, not a minimum of 125,000.
- No source Churchill cited gives any evidence the US Army was anywhere in the area -- a personal journal by Francis Chardon, a fur trader, shows that "Fort Clark" was not an army outpost, as Churchill seems to have assumed, nor did it contain a "post surgeon."
- No source cited makes any mention of the "gift blankets" Churchill claims were distributed (by the nonexistent Army)
- Further, Thornton gives the source of the outbreak as the Mandan village, not the trading post
Thornton, the primary source from which Churchill claims to have gotten the story, told The Los Angeles Times: "If Churchill has sources that say otherwise, I’d like to see them. But right now I’m his source for this, and it’s wrong."
Further, Brown shows the economic motives would have made no sense: The outpost was run by a fur trading company -- killing Indians would have decimated their business by killing their best Indian trappers. Also: "Journals and letters written by the fur traders who did man Fort Clark make it clear that they were appalled by the epidemic, in part because they had Indian wives and children and were thus a part of the Indian community."
For history buffs interested in more details, they are available in Brown's essay on the topic, which is interesting and concise.
None of this is to mitigate nor dismiss other tragic events in the story of relations between European settlers and Native Americans. Nor should it give impression no settlers ever thought of using disease as a weapon -- apparently there was an incident in 1763 where British colonial ruler Lord Amherst sought to deliberately spread smallpox to the Indians. (And perhaps this incident served as inspiration for Churchill's fabrication.)
But this idea that the US Army distributed smallpox-infected blankets to cause genocide among Indians? Apparently, it's a myth many of us bought, a myth which seems to have originated with one Ward Churchill.
As Thornton remarked, regarding Churchill's interpolation of his writings: "The history is bad enough—there’s no need to embellish it.
Amazingly, if Churchill hadn't made news for call the 9/11 victims Nazis, this fraud might never have been exposed.
Further Reading
It seems Ward Churchill has been no stranger to controversy, nor accusations of dishonesty and fraud. There are currently questions about his academic credentials, plagarism, theft of artwork, advocating violence, and finally, to add to the irony, he has finally admitted he is not actually an Indian, as he long claimed to be.
This is what the racial quota policies do to the pursuit of truth. The antimerit feature of such policies gives us professors and scholars who have no method but dishonest controversialism to make their way. Those who want an all merit system are in a position to complain of discrimination of several kinds, but those who want proportional representation by birth circumstances, are not. Lord Dunmore, in 1776, may have negligently or otherwise, started a smallpox epidemic through his administration of his fleet and Ethiopian Regiment in the Chesapeake region, which spread all the way to the Pacific coast Indians in Canada. It could be that one of the most significant epidemics for wiping out the Indians in North America, started , and was initially spread by, a black population which was fighting against the American revolution (Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment). Can government schools allow for the existence of a professor defiant of leftist sensitivity trainings, sufficient to tell us this history?
The only positive evidence of smallpox blankets (two) being given out to Indians was at Fort Pitt by Captain Ecuyer. At the time, Fort Pitt was under siege by Indian forces led by Pontiac. Compared to scalping, mutilations, canabolism, and war trophies taken back to the Indian villages from Fort Pitt, those two blankets would have had a minimal effect on the subsequent spread of smallpox up and down the East coast.
Thanks to that fake putz, every crackpot in the world talks about even George Washington committing germ warfare.
1870
German scientist Robert Koch proves that microorganisms cause infectious diseases by injecting anthrax spores into mice. The mice contract the disease.
More here.
If you go to the above URL you'll question the use of biological warfare/terrorism/genocide before 1870 simply because there was no proof microorganisms caused disease.
http://www.aigenom.com/Genocideintexas.html
Read it. There's mention of an invoice for the blankets given, even noting that they were taken from a smallpox hospital.
The bottom line is that the attempt was made in 1833. There is documentation that the plan was approved and that the perpetrator vowed to make the attempt to carry out the plan. Based on O. Ned Eddins' definition of genocide as stated on his web site (which goes into great detail in his attempt to discredit Churchill), only an attempt to eradicate a group of people is necessary to constitute genocide. Apparently, Mr. Eddins departs from the dictionary definition he touts on his web site because the "dictionary definition" doesn't support the argument that genocide was committed against Jews by the Hitler regime, thus Eddins' need to insert the "attempt" clause.
Runs-with-Scissors needs to re-read the URL referred to in the reply she/he posted, and the definition used for genocide on my website, which is...The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group - The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.
The documented evidence referred to in http://www.aigenom.com/Genocideintexas.html refers to the two blankets given out by Captain Eucyer of the British Army at Fort Pitt in 1763....except for Captain Eucyer giving out two blankets, my challange still stands for anyone to produce documented proof of the U.S. army giving out smallpox blankets to any Indians. There is no "bottom line" of smallpox being distributed in 1833 in the URL sited. He/she must be referring to the lies and fabrications of Ward Churchill for the 1837 smallpox outbreak among Indians of the upper Missouri River. The good news is Ward Churchill has been fired from the University of Colorado. The bad news is some other "Liberal Bastion of Academia", i.e. University of California at Berkley, will probably hire him.
Brad Mitchell-
The understanding that diseases were transmissible between living creatures existed (even if it didn't predominate) a long time before it was understood that specific diseases were caused by specific microorganisms. The practice of quarantine was used in some parts of medeival europe to prevent the spread of plague, for instance.
Historical accounts from medieval Europe detail the use of infected animal carcasses, by Mongols, Turks and other groups, to infect enemy water supplies. Prior to the bubonic plague epidemic known as the Black Death, Mongol and Turkish armies were reported to have catapulted diseased corpses into besieged cities.
During the Middle Ages, victims of the bubonic plague were used for biological attacks, often by flinging their corpses and excrement over castle walls using catapults.
from wikipedia
I consider it remarkable, in this age of digital document scanning, that there are no provided documents, rather quotes. Granted, my 10 year old could probably fudge a document to fool most people on the internet, but then again I consider her brighter than most adults.
Show me the documentation.
Regardless, I have seen this supposed atrocity attributed to Christians, excused in this barbaric behavior due to its commission being perpetrated upon pagans. It is likely true that Christians unwittingly brought diseases among the native peoples of the Americas. (You will also find accounts of Christians who tried to bring succor to the suffering native peoples, should you look for it.) This devastation while horrible would have left large tracts of land virtually unoccupied. A 10 dollar bill on a lonely stretch of highway belongs to whom exactly?
I read arguments that many of the founding fathers were agnostic or atheistic. Where then was their supposed over-whelming humanistic response to this injustice?
As for those who seek to make this an issue today, you will deserve a listen from me when you buy land out of your own pocket and then give it to a local Indian tribe.
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This is what the racial quota policies do to the pursuit of truth. The antimerit feature of such policies gives us professors and scholars who have no method but dishonest controversialism to make their way. Those who want an all merit system are in a position to complain of discrimination of several kinds, but those who want proportional representation by birth circumstances, are not. Lord Dunmore, in 1776, may have negligently or otherwise, started a smallpox epidemic through his administration of his fleet and Ethiopian Regiment in the Chesapeake region, which spread all the way to the Pacific coast Indians in Canada. It could be that one of the most significant epidemics for wiping out the Indians in North America, started , and was initially spread by, a black population which was fighting against the American revolution (Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment). Can government schools allow for the existence of a professor defiant of leftist sensitivity trainings, sufficient to tell us this history?
Posted by: John S Bolton on March 5, 2005 10:02 PM