1764-65 — Smallpox, esp. Iroquois, Shawnee, Lenape, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw >1,800

—   300  Chickasaw.    John Duffy. Epidemics in Colonial America. 1953 and 1979, p. 98.

–1,500  Choctaw.       John Duffy. Epidemics in Colonial America. 1953 and 1979, p. 98.

—       ?  Creek.                        John Duffy. Epidemics in Colonial America. 1953 and 1979, p. 98.

—       ?  Iroquois.        Mann. The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier… 2009, p. 18.

—       ?  Lenape.          Mann. The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier… 2009, p. 18.

—       ?  Shawnee.       John Duffy. Epidemics in Colonial America. 1953 and 1979, p. 98.

 

Narrative Information

 

Duffy: “The years 1764-65 saw smallpox flaring up sporadically among the Indians from South Carolina to New York. On July 30, 1764, the New York Mercury stated that ‘Smallpox has gone among the Creek Indians & carried off great Nos. of them.’ The following spring [1765] the Pennsylvania Gazette reported that fifteen hundred Choctaws and three hundred Chickasaws had died from the infection. Cornelius Bennett, an S.P.G.[1] missionary among the Indians in the vicinity of Mohawk Castle,[2] explained to the Society that the dangers from smallpox had compelled him to return to Boston….In January, 1765, smallpox was reported among the ‘Shawnese’[3] Indians.”[4] Duffy. Epidemics in Colonial America, 1953, reprinted 1979, p. 98.).

 

Mann: “Over the summer of 1764, the contagion spread like wildfire among the Iroquois and Shawnees, also moving south to the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Muskogees [Creek]. On September 1764, Colonel Andrew Lewis of Virginia gave Bouquet[5] ‘certain Intiligance’ [sic] that those ‘poor Rascals’ — the Shawnees and Lenapes[6] — were ‘dieing very fast with the smallpox.’ On January 25, 1765, a New York report documented smallpox among the Shawnees, whose clans lived not only in Ohio, but also in nearby Tennessee and Pennsylvania, as well as in South Carolina and Missouri, which helps to explain the southern spread of this induced[7] epidemic….” (Mann. The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion. 2009, p. 18.)

 

Sources

 

Duffy, John. Epidemics in Colonial America. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1953, reprinted 1979.

 

Heagerty, John J. Four Centuries of Medical History in Canada (Vol. I). Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014. Accessed 3-29-2018 at: https://ia802507.us.archive.org/25/items/fourcenturiesofm00heag_0/fourcenturiesofm00heag_0.pdf

 

Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation. “About Us.” Accessed 3-29-2018 at: http://nanticoke-lenapetribalnation.org/about/

 

Mann, Barbara Alice. The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion. Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, CO, Oxford, UK: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Google preview accessed 3-29-2018 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=vJcJmx8R8XIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

[1] Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

[2] Herkimer County, NY, today known as the Mohawk Upper Castle Historic District.

[3] Heagerty writes that: “This tribe lived in the neighbourhood of South Carolina, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Missouri.” (p. 43).

[4] Cites, in footnote 56, New York Mercury, No. 666, July 30, 1764; Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 1901, May 30, 1765; Cornelius Bennett to Secretary, Boston, September 12, 1765, in S.P.G. MSS., B22, fpp. 130-31l; Heagerty, Four Centuries of Medical History, I, 43.

[5] Colonel Henry Bouquet, British Army, which, along with colonists, was at war with Natives in “Pontiac’s War.”

[6] The Lenni-Lenape originated in the greater Delaware Bay area. On the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation website it is written “We are made up of the American Indian families from southern New Jersey and the Delmarva Peninsula who remained in out ancestral homeland after many of our relations were removed to the west and to the north as far as Oklahoma and Canada.”

[7] Reference to reporting that British General Jeffrey Amherst had ordered that smallpox-infected blankets be given to Native Americans.