Gunpowder,Steel and Disease

So ive hear these three gave the Europeans such a gient advantage over the natives but I have a question.

Yesterday in one of my classes we had an AmericanIndian come into my class she was married to a whiteman (who looks Indian) He said that the whites gave the American Indian blankets that carried deadly diseases as present to the natives. Well I play Age of Empires III (fun game) and in the corner it has a box that says random History and it says that the Europeans never gave away the blankets and it was a urban myth. so who should i believe?

a white Indian or a computer game.

 

Letters by Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander of the British forces in North America in the mid-17th century, and others show that he had plans to this effect, and that infected blankets had been sent to North America. There are also reports that some Indian tribes did suffer from smallpox.

There is not any general consensus as to whether the blankets were actually used, at least on a significant scale. The smallpox outbreaks could very well have resulted for normal interaction, as was seen during the Spanish discovery of South America a century earlier.

I found an article which appears to be well-researched, including images from the National Archives of the original letters.

I would suggest showing your teacher the article, since it is in my oppinion a very significant part of US and colonial history, and a story which is often repeated in many permutations.

 

Thank you. Im reading the article now.

 

I remember having a discussion on this before on here - all we could find evidence for was one occaision a couple of blankets were given out by a British Officer, but the natives were already diseased (if I remembered it right...)

 

Jared Diamond's theory that European superiority lay in "guns, germs and steel" (the title of his most famous book) is a brilliant simplification, which despite its appeal is not really a good reflection of historical reality.

As always.

You know, it's not always that easy being a historian in training...

 

europeans did lay waste to the new world peoples with old world disease in america ,ausrailia ,nz and the pacific islands ...this was by accident and not by intent of course

.the results would have beeen the same if the invaders came from africa or asia , old world peoples were resistant to deseases which were unknown in the new world ...gunpowder and steel are small time players in the equation when compared to deaths caused by smallpox ,dysentery or even the common cold or flu ...

 

The New World did give a disease back - syphillis came from South America.

 

Some estimate that more than 90% of the population of South and Central America died of disease shortly after the Spanish arrived...

 

Then again some point out that a plague had visited South America prior to the Spanish arrival.

One of the biggest problems on this area is the comparative lack of records.

 

during the conquest of the aztec empire by hernan cortez, smallpox decimate the aztecs making the figthing in favor of the conquistadors.