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.

Seneca elder and activist in Ohio and Native American studies scholar Mann describes deliberately giving smallpox to the Ohio Indians in 1763, marching the Choctaws into a cholera plague zone during their already genocidal Removal in 1832, sending hemorrhagic smallpox to the High Plains peoples in 1837, and the poisoning of the Cayuses. There is no shortage of primary documentation and first-person testimony, she insists, no obscure gaps in knowledge, no tortured logical escape from the glaring evidence that Euro-American settlers and their military and government officials used germ warfare on Native Americans as part of their imperial expansion across the New World. * SciTech Book News *
In four fascinating, extremely detailed, and heavily cited chapters, Mann digs into this record to bring to light the shameful and even shocking methods used against Native Americans in the drive west. . . . Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. * Choice *

Barbara Alice Mann is a PhD scholar working heavily in Native American studies.