Louis Proyect wrote:
For anybody following the Ward Churchill witch-hunt, the name Thomas Brown should ring a bell. This is a professor from Texas who has been pursuing Ward Churchill like Ahab pursued Moby Dick. He achieved a certain recognition for exposing Churchill's failure to properly document the charge that the U.S. Army handed out smallpox blankets to the Mandan Indians in 1837. Churchill cited Evan S. Connell's "Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Big Horn" and Russell Thornton's "American Indian Holocaust and Survival" but neither book says anything about the army playing such a role.
. The U.S. government DID innoculate the Native Americans for smallpox in the wake of the epidemic, and given the crudity of that first batch, which wasn't being widely distibuted in the settler communities, and lack of resistance, many more Indians ended up with smallpox...
Leigh http://leighm.net/
